> I suspect that purchasing music files to own will seem increasingly strange and inconvenient to younger people, though.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

As a fan of blues, I've noticed that there are a lot of grey songs in my Spotify playlists. There's just no practical way to be able to listen to the music I want to hear besides owning it (Youtube is hit-or-miss as well).

For people who want to listen to pop, they're probably fine. But anything that's even a little niche is trouble. Or that's my experience, anyhow.

> For people who want to listen to pop, they're probably fine. But anything that's even a little niche is trouble. Or that's my experience, anyhow.

O what happened to the idea of the “long tail”, eh?

I guess the idea is, why would you long tail when you can Pareto Principle?

Yeah, the theory of the long tail was that the marginal cost of that old, low volume stuff was nil.

I guess the truth was that it didn’t scale.

> I guess the idea is, why would you long tail when you can Pareto Principle?

IMO, that's not a great point. The music is already made - that's the hard part. It just needs to be licensed.

Maybe there are other channels that are more profitable than streaming, but I'm guessing that a lot of older/niche music is just locked away for no good reason.

At a certain point, I have to imagine that most artists would prefer their music be listened to if they aren't going to make money either way.

Can you recommend some blues artists that I may not know about?

Oh wow, there's just so many. Do you have Spotify? If so I can point you to some user-curated blues playlists that have a big variety.

I got into blues via dancing, which has heavily influenced my tastes.

In no particular order:

* Will Wilde

* Sugarray Rayford

* Smokehouse

* Etta James

* Gordon Webster

* The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn

* Tin Pan

* Asylum Street Spankers

* Hugh Laurie

* Legendary Rhythm and Blues Revue

* Preservation Hall Jazz Band

* The Marsalis Family

* Katie Webster

* John Lee Hooker

* Keb Mo

* Son House

* Joe Bonamassa

* ZZ Ward

* Kevin Selfe

* Allen Toussaint

* Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

* Bill Withers

* Nina Simone

* Buddy Guy

* Lightning Hopkins

* Howlin' Wolf

* Brother Yusef

There's probably a whole lot more - these are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. You probably know a lot of them, but I didn't want to guess which ones you know, so I just wrote out a bunch of people I like.

Yes, that's what I wanted to address and in the same way Steam address it with video games. You buy albums but you get the convenience of streaming services with no additional fees forever. Same as with Steam, I expected users to keep buying album regularity even if they didn't listen to them much. (cue seasonal sales etc...)

Just of of curiosity, how did your approach differ from Amazon's MP3 store?

Mostly because the goal was to offer a premium experience targeted at the classical music enthusiast. UX was close to what you can see with Apple Classical or Idagio. On the business side, the model was really Steam and not any music store, seasonal sales included. Anyway, I only had a few month to try to raise some capital and I failed, so it's history now.

"The test of whether you own something is if you can sell it."—Anonymous