music streaming

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music, they would cut a deal with Taylor Swift. They have the cash to do it. They wouldn’t waste time on locking up Kalevi Aho. That’s so obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it, but (given all the smoke and mirrors here), I really do.

So we’re clearly dealing with the bad Apple here. And the fact that the company... See more

In other words, streaming is a lot more profitable for all the actual value creators after we bypass these technopolies.

When all artists are confined to the same handful of platforms to promote their work, only the top 1% get a fair slice of them. And when all listeners are dispersed over an infinite array of small-scale, pop-up, artist-first solutions, no one gets a pleasant digital music experience. The only solution is stratification at scale.

14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.

Streaming offers the tantalizing illusion that these laborious steps have been eliminated by technology. But really they haven't. Music is an attention economy. The dominance of the biggest attention companies used to be reinforced by constraints of physical distribution, but it mostly survives the format shift. Most of the songs on the biggest pla... See more