I'm thinking he's referring to piracy, as in if you take away streaming with ads people that aren't willing/can't afford to spend $9.99/month for subscription will resort to pirating music.
And they've been down this road before, starting with Napster back in the day. At that time, the labels were offered a very serious and consistent amount of money, with tons of growth locked in. Was the dawn of broadband in the US, and Napster had 40 million users, many of whom would have paid some monthly amount without thinking hard about it.
They killed that, saw the growth of many different distributed schemes.
iTunes brought many back to the fold, and regular, common sense, moves to add value back to the process saw more people paying and fewer pirating.
If he's thinking about the consequences, he's right. Remove AD driven streaming, which is basically the replacement for aging and increasingly irrelevant FM radio, and people will just start sharing hard again.
Or use YouTube-- they're good but not perfect at takedowns, a lot more reliable and consumer-friendly than torrents, and the labels have a much smaller chance of winning against Google.
And they've been down this road before, starting with Napster back in the day. At that time, the labels were offered a very serious and consistent amount of money, with tons of growth locked in. Was the dawn of broadband in the US, and Napster had 40 million users, many of whom would have paid some monthly amount without thinking hard about it.
They killed that, saw the growth of many different distributed schemes.
iTunes brought many back to the fold, and regular, common sense, moves to add value back to the process saw more people paying and fewer pirating.
If he's thinking about the consequences, he's right. Remove AD driven streaming, which is basically the replacement for aging and increasingly irrelevant FM radio, and people will just start sharing hard again.