Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.

Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.

But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.

Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.

This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.

"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.

Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.

> Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music

What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.

That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.

The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.

And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…

That's unfortunately not true.

In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.

https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs

They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.

"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell

If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.

it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast

Citation?

Not OP: https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...

The article said the Spotify CEO was CEO of uTorrent. And Spotify used files employees got from The Pirate Bay. Not what the HN comments claimed.

To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.

You're thinking of Daniel Elk (Spotify co-founder and CEO) and Ludvig Strigeus, who ran uTorrent before building Spotify.

Thanks!

The music streaming services are also the easiest way to pirate music.

I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.

Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.

But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.

Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.

Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.

Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.

that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)

Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things.

My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.

What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get your investment back?

What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup?

This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.

Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.

> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.

Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.

I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.

If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't. If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then don't. If you can't make money writing books about the intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't entitled to earn a living just because you create music, movies or writings in our current society. If we're going to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over time, which one's are which start to change. It happened to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the benefit.

Wonderful! Again I fail to see how this is supposedly a strong argument against this:

> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.

The music market clearly still exists. There's no reason to believe that the movie market will cease to exist.

20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.

The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.