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Spotify cannot be compared with traditional radio. Of course they are going to have to pay more. Spotify is essentially giving you access to an entire record st

Spotify cannot be compared with traditional radio. Of course they are going to have to pay more. Spotify is essentially giving you access to an entire record store for free. On radio you get a limited number of select songs, you don't really get to choose what's played and the songs played get a lot more exposure which I'm sure is used to justify the lower fees.

adventured 14y ago
Spotify, Pandora, Sirius, and all the rest can easily be compared to traditional radio. In the streaming market you have very few good choices, the market is serviced by a few massive companies providing a very wide selection of music. In the radio market that same concept is accomplished by over 6,000 commercial FM radio stations, with a diverse playlist. To get a different playlist, you change stations. Indeed every type of music is covered by those 6,000 stations. And of course it used to be even more diverse, in the days of the purely live DJ, before the radio business began to fade and broadcasters cut expenses by moving to networked systems like the former Westwood One. You also used to be able to call up just about any station and make a song request. I'm sure you won't like that comparison to picking a song digitally, but it's the same, and it was very archaic, but no different than some of the other technological leaps we've made in which old technology seems very embarrassingly primitive. You often had to use a phone to make those requests, and a phone was a marvel in its day. The technological difference can be compared, in regards to distribution, ease of access, etc. In that case, Spotify / Pandora win, that's obvious. It's not that you couldn't access every type of music via radio stations, it's that it was a lot less practical. Technology leaped forward and vastly improved the situation. Spotify is very easy to compare against the radio business. What they've done is consolidate the radio market down into one platform. The Internet ate the broadcaster, very simply, just like it ate old Ma Bell. I can also compare IP telephony against the old telephony system.
- shardling 14y ago
  I kind of disagree -- people I know use spotify in a fundamentally different way than they used radio in the past. They often put on a particular album or artist, and this interaction is much closer to how folk used a library of CDs in the past. No one used the radio that way, even if you could call up and request a particular song. In contrast, Pandora is much closer to radio in how people approach it. (You can use Spotify like that too, but at least among my friends its not the primary means of interaction.)

adventured 14y ago

Spotify, Pandora, Sirius, and all the rest can easily be compared to traditional radio. In the streaming market you have very few good choices, the market is serviced by a few massive companies providing a very wide selection of music. In the radio market that same concept is accomplished by over 6,000 commercial FM radio stations, with a diverse playlist. To get a different playlist, you change stations. Indeed every type of music is covered by those 6,000 stations. And of course it used to be even more diverse, in the days of the purely live DJ, before the radio business began to fade and broadcasters cut expenses by moving to networked systems like the former Westwood One. You also used to be able to call up just about any station and make a song request. I'm sure you won't like that comparison to picking a song digitally, but it's the same, and it was very archaic, but no different than some of the other technological leaps we've made in which old technology seems very embarrassingly primitive. You often had to use a phone to make those requests, and a phone was a marvel in its day. The technological difference can be compared, in regards to distribution, ease of access, etc. In that case, Spotify / Pandora win, that's obvious. It's not that you couldn't access every type of music via radio stations, it's that it was a lot less practical. Technology leaped forward and vastly improved the situation. Spotify is very easy to compare against the radio business. What they've done is consolidate the radio market down into one platform. The Internet ate the broadcaster, very simply, just like it ate old Ma Bell. I can also compare IP telephony against the old telephony system.

shardling 14y ago
I kind of disagree -- people I know use spotify in a fundamentally different way than they used radio in the past. They often put on a particular album or artist, and this interaction is much closer to how folk used a library of CDs in the past. No one used the radio that way, even if you could call up and request a particular song. In contrast, Pandora is much closer to radio in how people approach it. (You can use Spotify like that too, but at least among my friends its not the primary means of interaction.)