[rayiner]

Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

A middle man controlling the subscriber-ship would not necessarily be better for papers. The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

[echelon]

> The middle man entity would have enormous bargaining leverage, like Apple does with the App Store.

That's a great point and speaks to a true danger with this model.

I imagine content publishers could distribute their content across multiple distributors if they existed, though I imagine the market would only support a handful of competitors.

> Spotify worked a compulsory license provision of copyright law that applies specifically and only to music streaming. (Originally intended for radio.)

Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested. How was this provision created, and did they start their business with a law team? How were they able to get this accepted? What about other, earlier entrants in this space? Grooveshark obviously failed (they walked a slightly shadier path), but had they tried to get on proper legal footing they might have made it.

Could a news aggregator start out as a Grooveshark, then pivot into a Spotify without getting sued into oblivion?

[dehrmann]

> Could you speak more to this point? I'm incredibly interested.

I think they're thinking of DMCA radio licensing. This is what Pandora, not Spotify uses/used, and why you can't play specific tracks on Pandora.

[scarface74]

There is no compulsory license for on demand music streaming where you can choose what songs you want to listen to and when. The compulsory license was for streaming radio stations where you can’t choose the exact songs you want to listen to like Pandora.

Proof? A radio can play any music it wants to and an artist/record label can’t stop them as long as they have a license. An artist can stop Spotify from including them in their music library.