4 ms·

Anyone can build and add Dropbox-like functionality to their product suite (and I was even involved in a couple such efforts a while back)... but Spotify is not

by saurik 4y ago

Anyone can build and add Dropbox-like functionality to their product suite (and I was even involved in a couple such efforts a while back)... but Spotify is not at all like that, in that not only is having the music licenses they have more than just some engineering work, people bring their music to Spotify, and so you can't even have a few ins and a major investor and then try and quickly get the same licenses to have the same service as you would still be missing essentially all of the music I listen to on Spotify.

ben7799 4y ago
Very few actually feel good about bringing their music to spotify. Other than the very few giant artists getting the sweetheart deals with guaranteed payouts most feel like they're forced to bring their music to spotify even though they know the whole thing is just bad.
- saurik 4y ago
  I don't understand how this detail changes anything: you still can't just build a competitor to Spotify and magically have all of its music.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You don’t need all of its music. You need the three major music producers and the rest will come. But that’s not the point. The “feature not a product” saying means that a major company has your entire reason for existing as a feature in their product. Streaming music is already just a feature for Apple and Amazon. Just like today, you wouldn’t create a separate spell checker application like in the 80s.
    - saurik 4y ago
      > You need the three major music producers and the rest will come. This isn't how the market works. I know musicians, and they don't care that you are playing licensing monopoly/bingo and have 3 key squares and now they clearly are going to waste their time uploading their music to your service. You need to essentially already have the subscriber count to provide them a new revenue source that is greater than the pain of dealing with you... which forms a brutal catch-22. This is similar to why live video also isn't just a feature and YouTube is having to go to war with them to bring streamers to their platform (though as Twitch isn't really about a "back catalog", Spotify is actually in a much better position than Twitch). Social networking is another example of a thing that isn't just a feature you can throw together, even if it looked like that to a lot of companies. Essentially, anywhere there is either a catalog or a network effect to be had (these are related concepts), you have to provide something that isn't just equivalent but fundamentally new to build a user base that can pull in the new market participants, or people are going to keep using the old service even if they hate it because it has a better library. (The alternative is you have to do something explosively better for the content producers, enough that they want to get on the ground floor. The most obvious way to do that is by just handing them free money with massive subsidies due to VC raises, which was certainly a lot easier a few years ago than it is today.) I was the developer behind a major content marketplace that had tens of millions of users and which was able to operate for over a decade despite tons of people trying to build competitors. Hell: my software was open source! I only shut it down because the entire market I was in stopped being technologically viable (resulting in my lawsuit against Apple), and it still took years for the content to become stale enough for people to move on (which doesn't happen as quickly for music). I am speaking from direct experience. > Just like today, you wouldn’t create a separate spell checker application like in the 80s. Spell checking, like Dropbox, has no network effect and no first mover advantage.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        > This isn't how the market works. I know musicians, and they don't care that you are playing licensing monopoly/bingo and have 3 key squares and now they clearly are going to waste their time uploading their music to your service. You need to essentially already have the subscriber count to provide them a new revenue source that is greater than the pain of dealing with you... which forms a brutal catch-22. You keep acting as if there aren’t two trillion dollar market cap companies that don’t already have streaming services that don’t have to be profitable. You also act like the day that Apple announced “Apple Music” every musician wasn’t scrambling to get on the platform. > Spell checking, like Dropbox, has no network effect and no first mover advantage. If Facebook announced tomorrow that they were going to release “Facebook Streaming” they already have an audience. We aren’t talking about Joe Bobs Music streaming service.
scarface74 4y ago
That’s not the concept behind “a feature not a product”. The entire idea is that a major company can add streaming as a bullet point to their ecosystem - like Apple and Amazon - and doesn’t need to be profitable by itself. That is the “DropBox problem”. DropBox is trying to be a sustainable company while Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Amazon just throw it in as a feature in their portfolios. This is the same with the movie studios in 2023. In 2006 when Apple first approached the movie studios, the idea of VOD digitally was new. Now the studios have a standardized process for it. There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses. VOD = Video on Demand where you pay to rent or buy each individual film. There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about. The smaller labels will come along
- saurik 4y ago
  The business of Spotify isn't "streaming music": it is "music licensing"; and, even there, it isn't like most of the music was due to Spotify going out of their way to contact people and get their music on their service: people--not even "labels", but people--upload their music directly to Spotify. You can compete with that, but it is a massive uphill battle; it is similar to trying to create a new app market competitor from scratch and assuming that all of the apps which exist on someone else's platform--many of which might not even be maintained by people who give a shit anymore--are somehow going to appear on your platform. > There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses. This is entirely untrue... hell: Apple doesn't even have a lot of the content that exists out there anymore, as numerous titles now can only be purchased from Amazon, as it was essentially uploaded directly. I wish I could obtain all of the movies/TV I consume from Apple, but that just isn't how this industry operates. > There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about. This wouldn't be sufficient to cause most users to switch from Spotify. It certainly wouldn't get me to switch from Spotify, and I don't even like Spotify! > The smaller labels will come along The long tail of music doesn't even involve "labels" :/.
  - scarface74 4y ago

by saurik 4y ago

ben7799 4y ago

Very few actually feel good about bringing their music to spotify. Other than the very few giant artists getting the sweetheart deals with guaranteed payouts most feel like they're forced to bring their music to spotify even though they know the whole thing is just bad.

