

Who killed the music industry? An interactive explainer - edinc
http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/05/who-killed-the-music-industry-an-interactive-explainer/

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biff
It's a pity this didn't get more attention on here, as this is a surprisingly
detailed article on the subject.

The one tiny aspect I've been thinking about a lot lately involves the anti-
Spotify crowd. This piece throws in some speculative numbers about iTunes vs.
Pandora vs. Spotify, and explains that if only non-paying Spotify users listen
to a given track it takes 600 listens to equal one iTunes purchase, in terms
of royalties. (For paying Spotify users, BTW, it's only 60 listens.)

Although some artists, notably Radiohead, are taking Spotify to task over
this, I'm curious about why this is considered differently to the old dynamic
of broadcast radio vs. LP/tape/CD, where there was no way one broadcast of a
song cost the station as much as buying a single, and that broadcast was
nearly guaranteed to reach more than 600 listeners. Is it that Spotify users
can choose the songs they listen to, and maybe burn themselves out on their
favorite tracks, where in radio they'd run a few chosen songs into the ground
but if you wanted to hear anything else you had to buy the album?

What's even more noteworthy to me was Pink Floyd putting just about everything
they've got on Spotify. They were one of the famous holdouts on iTunes
ostensibly because they wanted their works to be experienced as entire albums,
and are part of the group attacking Pandora over its seeking of royalty cuts.

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mtgx
tl;dr: Record labels are dinosaurs, and they have been and will continue to be
hurt by the new digital ways of consuming music, until they die, because their
cost structure can't be supported in this new age. New ways of dealing with
music and helping artists make money will need to be found, which probably
won't include the labels.

