James Cook, reporting for Business Insider U.K.
This hadn’t even occurred to me, but of course she’s absolutely right. I thought the new streaming music service Tidal was D.O.A. even before reading this: to even get enough customers to make a difference, it would need an extremely high number of exclusives. But Allen’s point is that even that wouldn’t help.
The service that Apple are rumoured to be announcing soon may be ok, not because it’s going to have exclusives, but because it will be the default on hundreds of millions of phones. Otherwise the incumbents Spotify and YouTube are probably going to dominate.
I’ve argued before, though, that streaming is only good for megastars. But piracy is only a major problem for megastars too: if you’re a small musician appealing to a small audience, that audience will be that much more passionate, and that much more willing to support you.
Via Mac OS Ken