The fundamental reason why none of the streaming services will remain in business is market economics. Digital Music is a commodity because Apple set an unreali

The fundamental reason why none of the streaming services will remain in business is market economics. Digital Music is a commodity because Apple set an unrealistic consumer price point against which no independent service can compete. Consider that Apple sets the market price for music, from a consumer perspective, and at a flat $0.99 per track with some tracks priced higher and lower. For brevity, I'm going to use the $0.99 price. This price does not reflect actual costs for providing the service, rather, it is a price point to encourage adoption by the masses. At $0.99 per track one can argue that Apple was seeing maybe 5 to 7% net margin. Any competing company could not set the price higher than $0.99 as the audience would just go to Apple for the lower amount. So as a competitor; e.g., PressPlay who became the legal Napster, would need to compete at an 7% net margin which is extremely low. Businesses generally can't survive on less than a 10% net margin and most aim for 20% to 40% net margin. How does Apple get away with running a business at essentially a loss? They sell ancillary products (hardware) at very high margins and the music is the loss leader that makes those products more valuable. Apple made music a commodity and Google Music and Amazon Prime Music just reenforce the situation by essentially charging you near nothing for unlimited music. Streaming services, by comparison, have very little they can sell in addition to their subscription fees, and those fees cannot be much higher than what Apple, Google, Amazon would charge for similar services. The phrase "they'll make it up in volume" holds no water when licensing fees scale in proportion to usage. Just look at P's 10Q for reference. BTW, I was involved in building or supporting the following music services in one way or the other back the early 2000's: * MP3.com * Trusonic * Pressplay -> Napster under Roxio * eMusic * Rollingstone.com * MP4.com Since 1999 it was clear that streaming was the future of music. Just not a very profitable future as it turns out.