I’m all for paying for a discovery algorithm, and Spotify has a good one. But as Google found out, staying the top player in a discovery space is hard.
A serious risk that Spotify faces is that new federated social networks are popping up, with great support for finding new artists.
Without the Discovery portion of Spotify, and with the constant pressure by record labels to enshittify the service, I don’t see a long runway ahead for Spotify.
The new default is going to be piracy, again. (The old default was piracy, before streaming got good.) The paid option will be patronage. Then we will see massive amounts of bundling in the patronage services, as they re-discover that people are willing to pay for a discovery service.
If the record labels even still exist at that point, they will pressure the bundled patronage services to enshittify, and the dance will start over at piracy.
For anyone on the selling side who wants to skip a step or win for awhile, here’s the lesson: You can’t sell digital files. You never could - not from day one. You can only sell easy access and discovery.
Digital files are the ulitmate perfectly elastic good, and the consumer community will swing back and forth into piracy or paying, based on how well they are treated as customers.
“The Caves of Steel” is very much part of the “I Robot” storyline, and not an important distinction here. I also expected Dr Susan Calvin, but when talking about what we actually got, it’s closest to an adaptation of the R. Daneel trilogy.
And anyway, on Asimov’s average scale, those years are right next to eachother. /s