Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

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Edit: I big brained and wrote this whole thing while thinking Spotify. I believe my thoughts on the matter stand, though. So I’ll just correct the wording. P.S. I don’t hold this opinion strongly. I’m eager to hear other thoughts on the matter.

I’m not a fan of this perspective because it can sound like people believe it’s the company who is behaving wrongly, and they want a form of charity from it. They want Audible to give up profit because they don’t l feel it’s fair. If Audible isn’t worth 60-75%, don’t use it to distribute your media. Which is probably not a viable option. I think this leads to the real complaint candidates:

“Audible has a monopoly over audiobook creation/distribution by breaking laws, and should be dealt with by the government.”

“Audible has a monopoly without breaking laws but I think there should be laws.”

“I don’t like how capitalism works.”

“Capitalism isn’t working in my favour this time.”

Audible isn’t the right audience for any of these complaints.

If Audible’s service isn’t worth anywhere near that much, they either are acting in a way where government should intervene, or there’s a deliciously ripe opportunity for another business to thrive if they can overcome the inertia of the incumbent.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the creators should take home the bulk, and I bet, on intuition alone, that there’s plenty of money to run a music service at a fraction of the take.

Critcizing and/or boycotting Audible is probably the strategy that's most likely to effect change.

Yes, I do think the government should intervene, but is that realistic? How often does the US file antitrust suits against big tech companies or their subsidiaries? I've seen lawsuits to block mergers/acquisitions, but the last time I remember actually breaking up an existing monopoly as an option on the table was Microsoft over 20 years ago.

I dont see any deliciously ripe business opportunity here. If you want to compete with Audible, you need to attract authors to your platform. Yes, you can try luring them with a more generous share of the profits. But you will run into a brick wall because the sheer size of Audible's user base means that authors have bigger potential earnings there even though Audible takes an extortionate cut. And you won't be able to match Audible's user base until you have a similarly large/diverse selection of authors and works to choose from.

The only way to break the chicken and egg problem is to come with a huge amount of capital that allows you bribe authors/users onto your platform by selling at a loss while you build up volume. Which, of course, is exactly how Audible built its monopoly in the first place. But back then it was an emerging market and the competitors were smaller and less entrenched. Audible feels comfortable taking an extortionate cut now precisely because it knows that no one else has both the capital and the will to compete with them. This is not something that I would bin under "the free market working as it should."

I'm surpised that some people still don't recognize the playbook. This is 20th century tech strategy. Amazon was already doing this with physical books in the 90s - it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that they are doing it again with digital audiobooks.

This strikes me as market absolutism - if you are participating in a market then you have to believe that the market will solve all of your problems or else they aren't valid. People can believe a company is behaving "wrongly" even if it profitable and successful.

But there are almost always other social dynamics at play, true free markets are rare. You can generally "like how capitalism works" and not believe that markets will optimally solve every problem all the time.

Also, "the market" is an abstraction. What actually kills companies? People stop using their product. Criticism/boycotting is a market force. Capitalism requires informed consumers and this is consumers sharing information.

Markets also take time. Even if you believe the market will solve a problem, it will take time for the "bad" company to die and other firms to take it's place.

Audible is not a music service but an audiobook and podcast service.

Omg I’m thinking Spotify. Thank you. Let me correct my comment.

"Capitalism only works well if there is sufficient competition"

That's the valid complaint here. There's not enough competition for Audible, so they can afford to charge extortionate prices. More competition is good, so that's what Sanderson invests in. Sounds like an awesome move to me.

That really feels like a great solution.

Perhaps I’m muddied in semantics, but I don’t think the complaint can be “Audible exploits people.” I think it is, “someone needs to exploit the opportunity Audible has presented by charging so much.”

I think "Audible exploits people" is a perfectly valid complaint. But it's important to understand that it's the natural inclination of corporations to exploit people whenever they can, and if you want them to stop, you need to make it harder for them to do so.

There's a lot of ways you can do that. By introducing regulation, competition, empowering people, or even banning corporations. The first two seem to be the most popular in our society.

That's the option I like too, but it's easier said than done. We have these quasi-monopolies popping up around digital intellectual property of nearly every sort: charge a lot. Everybody uses Microsoft Office. There's only a handful of Hollywood studios. Etc. Etc.

It seems that for some combination of legal and technical reasons it's very hard to beat an incumbent in these industries. Maybe it's just that the economies of scale are so good, I don't know. but when you think about it, everything involved is man-made, the very concept of intellectual property itself is a human invention. Patents, copyrights etc. all just stuff we cooked up. If we have defined it to be a self-reinforcing monopoly-generating thing, maybe we should redefine it.

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