What if the Spotify vs. Apple battle was about news instead of music?
As a music junkie and early Spotify subscriber, I've watched with interest the debate around Apple's recent streaming music announcement. I'm fond of both companies, so it's a bit tough to pick a favorite here.
But even tougher is to pick a winner, because the stand-off is situated around a complex riddle that's befuddled the struggling music industry for years: how do you monetize and control something that people are increasingly expecting to be free?
Enter The Wall Street Journal, not surprisingly, with an interesting observation: "Spotify, the money-losing Swedish outfit that qualifies as the 800-pound gorilla in music streaming, said Wednesday that it now has 20 million paying subscribers, up from 15 million at the start of the year." ... "Assuming $10 a month, the $2.4 billion generated annually by 20 million paying subscribers equates to about 1% of Apple’s projected revenue for this fiscal year."
Spotify is building its war chest to stay out in front. But the article makes the case that for Apple, the revenue from streaming music is not the ultimate prize like it is for Spotify... as Apple "typically uses its content business to stoke interest in its highly profitable devices."
Watching this unfold should be interesting to anyone who loves the convenience, ubiquity and access that streaming music provides. Perhaps the brawl will bring about better user experiences and even more enhanced sound quality.
But it got me thinking: what if you did a find-replace on all these articles and swapped the word "news" for every instance of "music"?
Are there some parallels the struggling news media industry might be able to note? Will the winners in that space be the ones who use news as a way to stoke a more profitable business, rather than purely relying on news content to be the business?
Maybe. Time will tell. Until then, I'll keep making customized playlists and munch some popcorn as this story takes shape.
Chair, Intellectual Property and Media Law at Riezman Berger, P.C.
9yDave wrote: "a riddle that's befuddled the struggling music industry for years: how do you monetize and control something that people are increasingly expecting to be free?" Hi Dave, Can I take a crack at your riddle? As you may be aware, I am the attorney for the Digital Content Exchange. We at the DCE have been predicting more or less doom and gloom in the music industry for the last 10 years, ...and it is not even controversial, at this point, that such is the case. (Our trail of this is all over the internet. Plus we had high-level discussions with EV-E-RY-body 5-10 years ago, warning each and every one of them. See my blog, Chronicle of a Solution). After 10 years, • Our critique about the way digital music is handled ... has never been answered. • Our non-DRM solution for resolving music ownership/streaming has never been looked at. Nor has the prototype we built. As it turns out, the prevalent attitude of "Don't worry, a startup will be along any minute to fix that" doesnt work for this particular problem. Sometimes you need to study it *like a problem*. It would be the same as saying, "Do not worry about global warming, there will be some profit-driven solution out of Silicon Valley along any minute to fix that" No, we *study* global warming, we come together for the good of humanity. Along the way, there are profit driven inventions which address the problems. But we define the problems *first*. So here is this problem that everybody's wailing about and no one's really held a Summit or any kind of a think tank/collaboration/festschrift/contest or anything to fix it. Everybody's waiting on a "cool app". 10 years, yes 10 years. You can ask mutual friends of ours like Toby. And every day my partners and I read the tech news and just shake our heads. Emmett ps and yes I do think that news content has the same problem and might be amenable to a similar solution. But if we cannot get any progress on music, movies, books and video games, news content, which is inherently trickier because of the "fish-wrap problem" ... is not going to be fixed anytime soon.
Well, this could have happened, but it would have to have been 20 years ago when the Internet delivery of graphics, information and community - the Web - was in its infancy. Sadly, the news business lacked the foresight to build what was necessary to be a factor for this. It was too busy making the short money off classified ads, death notices and the auto business. I mourn the loss of these sources, but they have no one to blame but themselves. We told them what was going to happen, but they didn't believe us.
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9yInteresting, "what if." Really makes you think.