| The whole premise of the way streaming music is marketed and sold is all wrong. In the long term if you want good music to be created you have to put a little thought into how you’re nurturing the community of musicians on the local level who are doing the hard work of creating the product that Spotify and iTunes are selling. From the point of view of a streaming service, it looks like this: 1) music is generated from bands via spontaneous generation 2) we throw that music up on a streaming site without context or support unless paid by major labels 3) profit That’s not how it works. Good music is usually developed in some context- a community of musicians will develop in some major city in a location where the rent is not too high. They go to each other’s shows, they support each other, they learn from each other, they imitate each other and develop new sounds. Once in a while one group becomes popular enough that people outside of that community start to hear about them. But, just as Facebook has become a news aggregator and should probably take that responsibility seriously, iTunes should take its responsibility seriously to the musical community that generates the product it sells. It could start recommending to people bands that are local to them- who they could go see live. It could tie in promoting live experiences of the bands a user is listening to. They could redistribute the streaming profits a little to give some financial support to smaller artists instead of the top 10 bands who play on a loop at Applebee’s. There are lots of ways that they could foster the growth of musical communities, and they aren’t doing it. One good thing about the old music industry was that they would at least somewhat do this for struggling bands- they would identify talent, and develop and promote it. iTunes doesn’t do that. Spotify doesn’t do that. A lot of talent is going to wither on the vine without support. |
Both of these trends put traditionally local restaurants and small bands under increased pressure to compete with the likes of VC-funded Spotify or DoorDash. The pessimist in me sees a future where these local business are largely gone, kind of like how Walmart and other big box stores replaced many small, local retailers.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961416/spotify-fake-art...