4 ms·

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 m

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.

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.