What Spotify and the 'Audio Industry' Are Doing to Musicians - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
At its best, Spotify is an elegant tool—a conduit between artist and art and listener. But at its worst, it’s a bad actor in a worse industry that historically treats artists miserably
-
Even though the small number of streaming services have access to almost every bit of music that’s ever been recorded, and even though they strike near-monopolistic deals with near-monopolistic major labels, there isn’t quite enough money for anyone to make a good profit on streaming music. Too many middlemen take their share, and there’s a limit to how much people are willing to pay for music now that the internet exists.
-
The biggest tech companies have other ways to make money: Apple sold music by the song before starting a streaming service but always generated most of its earnings off hardware; Google has a seemingly infinite array of mysterious revenue sources.
- ...10 more annotations...