this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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I appreciate the author's interest in the subject and agree that this is incredibly shady especially when you look at the CEO's stock sales on the last year.
But I pretty strongly disagree with their take on how to remedy the situation, that "record labels should grow a spine" and create some streaming service controlled by them (and granted an antitrust exception by the federal government).
Streaming services were an innovation from outside the music industry's control, and I don't trust them to be good stewards of the idea if we cement their control and make it harder for new competitors. It seems like the problem is pretty obvious (late stage capitalism, no criminal accountability for white collar crime). I'm baffled how the author completely skips over these root causes and thinks weakening antitrust regulation is the solution.
Indeed-- the way forward would instead be regulation to weaken the record labels hold on licensing rights: basically, if they license music X to streaming service A, any other reasonable competing service must be allowed to license the same piece of music for the same price. This would open for real competition in the space in a way that doesn't necessaily drive down license fees.
Agreed, if music labels start making their own streaming services, then it will go just like it has with video. Where there is now more streaming services than a regular person can feasibly pay for, and every service only has a small subset of what you want to listen to... Imaging needing to switch streaming service to listen to music from a different artist because they happened to have signed with a different label, and being unable to make a pplaylist that incorporates songs from artists from two different labels...