[munchbunny]

It's interesting (at least to me) to think that without the likes of Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa, Grooveshark, Pandora, etc. we would not have gotten to a place where the music industry is willing to play ball at Spotify's level. It's too bad that there was a lot of collateral damage in the process.

[baddox]

What was the collateral damage? Do you mean the kids and grandmothers who were sued by copyright groups as a show of force?

[tantalor]

The iTunes Store deserves much of the credit for that shift.

[Animats]

True. That, not the iPod, was Apple's real weapon. Apple was able to bring that off because for a reason that's not well understood. Remember, Apple was nowhere in consumer electronics at the time. There were bigger companies with MP3 players. But Apple had an edge.

Hollywood, which includes the music industry, is very hierarchical. Steve Jobs was not only CEO of Apple. He was also CEO of Pixar. As the head of a major movie studio, he outranked all music executives. He could deal with them as their superior. That got him in the door.

iTunes is now the largest music vendor in the world.

[e12e]

Lets not forget that Sony Music/Entertainment kept hobbling Sony Tech. Which supposedly is why Sony had a few brilliant mp3 players, and then ... nothing. For a few years.

It's ludicrous -- the company had the music rights, movie rights, patents and technical know-how -- but just refused accepting the way the trends were going.

[qq66]

Itunes got labels to accept $2 per album per user rather than $10. Spotify got labels to accept 2 cents.

[qq66]

Yes, Spotify's value proposition to rights holders is "we're paying you something, it's better than Grooveshark." Another situation where a nominally powerful entity makes a major concession to avoid even higher losses to illegal activity is in tax policy. Many types of taxes are lower than they would be if evasion wasn't a partial substitute for compliance.