Apple Music

The antithesis of streaming music

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Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash


While I don’t deny the convenience of streaming music and video, I often am left wondering what these services are really doing to help the artists. Streaming, like most of the internet so far, is a winner take all better. It is good for Drake, Beyonce, and Post-Malone. Not so much if you are an experimental pianist from Argentina or Iceland. You don’t make much money. You don’t get as many plays as the superstars. And whatever money you get, it cut many different ways. Sure, some independent artists are delighted with what they get from Spotify. But not everyone is jumping for joy. 

As I wrote earlier, we need to reward the musicians differently. I currently pay for Spotify and Apple, and yet I feel compelled to support the artists by buying their music. Over the past few months, instead of spending money

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Technology
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Not a Tidal wave

Streaming Subs

The smartest (business) man in hip hop, Jay Z, says Schibsted ASA, a Norwegian media group that sold him Tidal Music service (a year ago for $56 million) had inflated subscriber numbers and were disingenous when they sold him the company. So he is suing them and wants to be compensated for the damages caused by their lies.

Regardless of who you believe, the question that we should be asking: What kind of due diligence was done before Jay Z bought Tidal? Or was he (and his business group) so blinded by the opportunity to make quick cash that he overlooked the details?

To me, Tidal was nothing but a bought-to-flip company, which had little or no chance against Spotify and Apple. There wasn’t much to the service, and Kanye West isn’t enough for me to sign up for the service. It didn’t have the software chops. It didn’t know how to use data to drive usage. Tidal was a AAA baseball team

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Musings
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Netflix, Apple Music & need for bandwidth

For a long time, I have argued that bandwidth (usage) can be a good predictor of economic trends and shifts. I was reminded of that earlier this morning, when reading a press release about Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report: Asia-Pacific & Europe, when this bit caught my eye.

  • Netflix is making gains in the new European markets they entered late last year, with the service now accounting for almost 10% of peak downstream traffic in Austria and France.
  • Apple Music, bolstered by a three month free trial, has surpassed Spotify as the leading music streaming service on mobile networks in Australia and New Zealand.
  • YouTube is the top mobile application in both Europe and Asia-Pacific, making it the global leader in mobile traffic.
  • Online gaming continues to drive traffic on fixed networks with Twitch and Steam now top-10 applications for the first time in Europe and Asia-Pacific respectively.

Sandvine is a Waterloo, Ontario-based network

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Musings
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