Megatrax Blog

Spotify may have opened the door to a new era in music licensing and a broader profit model for several industries. Bas Grasmayer reports for TechDirt:

Recently Spotify launched its app platform, a significant step into a future where music licensing can function like an API. Which of course should have been made possible a long time ago, but corporations’ loss of control was preventing that until they finally found a way to out-leverage the indies – or maybe that’s just a coincidence.

So recently we’ve been seeing a phenomenon I like to call the Rage Against The Stream, where artists & labels have been pulling their content from services like the aforementioned. I probably don’t have to point out that in a reality where everyone is competing with free, attention has become more scarce and valuable than ever before and thus the categorical dismissal of access models such as subscription services is unlikely to pay off in the long run (p.s. I love understatements).

The day after Spotify launched its platform, articles started popping up, commenting on the fact that it’s impossible to ‘monetize apps’ and there thus being “no clear upside to developers.” And that’s where I grab my BS-defense-stick and start drawing the line.

Read the full article here.