[epicide]

I think we might be seeing a shift in how people consume music that Spotify is (better?) positioned to take advantage of.

First and foremost, I agree that Spotify will struggle if they try to compete with other services on providing all artists.

It seems like listeners (or perhaps a subset) are listening by genre rather than by artist. I know genres and waves of music are nothing new, but with the lower barriers to creation as well as to consumption [1], we are seeing the number and frequency of new genres and sub-genres increase dramatically.

Anecdotally, I find myself using radio based music a lot more. E.g. I have a Synthwave station on SoundCloud that I listen to. I think this style is further exemplified with the popularity of sharing Spotify playlists. This is also why I think Spotify in particular are ahead -- the very people who would listen to Spotify published content are the people that already use Spotify.

In fact, I think this style better fits a lot of people who would use a streaming service in the first place. A lot of the people who want to listen to their favorite artists question the idea of paying for a subscription to maintain access to their favorite albums.

Of course, if Spotify goes this route, they are not alone. They would have to compete with services like SoundCloud and BandCamp. I think they could find success by toeing the line between major label content and indie content.

[1]: e.g. a "bedroom musician" can make their album over the course of a few weeks and then that album gets bought and listened to by someone thousands of miles away within minutes/hours of release. No printing copies, shipping, stocking, ticket purchasing, etc.

[logfromblammo]

Genre is a discovery hack. If you listen to "Reggae", that may be only because you know you like Bob Marley and the Wailers, but you don't necessarily already know that Peter Tosh plays similar music, or that Desmond Dekker is similar, but is actually considered Jamaican (First Wave) Ska. It won't be able to predict if you will also like or dislike Rage Against the Machine or Elvis Presley, or individual songs that an artist plays out of their normal genre.

If Spotify can solve discovery, by using actual human listening patterns, playlist contents, machine classifiers, or whatever else they may have at their disposal, it is much less important that they have licenses for all the most popular songs. The popular songs are the easiest way for the system to determine what kind of sound any given listener will like, but tuning the radio and auto-playlists to respond to likes, skips, and dislikes should be able to reveal the songs that people will like, from artists nobody has heard of [yet].

I think they're almost there. When I go to radio mode based on my "Liked from Radio" playlist, I want to also be able to specify between "I'm passively listening, so just play music I probably won't want to skip" and "play only new stuff, so I can actively train your algorithm". As it is, it mainly just plays things that are already on my list, and I have to skip ahead on everything I have already liked when I'm trying to train it.

The key issue is that if Spotify is the music discovery engine, people won't discover music that isn't on Spotify. You have to license to them, or you don't acquire new fans. It only helps them that broadcast radio has consolidated itself into a uniform ball of only the greatest hits by only the biggest stars.