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I would find an estimate like "AirPods make more money than Spotify" interesting; its a sort-of poetic "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth mor
by 013a 7y ago
I would find an estimate like "AirPods make more money than Spotify" interesting; its a sort-of poetic "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself", at least in a limited scope (of course, the entire audio hardware industry is larger than Spotify, but is the entire audio hareware industry larger than the entire music recording industry? idk).
- LaGrange 7y ago> "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself" ...at which point it's reasonable to maybe stop conflating price with value.
- chemmail 7y agoI guess you haven't met an audiophile?
- jrockway 7y agoI have met audiophiles. The impression I get is that having nice headphones "on the go" is not a priority and people live with the low quality of small-and-wireless headphones. Very few audiophiles are sitting at their desk using Airpods, though. In that market, wired headphones rule supreme. (Many people are using wireless noise-cancelling headphones, however, not for audio quality but because "work" is too loud for people to work. At my last job, they even had Sonos speakers around playing music all day. It was crazy!)
- FireBeyond 7y agoMusic fans buy stereo/audio equipment to listen to their music. Audiophiles buy music to listen to their stereo/audio equipment.
- FireBeyond 7y ago> the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself Which still isn't a useful comparison. One is an outright purchase, and the other a subscription service.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoTrue. But $10 x 12 = $120 subscription per year. That's a decent buck and a fairly large market.
- snypox 7y agoAnd on a long term, more profitable probably. We won’t see Spotify disappearing for a while.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoSpotify rents music that it itself rents from 3 companies that own most of the music. Why would those 3 companies not just raise their rents if Spotify starts making a decent profit? Spotify has been around since 2006 and just eked out a tiny profit last year. Unless they plan on owning music themselves, I don’t see why the music owners wouldn’t try to capture most of the profit.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoOr. Flip that over. What happens to the music owners if one of their primary distributors goes under?
- lotsofpulp 7y agoAs long as Apple, Google, and Amazon are willing to forgo margins on music, not much.
- 013a 7y agoI never said it would be Useful. I said it would be Interesting.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paxys 7y agoIt tells you that one hardware product is worth more than one streaming service. Hard to draw any conclusions about the music business as a whole.
- runT1ME 7y agoI primarily use airpods for making calls, and over the ear headphones for music.