Re:Spotify Adds Led Zeppelin as It Focuses on Mobile Business
by viraptor on Wednesday December 11, 2013 @12:15PM
(#6888891)
I think that given enough providers it could be stable. Right now we've got just few big players. Spotify, google, itunes, deezer in some places. Some are much bigger than others. Losing 0.5 potential listeners of not that much. But if we had 20+ providers, who would ever accept an exclusive deal? I.e. which artist would go for a "95% of listeners will not be able to access your music, but that's OK, you'll be exclusive and well promoted on our service" (+the deal signing bonus of course)
Re:Spotify Adds Led Zeppelin as It Focuses on Mobile Business
by chaz on Wednesday December 11, 2013 @12:52PM
(#6889226)
Exclusivities don't need to last forever. An exclusive of a few months may be enough to acquire additional subscribers while keeping the cost low enough to be justified as an acquisition cost.
Personally, I think exclusives will always be around.
I agree that the best situation seems to be one where every service has everything, and they just compete on price, UI, audio quality, reliability, etc. Users can subscribe to the service they like best, services can concentrate on technical excellence instead of negotiating with artists, and artists get access to all users.
However, given that situation, what happens when one of the services decides to negotiate a big exclusive deal with a popular group? This is a huge competitive advantage for them. They'll steal a ton of new users jumping ship from other services. Naturally, a service would try to accomplish this.
How do other services respond? I don't think they'd have any good way to deal with that besides trying to score their own exclusives.
Before long, everything is fragmented and nobody is happy. Users have trouble finding the music they want. Services are stuck fighting over exclusive rights to popular artists. Artists don't get the exposure they want. But they're stuck with it, because the good situation is not stable.