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spotify should just be more expensive, right? like, $9.99 a month for access to "most music" is MoviePass level of "too good to be true for the economics to work out correctly for everyone"
it's also interesting to me that the music streaming industry hasn't shaken out the way that the TV/movie streaming industry has, with a few giants but several mid-level and smaller competitors, with users usually subscribing to more than one
Spotify is like if Netflix had a streaming library MANY times larger (not sure the factor, but let's say they had a majority of the movies the average person ever think to search for that had been released in the last 50 years). Everything on HBOMax, Criterion, Disney+, and more
And they charged $10 a month for it, and had no serious competitors
basically, consumers are obviously benefiting from the idea that "you should be able to have all your music listening needs met by subscribing to one service," but this system was not inevitable. We could have had (& could still have) a more diverse ecosystem. It's weird we don't
I guess the thing that Spotify is more like than Netflix is, in some ways, Amazon. "It's (mostly) all here, and dirt cheap. Why go anywhere else?"
(but it also occurs to me that Netflix HAD a larger library before competitors purchased the rights to more of it, and Netflix has continued raising its prices on the strength of its new exclusive content even as its back catalogue has shrunk. Maybe that's the future of Spotify.)
However! The longer consumers have to get used to a free or cheap model, the more they resist being asked to pay more for it later (see: journalism). So there's reason for concern on this. If consumers are asked to pay more for music, do they go back to pirating?
this has been business amateur hour with Lauren, sorry
