Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

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Music streaming doesn’t suffer nearly the fragmentation issues film and television streaming services have, though.

If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.

If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.

The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.

> MSTRKRFT

17 million listens. I would not call that obscure.

As a matter of fact a lot of truly obscure stuff barely gets to SoundCloud, let alone Spotify.

I don’t think this really affects my point that the fragmentation situation is infinitely better with streaming music than it is with video.

Here’s - perhaps - a better explanation as to why.

The majority of major music labels - Sony/BMG, Columbia, EMI, etc - have the majority of their music available on the majority of the available streaming services.

This situation is unfortunately worsening on video streaming platforms as every major studio and their brother wants to completely commit to their own service.

It’s even worse as the result of this weird licensing moving around is series and films being removed from services you’d previously subscribed too mainly for those particular shows or films.

The only result of this is value loss and confusion presented to the consumer - as the recent CNN+ disaster shows, along with Netflix’s flailing subscriber count.

The music streaming world is exponentially better. Like - subscribing to a music streaming service is actually worthwhile. Video streaming services decrease in value with every new one that is introduced.

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