can anyone ELI5 why music streaming never fragmented like TV streaming did?
An album being exclusive to a particular platform seem to be incredible rare. TV platform continuously remove things from the catalog to reduce costs but that does not seem to happen often in music.
Artists are basically already not getting any serious royalty from streaming. Streaming is essentially free other than operating costs for the companies.
You can also listen to that latest track on the radio for nothing.
To fragment the market you’d have to have something so powerful that people would go to one place over another for lack of having it. The effect is surprisingly weak in the music segment, people just listen to other things.
My guess is that with TV/Movies streaming you generally sit down to consume a given piece of content in chunks of minimum 1hr, and people rarely watch an episode of one show back to back with another show. So having that content fragmented between services doesn’t provide much friction to normal viewing.
Contrast that with music, where having to switch services to listen to a different album would be extremely disruptive to the way most people listen. The only way that would work is if the separate services were generally clustered by genre, like radio. Having said that, I’m a little surprised that niche music streaming services haven’t popped up (like how you have Crunchyroll for anime, for example).
TV streaming STARTED fragmented. Just it was all bundled together in a cable subscription. The (ineffective) moderator in that were the cable companies like Comcast, who were always trying to negotiate the price of a channel down. Suddenly with streaming, you could start your own service and getting dropped by someone like Comcast wasn’t the death sentence it used to be. The TV content creators are dealing with the end user for the first time.
The music industry long ago learned they get better sales when all their vynal/cassettes/CDs are available at Kmart/Walmart/Best Buy/etc. The music industry DID fragment a bit with online streaming, but those quickly failed. And the artists soon realized that being cool and exclusive to iTunes lead to less money for them.
Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?
It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.
can anyone ELI5 why music streaming never fragmented like TV streaming did?
An album being exclusive to a particular platform seem to be incredible rare. TV platform continuously remove things from the catalog to reduce costs but that does not seem to happen often in music.
Artists are basically already not getting any serious royalty from streaming. Streaming is essentially free other than operating costs for the companies.
You can also listen to that latest track on the radio for nothing.
To fragment the market you’d have to have something so powerful that people would go to one place over another for lack of having it. The effect is surprisingly weak in the music segment, people just listen to other things.
My guess is that with TV/Movies streaming you generally sit down to consume a given piece of content in chunks of minimum 1hr, and people rarely watch an episode of one show back to back with another show. So having that content fragmented between services doesn’t provide much friction to normal viewing.
Contrast that with music, where having to switch services to listen to a different album would be extremely disruptive to the way most people listen. The only way that would work is if the separate services were generally clustered by genre, like radio. Having said that, I’m a little surprised that niche music streaming services haven’t popped up (like how you have Crunchyroll for anime, for example).
TV streaming STARTED fragmented. Just it was all bundled together in a cable subscription. The (ineffective) moderator in that were the cable companies like Comcast, who were always trying to negotiate the price of a channel down. Suddenly with streaming, you could start your own service and getting dropped by someone like Comcast wasn’t the death sentence it used to be. The TV content creators are dealing with the end user for the first time.
The music industry long ago learned they get better sales when all their vynal/cassettes/CDs are available at Kmart/Walmart/Best Buy/etc. The music industry DID fragment a bit with online streaming, but those quickly failed. And the artists soon realized that being cool and exclusive to iTunes lead to less money for them.
Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?
It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.