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I'm not so much talking about the tradeoff from physical to streaming. I'm talking about how when the transition to streaming happened, it was funded with a bun

I'm not so much talking about the tradeoff from physical to streaming. I'm talking about how when the transition to streaming happened, it was funded with a bunch of VC money that set a customer expectation of a very cheap music supply, which was later used to leverage negotiations for low streaming rates. Paying the songwriters is a cost from the delivery perspective, and the tech companies have every interest to reduce that cost. They're going to try to turn that knob before they try to raise prices on consumers. Now, if the mathematical modeling has been done to show that any increase in streaming royalty rates is 100% correlated with a decrease in listenership, such that songwriter revenue decreases; in other words, if it's been mathematically shown we are at a maximum from the songwriters' perspective, that would be convincing. I just doubt that that is the case.

legitster 4y ago
We shouldn't mix apples and pears here - music streaming is a different beast. The marginal cost for DoorDash is the cost of a pizza. The marginal cost for a music stream is effectively $0.00 dollars. You could say that VC set the customer expectation for cheap music (although, Zune Music Pass was available a full decade before streaming took off) but even before streaming you could argue consumer expectation for music was pretty dang cheap. Music was free on the radio, albums where shared widely, music was copied and pirated rampantly. It's a stronger argument that streaming services convinced labels that that everyone could make more money if they started competing with piracy on cost and convenience.