I had a conversation with a relative that left me feeling like an idiot. What I was TRYING to say is there was an unexploited space for Spotify to use AI. In the scenario I had in my mind, you would type in a concept or keyword into a playlist and AI would generate a list a longs from that.
I was a bit inarticulate about the concept I was proposing and I came across sounding like an idiot. While I may be an idiot, I continue to think about how I could have put a bit finer point on what I was trying to say.
I don’t think that all of Spotify’s playlists are done manually, I do think that there is a place for harder AI to be used for streaming services. Spotify knows me really well and if you hooked that knowledge up to a harder form of AI I think some pretty interesting things could come about not just with keywords but with discovery.
Apple has a huge amount of money tucked away. In fact, I think it’s about as much money as the U.S. Federal government has on hand at any particular moment.
As such, logically, Apple would make some big corporate purchases with all that cash. To me, the logical acquisitions would be Netflix and Spotify. At the moment, Netflix is trading at a historic low and Apple buying it would be a great way for them to build on the success of Apple+. Right now, Apple+ is little more than a very successful vanity project and buying Netflix would give the company a huge foothold in the entertainment business.
Meanwhile, buying Spotify would be a nice fit with Apple’s existing Beats and iTunes services. It would be quite beneficial to Apple’s bottom line to fuse iTunes with Spotify’s huge audience.
What’s more, if you really wanted to get all Steve Jobs about it — that is, if Tim Cook had any vision — they would make one uber streaming service that combined Netflix, Spotify, iTunes and Beats into one tidy one-stop-shop for all of our entertainment needs.
It would be pretty cool if this new service not only allowed you to stream music, but the videos to go with that music as well. It would be a direct competitor to YouTube with a far better UX / UI.
There probably would be a huge obstacle — that of the anti-trust issue. But Apple probably could figure out a way to get what they wanted.
I’m not an expert, but just some back of the envelope thinking about things like Spotify leads me to believe that in the end the music industry is bound to make a whole lot more money of streaming than off of any physical medium.
The reason is, if someone owns music, they buy it once and can listen to it as much as they like for “free” afterwards. Meanwhile, with streaming, it’s kind of a win-win for everyone involved. For a reasonable monthly fee, consumers can listen to millions of songs at whim. Meanwhile, every time a song is played — for whatever reason — the artists involved gets SOME money, however small.
So, there are two major times when this element of music sociology gets involved. One is, the back catalogue of music that might not be as popular anymore and, as such, might be hard to find. Places like Peaches or Tower Records — however big they may have been — had finite physical retail space and, as such, they had to make some subtle editorial decisions.
So, as an Old, if I went to some modern day Tower Records, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be able to find some obscure 90s band simply because it was 30 years ago and the market to house the CD / vinyl isn’t there anymore. But with Spotify, et al, if I want to listen to a very specific 90s song out of the blue, that’s money that that artist would otherwise not get.
The other main way artists MUST be making more money is through replays. I listen to some songs over and over and over and over again and that’s money that the artist wouldn’t get using the traditional Point of Sale type distribution of a physical product — once that physical music medium is bought, that’s all the money that artist should expect to get.
I’m not saying streaming music is perfect or that it isn’t causing problems. It’s not perfect and it’s causing problems. But I think, over time, artists — especially older mid-tear artists –may realize they’re actually making more money than they might otherwise.
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