There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of popular movies on their streaming service.

For their mail service they did

Netflix didn't lose content by choice. Actual right holders decided to pull their content and create rival services.

Has nothing to do with perceived enshittification by Netflix (even though they have enshittification too).

Spotify is under the same threat: they have no content that they own. Everything is licensed.

I thought they started producing their own podcasts. Can't bring in much though.

260+ million songs they don't own vs a dozen or so podcasts

They also have fake artists they put on playlists :P

Yes, but it's still the required correction to your claim. I actually don't know how many podcasts are using their publishing platform. I imagine it's considerably more than a dozen.

They want to own something but it's always going to be a drop in the ocean. They have a small new music label thing called RADAR but I imagine the failure rate on that is very high. They need to buy a label if they want to meaningfully change this. Just like Amazon now owns MGM and Netflix maybe getting Warner Bros. Presumably they can't afford to do this, and I don't think that integration would work as well in the music industry.

But, Netflix did lose their content by choice! Way back in the 00s, you could pay Netflix something like $5 a month, and they would mail you physical DVDs of almost any movies you could ever want to watch. In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.

Sure, they had the rug yanked out from under them with digital streaming, but they very deliberately put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.

> In fact, my recollection is that the physical library was generally much more extensive than the streaming library, at least through the early ‘10s.

Because streaming licences are different from DVD licences for example. Hell, even 4k streaming licenses and lossless audio streaming licenses are different (and significantly more costly) than streaming 1080p and compressed audio.

> put themselves into that position when they pivoted to streaming in the first place.

As we all know physical DVD businesses are thriving

Spotify is banking on AI music which is enough to tell you everything you need to know about the company, their C-suite and their opinion on music.

The bit in the blog post about the amount of music uploaded yearly to Spotify was shocking.

I'm sure there's lots of unsigned self-published artists uploading their music in there, but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.

> but so much of that has to be auto-generated and AI-generated slop.

There is. And most people would not even recognize a lot of AI music without multiple listens and digging through things like "is there any online presence (which can also be easily spoofed)".

I've fallen into the trap myself with some (pretty generic) blues music

> Spotify is banking on AI music

Are they?

Yes, they actively promote playlists with AI music to corner the "chill work" music without having to pay anything to musicians.

Ah yes. The reason is because all the money is in the chill music. And not in the fact that the most formulaic genres get flooded with easily generated music ("chill work" music especially doesn't even need sophisticated AI, a random number generator would work).

And that's before we ask the question of how to identify AI-generated music (no one asks that question, but everyone wants it removed).

Dude, as of now Netflix cancelled 263 shows[0], I have no idea where this idea of not having a choice is coming from.

[0]: https://simkl.com/5743957/list/59981/cancelled-tv-shows-netf...