Music streaming will no doubt eventually becoming the dominant way music is distributed and consumed. Is what we have right now perfect? No. The whole thing is still a money pit for everyone involved except the consumer.
Since big problems still exist, though, shouldn’t more people be talking about how they can be solved? David Lowery (Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven) offers this on his site, The Trichordist: ”It’s not that streaming can’t work. It can. It’s that Spotify is a bad business model that has unsustainable economics and exploits artists because it is a wall street financial instrument and not a music company. “We’ve previously published a couple posts on streaming music where we explore how access models and windowing are working for the film industry and could serve as a guide to the record business. We’ve also shown how transactional music purchases have made legal music consumption the best value in the history of recorded music. The key to building streaming business models that make sense and are sustainable is to increase the subscription fees, utilize well thought-out windowing models and experiment with new pricing tiers for access based services. Historically the music business has employed the use of special markets such record clubs (remember 11 CD’s for one penny). It’s not that record clubs were bad, in fact numerous studies found them to be great source of additional revenue if managed in a way that did not cannibalize front line sales. (Remember 12 month record club holdbacks?) Now we need to strike the same balance with streaming services. So let’s get real, the Spotify business model and streaming math just does not work and can not work in it’s current form. Here are five suggestions to get music streaming back on track as a viable business model. 1) Minimum Payment Per PlayYou want to give your service away? Fine, but artists and rights holders are not going to subsidize your business by devaluing our work. No plays without a minimum royaltyÃ