Obviously Apple can afford to pay a lot lot more. Now obviously you can say that if they can't afford it they shouldn't be in business, but you can say the exact same for the record labels/artists. They can just pull their songs from Spotify.
I don't have any sympathy for Spotify, though. No one has done more than they have to create the price point expectations for products like theirs. They should have known it wasn't enough. They probably did know and like most growth phase startups simply decided to care until later if ever, and any negative enduring impacts on artists be damned.
I think Napster/Limewire/Kazaa were far greater influences on price point expectations for Music. This reads like complete erasure of music distribution from 1999-2011. Not to mention you already have companies like Rdio and Grooveshark that were pretty much squeezed to death by the labels.
Yes, Advertising is a poor way to monetize such a service (just look at Pandora), but Apple is in a privileged position being able to start today with a subscription only service; one that is enforced by their market position in devices. There is no way you could have pulled that off in 2008, and the reason for that was piracy.
Unauthorized copies have been a fact of life not only through the dawn of the P2P era but back through the cassette era. And you don't even have to get into the ethics of that in order to understand that none of them ever set price point expectations. Everyone involved in that activity ultimately understood that they were not participating in economically supporting the artist (or indeed, in any economic transaction at all). Everyone was clear on the accounting.
Spotify adopted an economic model marginally different from piracy but with the veneer of a legitimate economic transaction, the pretense of some kind of proper accounting.
So yeah. It absolutely did more to set price point expectations.
> Rdio and Grooveshark
Rdio and Grooveshark are weird examples to pull in, Rdio because it was always too late and too small to have really made that much of a difference, Grooveshark because it started life as more of a P2P tool. What's next, pointing out the missed relevance of audioscrobbler/last.fm?
> There is no way you could have pulled that off in 2008, and the reason for that was piracy.
The primary reason you couldn't have pulled that off in 2008 was economic contraction, not piracy.
If you actually look at the RIAA sales history figures you can see it:
https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
The total sales volume peaks quite clearly coincide more with macroeconomic trends than technical trends. CDs get huge during the "irrational exuberance" of the 90s. It dips with the dot-com crash, but even with P2P taking off like crazy and digital retail barely getting off the ground, the amount of money going into CDs is more flat than downward ... until 2007, of course, and everyone knows what happened then. And the recent primary huge revenue growth in streaming has coincided with periods of big economic growth.
And you can also see the story in there of digital retail growth from 2004... up until streaming cannibalized that.
Looking externally at the company they’re listed as having 50,000-100,000 employees. That’s a lot of people to employ for a audio streaming service.
I also happen to know their cloud commitments (I know a guy) and they are large enough that it starts to make a lot of sense to invest into physical hardware.
I’m talking so much money per year that it rivals the GDP of some countries.
Uhhhh. Do you mean Apple or Spotify? Spotify's 2021 Q4 press release says:
>At the end of Q4, our workforce consisted of 7,690 FTEs globally.