saurik 4y ago
I don't understand how this detail changes anything: you still can't just build a competitor to Spotify and magically have all of its music.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You don’t need all of its music. You need the three major music producers and the rest will come. But that’s not the point. The “feature not a product” saying means that a major company has your entire reason for existing as a feature in their product. Streaming music is already just a feature for Apple and Amazon. Just like today, you wouldn’t create a separate spell checker application like in the 80s.
  - saurik 4y ago
    > You need the three major music producers and the rest will come. This isn't how the market works. I know musicians, and they don't care that you are playing licensing monopoly/bingo and have 3 key squares and now they clearly are going to waste their time uploading their music to your service. You need to essentially already have the subscriber count to provide them a new revenue source that is greater than the pain of dealing with you... which forms a brutal catch-22. This is similar to why live video also isn't just a feature and YouTube is having to go to war with them to bring streamers to their platform (though as Twitch isn't really about a "back catalog", Spotify is actually in a much better position than Twitch). Social networking is another example of a thing that isn't just a feature you can throw together, even if it looked like that to a lot of companies. Essentially, anywhere there is either a catalog or a network effect to be had (these are related concepts), you have to provide something that isn't just equivalent but fundamentally new to build a user base that can pull in the new market participants, or people are going to keep using the old service even if they hate it because it has a better library. (The alternative is you have to do something explosively better for the content producers, enough that they want to get on the ground floor. The most obvious way to do that is by just handing them free money with massive subsidies due to VC raises, which was certainly a lot easier a few years ago than it is today.) I was the developer behind a major content marketplace that had tens of millions of users and which was able to operate for over a decade despite tons of people trying to build competitors. Hell: my software was open source! I only shut it down because the entire market I was in stopped being technologically viable (resulting in my lawsuit against Apple), and it still took years for the content to become stale enough for people to move on (which doesn't happen as quickly for music). I am speaking from direct experience. > Just like today, you wouldn’t create a separate spell checker application like in the 80s. Spell checking, like Dropbox, has no network effect and no first mover advantage.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      > This isn't how the market works. I know musicians, and they don't care that you are playing licensing monopoly/bingo and have 3 key squares and now they clearly are going to waste their time uploading their music to your service. You need to essentially already have the subscriber count to provide them a new revenue source that is greater than the pain of dealing with you... which forms a brutal catch-22. You keep acting as if there aren’t two trillion dollar market cap companies that don’t already have streaming services that don’t have to be profitable. You also act like the day that Apple announced “Apple Music” every musician wasn’t scrambling to get on the platform. > Spell checking, like Dropbox, has no network effect and no first mover advantage. If Facebook announced tomorrow that they were going to release “Facebook Streaming” they already have an audience. We aren’t talking about Joe Bobs Music streaming service.

scarface74 4y ago

That’s not the concept behind “a feature not a product”. The entire idea is that a major company can add streaming as a bullet point to their ecosystem - like Apple and Amazon - and doesn’t need to be profitable by itself. That is the “DropBox problem”. DropBox is trying to be a sustainable company while Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Amazon just throw it in as a feature in their portfolios. This is the same with the movie studios in 2023. In 2006 when Apple first approached the movie studios, the idea of VOD digitally was new. Now the studios have a standardized process for it. There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses. VOD = Video on Demand where you pay to rent or buy each individual film. There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about. The smaller labels will come along

saurik 4y ago
The business of Spotify isn't "streaming music": it is "music licensing"; and, even there, it isn't like most of the music was due to Spotify going out of their way to contact people and get their music on their service: people--not even "labels", but people--upload their music directly to Spotify. You can compete with that, but it is a massive uphill battle; it is similar to trying to create a new app market competitor from scratch and assuming that all of the apps which exist on someone else's platform--many of which might not even be maintained by people who give a shit anymore--are somehow going to appear on your platform. > There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses. This is entirely untrue... hell: Apple doesn't even have a lot of the content that exists out there anymore, as numerous titles now can only be purchased from Amazon, as it was essentially uploaded directly. I wish I could obtain all of the movies/TV I consume from Apple, but that just isn't how this industry operates. > There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about. This wouldn't be sufficient to cause most users to switch from Spotify. It certainly wouldn't get me to switch from Spotify, and I don't even like Spotify! > The smaller labels will come along The long tail of music doesn't even involve "labels" :/.
- scarface74 4y ago