Yes, sustainable business model is hard. Just look at Spotify's stock - it's basically break even since IPO. The music industry adjusts their fees to keep Spotify alive, but never significantly profitable, and Spotify has little ability to push back on this.
...but there's also soooooooooo much entrenchment going on in this space. There's special contracts written that whitelist which platforms tracks can be played on and tricky "favored nation" clauses (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/business/media/sony-terms....) So, if you create a new platform, and it's a real threat to the others, then you just get denied a seat at the table unless you make concessions to the point of impotency... or you only have indie music that struggles to attract masses.
Ultimately I decided that, while I cared a LOT about this sector, that it's just too much of an uphill battle.
Your idea sounds cool though. I wish you luck. Is it your intent to build a music catalog that is entirely unique to your platform, to bring in indie artists, or to try and bring in the big names, too? If you're not trying to bring in the big names... how do you prevent the situation where someone says, "I love this song, but next I want to hear ____.", it's not on your platform, and so they open Spotify/YT, and now suddenly you've lost engagement with your platform. I don't feel that consumers maintain playlists across multiple music services and bounce between them based on their current listening preferences. Do you?
I've had two thoughts re: how to start and how to build an interesting music catalog without getting crushed by the lawyers and labels who are in cahoots with each other. First, the concept of breaking music into its stems and letting people directly interface with music "particles" that their ear-brains love most has made me think that the most important thing to get right is recommending more music that has the sonic characteristics that someone enjoys most, not necessarily broad things that come from music metadata like genre, lyrics, or what your friends liked or listened to. Rather, things like melody, groove or rhythmic patterns, BPM, timbre, harmonics, textures, or music structural preferences are how you get recommendations on what to listen to next. When thinking about it that way, it seems like how the music sounds can be used to recommend, regardless of who big or small or new or established or signed or unsigned an artist might be. In my mind, there's an interesting democratic nature to that too where new artists get a fair shake at discovery as much as major artists (whereas today there's a lot of editorial control over who gets bubbled up into recommendations algos). Second, I've thought about developing a solid prototype and then going for sizeable investment so that I could afford to strike deals, join the cabal, and establish the relationships and access the catalogs of labels big and small.
Would love to have a discussion, email is in my bio.
I been working on UX with the team at https://www.radiooooo.com and I believe there is a lot of space for new UI and discovery interactions that treat finding new music as a game.
There is an unspeakable ‘uncanny valley‘ quality that’d algo generated playlists create. Like the music is too similar too aligned, it sends my ears to sleep.
The music project that I have been working on aims to bring together a musical audio pre-trained language model, natural language inputs, and a novel interface that deconstructs what you hear into visualizations and user controls. The idea is to allow you to dramatically improve personalization of music search, discovery, and curation by allowing interactivity with the individual parts of music, also known as stems in music theory and music mastering.
The overarching challenge that music streaming services and more broadly media streaming services have, is building a sustainable business on somebody else's art...you have to (rightly) pay licensing costs. This is a major (and ever changing) business risk and one of the larger challenges when I think about launching a new music streaming platform. MTV discovered this in the mid 80's when margins for music and music video licensing became flat, Netflix / Apple / Amazon / etc know this which is why they invested in developing their own content in house.
If anybody is passionate about working on something new in streaming music let me know - I could really use help developing the music audio PLM prototype.
(1) https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/there-are-now-120000-...