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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

If something hasn't "necessarily" saved musicians, then there's not much of a defense of whatever else it's done for the industry.

And any idea that services like Spotify were just the only way forward to revenue is one that thoroughly ignores the growth of digital recording sales that took place independent of it (not to mention what they may well have been like if it'd never happened).

Buffet streaming services marry the worst of piracy and the old-school middleman capture. They give the illusory impression that you're actually rewarding value.

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> Buffet streaming services marry the worst of piracy and the old-school middleman capture.

You have an interesting perspective... as a consumer for me Spotify marries the best of those two worlds. I get the music I want and discoverability, quality, and ease of use is extremely good.

You're talking experience rather than economics. The consumer experience of Spotify is certainly much more convenient and pleasant than the experience of P2P piracy.

And it turns out that can be true even while the economics of buffet streaming services simultaneously effect the drastic cuts in first-order revenue that piracy brought directing it instead to distributor and label.

Short-term experience anyway. Long-term experience requires remaining a subscriber ad infinitum. I admittedly come from the perspective of someone who prefers to own music that I care about. Which, in turn, is very influenced by the fact that I had a very large digital/digitized music catalog before streaming came along so incremental purchases aren't very expensive.

I think there is a difference between collectors and people who just want to listen to music. I gladly pay Spotify each month to NOT have to manage a collection of physical or digital music.

I gladly pay HBO and Netflix as well, but it seems no matter what I pay, I cant get the same movie/series coverage that Spotify provides for music.

I don't really think of myself as a music collector. I just like to know that if I decide tomorrow I don't want to pay for a streaming music service any longer, I'll still have all the music I care about. That said, given that all the major music services have at least most non-niche music, having subscriptions to some things is just the way things are these days and you're probably not realistically going to drop a music streaming service.

Video is, of course, much more fragmented but it's also different in that you're not going to rewatch most video content. There never were music rental stores (although libraries did/do have music) but video rentals were a thing pre-streaming.

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