I posted on another recent thread about Netflix that I think they need to acquire Spotify and possibly some other companies if they want to survive. The fact of

I posted on another recent thread about Netflix that I think they need to acquire Spotify and possibly some other companies if they want to survive. The fact of the matter is that the economics for the average guy on the street favour going with Apple One or the rumoured Google Pixel Pass rather than a bunch of different services, especially with the upcoming recession straining budgets. When times are tough do you really care that the UI of Spotify is marginally better than Apple Music if Apple Music is cheaper? Spotify Family is £17.99/month over here in the UK whereas Apple One Family is £20/month with all its other benefits. If Spotify raise their prices again over here then I think they may be toast in our market. They certainly will be for me, and I've been a customer for over a decade. Netflix has a different problem in that, with the proliferation of new streaming services, customers who used to be paying all year round are going to turn into people who sign up once every few months when a show they care about drops to binge it and then rotate to another platform. They could mitigate it with some smart programming e.g make sure a new similar genre series drops either every month to keep people hooked or switch to episodic releases to try and draw content out between series drops. But ultimately we're heading for a world where anyone budget orientated is going to get caught up on their favourite shows and then rotate between streaming providers rather than paying all year round. As far as I can see this only really ends with everyone in one of three camps: Apple, Google, Independent. The independents will be able to charge slightly more than the hardware behemoths but only if they offer a product that is superior enough to warrant it and I personally don't see any groundbreaking innovation coming from Netflix or Spotify any time soon. Otherwise they really need to be charging less to make up for the inconvenience of fragmented services. If they try and go it alone, they're going to see their customer bases getting gradually eroded and have to make some massive adaptations in order to survive - potentially becoming more niche and quality focused like small retail stores or coffee shops have had to become to survive against Amazon and Starbucks. If they band together then the consumer has a better justification for sticking with the brands as they currently are. This ultimately comes down to the classic "Good, Fast, Cheap" trichotomy, more appropriately reworded in this particular instance as "Quality, Convenient, Cheap". Spotify and Netflix can't compete on Convenient (never going to beat built in integration of Apple/Google) or Cheap (Apple and Google have infinitely more money to undercut them). In a recession, more and more people are going to put an emphasis on Cheap, so they need to team up to leverage economy of scale for more affordable prices and/or massively increase the quality of the product in relation to competitors so that it is harder for the consumer to part with.