Galliardist
Major Contributor
The reason for concentrating on Spotify is its scale and reach. Spotify has invested heavily to become a major player in a service that doesn't have much in the way of added value and is not a base for adding on additional services and sales. Spotify doesn't have an Alexa to be the 100% default to. It doesn't sell the hardware you play on. Rival services have effectively similar size catalogues and the same new product. And its customers only have so many hours in the day to listen - and often these days people listen to playlists when driving, for example, so are not using any wonderful interface or "radio" where you can influence what they listen to.
Effectively, it's a massive expenditure to produce a dead end. Even if you do provide great ways for people to discover new artists or favourite music to keep them listening, you still only have so many hours in the day when they will. And the monthly fee model makes it even worse in a way, because if you get them to listen more, you have to pay out more money. Your ideal customer pays to hear a small amount of music on the highest tier of payment.
As for exclusive and desirable content, does that still work? Netflix and Amazon are already laying off staff and reducing the quality of their exclusive product. What's more, people hate paying seven services to watch eight popular series, and on top of that some of those popular series are flops that annoy the customer base further.
Regarding the payment to artists, I don't take too much notice of the moaning, but at the same time if an artist gets more money because I use one service rather than another, that is still a factor in my choice. I do know several of the artists I stream regularly, and either that or a connection made in some other way such as social media seems to drive a lot of what people listen to these days, outside of the few big stars. So do you want to pay your mate a third of the money, when paying the streaming service far less than a third more at the time? What interests me though is that the same people who make a fuss about what Spotify pays per play, will still insist on ad blocking YouTube and denying the same artists there. I'm also pretty certain that Spotify et al have never produced their own new megastar and YouTube has done that, so in a way it's more important.
I suspect that music streaming will eventually be purely a part of a larger offering from major players, and that Spotify as a large independent service is an anomaly.
It will end up sold to somebody like Meta who don't yet have a music streaming offering. The advantage it has is the data it has about its users, and what they have provided in terms of their playlists and profiles that they won't want to lose or have to recreate or export to a different service. That itself is more value to a broader service than Spotify itself, though.
