I don't limit myself to the music of one band, so i really appreciate spotify, and i don't limit myself to the news of one publisher.
Going back to pre Internet: Even then most people got one newspaper and be done. (I myself grew up with in a household with a daily newspaper and two weekly, in addition to subscriptions to physics and computing magazines, but that was an exception, in most of my friend's places there was at most one) And TV channels there was one news program one watched (and still only few people switch between news channels)
I think most people get very shallow news information from some big names (nu.nl) that are basically reprints from AP news items. Short discription what happened, no background, nor deep diving. Most websites have the same reprinted stories, nothing worth paying for.
For background stories, that require real journalism, you can't rely on just one source. You want the best articles from all sources. Most sources have only a few good deep stories a month.
But things have really changed compared to pre-internet: it is much easier to share links to specific news items, and all these links are actually within reach, just click on the link and open it.
This is the sea-change that has happened. Newspapers used to be hugely profitable, because they owned and controlled the primary source of news for most people. Their platform – direct distribution directly to people's homes – was immensely powerful for many decades. That platform was disrupted by the internet. Newspapers are no longer the primary platform most people use for media consumption. Those platforms are now, as you say, places like HN, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, etc.
If you go to a facebook stream: how.many different news sites do you really get? - It's few. Most your "friends" have their go-to media they share and random outliers. It feels broad, but I doubt it's broad for the typical user.
I don’t think this is a good thing. We’d all benefit from seeing multiple perspectives on the news. But to solve this problem you’re going to have to persuade companies that have no interest in sharing their audience and convince an audience that, by and large, doesn’t have a big interest in reading multiple sources of news. It wouldn’t be easy.
this is a bizarre analogy
no one had to limit themselves to listening to only one band before Spotify
Seems like a good analogy to me.
And they were right to fear it, as spotify revenue streams hardly resemble the revenue streams they had from selling albums.
Selling through spotify is now seen as marketing, bands have to make their money from concerts.
Newspapers and magazines are correct to fear selling per article, it will significantly reduce their revenue, with no real revenue model to make up for it. Newspaper concerts?
This is perhaps a better analogy than you realize, but not for the reason you realize.
Yes, Spotify is great for music consumers, but it is profoundly destroying the well-being of music producers. Of course, the big-money days of the 90s are never coming back, but I hope most people would agree that talented musicians should be able to earn a living wage from their art so that they can focus most of their time on it. That's a net benefit to society.
But Spotify returns so little money to the artists you conveniently stream that music is inexorably turning into a hobby for all but a tiny fraction of pop stars.
Unless you want 99% of journalists to be hobbyists doing it in their free time when they aren't serving people coffee at the nearby Starbucks, then Spotify's isn't the business model to advocate.
That, unfortunately, doesn't add up. Many low-value customers is not what we need.
We need (and have) predictable revenue from stable base of customers we know and trust. (And who trust us.)
We need (and have) reliable sources for new long-term customers.
We don't need lots of (random) people paying us $1 or $2 every couple of months. Frankly, that sounds like an awful business to be in.
You may need to elaborate on this. Where are your new long term customers coming from?
While I don't limit myself to just one band, I also prefer a real DJ to spotify, for so many reasons. I'm probably just getting old though.
Basically, I'll pay for expertise in these areas.
By trusting in a publisher. In which case, you then become a loyal reader, just like you become a fan of a band. Of course, this is not an exclusive relationship.
If you want to best news, you need to look across different sources, and get recommendations from different sides, e.g. something like but not limited to hackernews.