A Game Of Songs. The Music Streaming Challenge
A tale of the music industry’s ongoing struggle for power on the internet.
Streaming is coming.
Recently, Spotify celebrated 50 million subscribers. Overall, more than 100 million people pay for a music on-demand streaming subscription globally. Most tech giants have entered the market by now. Based on this, you might assume that music streaming is a lucrative business. You are not mistaken. But the streaming services aren’t the ones making all the profit. That price goes to someone who, according to common tech industry believe, should have long been written off — and surpassed by a disruptive company from their own ranks.
This someone is, of course, the traditional music industry and, in particular, the major labels. Once upon a time everybody believed they were doomed. It was almost a foregone conclusion that they were going to be the first major industry disrupted by the internet. In reality, however, the labels bounced back since these early days when Napster and peer-to-peer filesharing appeared to be threatening them existentially. In an almost ironic twist of history, you might even argue that music labels today are in the best position of all traditional media companies.
