Scarcity as an API

Yet there’s a fundamental tension between drop culture and digital music itself. As I've written about in the past, artificial scarcity could not be more antithetical to how the streaming economy works today, because we expect digital music to be as close to free and ubiquitous as possible — i.e. the opposite of scarce.

In all of these cases, the “drop” is valuable because it is artificially scarce; fewer people would want it if everyone could have it.

Scarcity is a form of framing a product. Example: At the Apple store, there’s only one of each product on display. All other inventory is in the back. This creates a sense of scarcity and increases the value of the product.