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Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

I would find an estimate like "AirPods make more money than Spotify" interesting; its a sort-of poetic "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself", at least in a limited scope (of course, the entire audio hardware industry is larger than Spotify, but is the entire audio hareware industry larger than the entire music recording industry? idk).

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> the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself

Which still isn't a useful comparison.

One is an outright purchase, and the other a subscription service.

True. But $10 x 12 = $120 subscription per year. That's a decent buck and a fairly large market.

And on a long term, more profitable probably. We won’t see Spotify disappearing for a while.

Spotify rents music that it itself rents from 3 companies that own most of the music. Why would those 3 companies not just raise their rents if Spotify starts making a decent profit?

Spotify has been around since 2006 and just eked out a tiny profit last year. Unless they plan on owning music themselves, I don’t see why the music owners wouldn’t try to capture most of the profit.

Or. Flip that over. What happens to the music owners if one of their primary distributors goes under?

As long as Apple, Google, and Amazon are willing to forgo margins on music, not much.

I never said it would be Useful. I said it would be Interesting.

I primarily use airpods for making calls, and over the ear headphones for music.

> "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself"

...at which point it's reasonable to maybe stop conflating price with value.

I guess you haven't met an audiophile?

I have met audiophiles. The impression I get is that having nice headphones "on the go" is not a priority and people live with the low quality of small-and-wireless headphones.

Very few audiophiles are sitting at their desk using Airpods, though. In that market, wired headphones rule supreme. (Many people are using wireless noise-cancelling headphones, however, not for audio quality but because "work" is too loud for people to work. At my last job, they even had Sonos speakers around playing music all day. It was crazy!)

Music fans buy stereo/audio equipment to listen to their music.

Audiophiles buy music to listen to their stereo/audio equipment.

It tells you that one hardware product is worth more than one streaming service. Hard to draw any conclusions about the music business as a whole.

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