Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year
red@sopuli.xyz 6 months agoI was referring to the sharding that happened with video streaming services. It used to be Netflix had mostly everything, in the start, similar to Spotify. Now there are services per publisher that contain their own catalogues.
Fuck. That.
Emerald@lemmy.world 6 months ago
So you’d rather a monopoly?
red@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Spotify isn’t the only service currently.
Like I said in my op: it’s good service for the consumer. It might not be if enshittification ensues.
But compared to video streaming, it’s awesome.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Are you seriously throwing might into this sentence?
I suppose you could say when you throw a ball up in the air it might come back down but that is kind of being disingenuous isn’t it.
Here’s another thought, **doesn’t it impact the quality of the service for the consumer if the workers doing the labor to create the substance of the service, the basic thing that gives the service value to customers, are not being rewarded in a sustainable fashion for their time and labor? Do you really think all your favorite artists are going to keep cranking out music in this environment? More importantly, do you think your favorite artists would have ever been able to invest the time and effort to get big enough to become that 1% of the successful musicians if the environment was as hostile towards musicians earning money as it is now?
thesmokingman@programming.dev 6 months ago
At least 50% of the bands I’ve seen, toured with, or heard don’t record music to make money. There’s just too much music for it to be dependable income. They do it because they wanna share something neat with their friends. They upload it to sites like Spotify or a decade ago MySpace or a decade before that zines so other people can find cool shit. If they get lucky, that stumble upon nets a shirt sale which actually nets the band some income.
The sweeping generalizations you’re making do not apply. Stop trying to make music about money.
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 6 months ago
No, dude… Spotify doesn’t have exclusive streaming rights to its music
Emerald@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They were talking about how each publisher was making their own streaming service as if the solution would be to have them all under one roof aka a monopoly.
LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
No, the solution would be for every app to be able to licence the music without any exclusivity, making them compete over the features their apps and services have instead of on the music itself. Video streaming is an oligopoly right now, which can be just as bad as a monopoly.
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I mean, nobody intrinsically cares how many competitors there are, so long as the all content can be retrieved from a single source. Of course that doesn’t mean people wouldn’t care if a single company were to abuse their monopoly e.g. by charging unreasonable rates or forcing ads (looking at you, cable).
It’s worth remembering that monopolies aren’t inherently illegal in the U.S. or anywhere else really; it’s not against the law to have the best product by a mile, nor should it be. Antitrust is illegal, which in this case would be defined by signing exclusive rights for all content and then providing a shitty service.