Companies with lots of investors can afford to operate at a loss. Generally, once a company has a significant market share and has flushed out enough of its competitors, they can charge higher prices later for whatever service they provide for a significant profit. That is the theory, anyway.

I know that many of the schemes from the above scenario are usually illegal these days, but the above example is the gist of it. Walmart's attempted entry into Germany is a good example of how to fail hard at taking over a specific market: https://ecomclips.com/blog/why-walmart-failed-in-europe-what-went-wrong-in-germany/

Also, companies can just flat-out lie for new investment money. They can manipulate projections or inflate company value to offload shares to a new sucker. You can have CEOs that just blabber off about bullshit or sell services that never really materialize. (Elon and his self-driving car promises or the now concluded drama about Theranos as examples.)

In the end, a company can succeed or it fails hard. It doesn't really matter to the executives since they still get paid and investors will take the loss. (In some of the worst cases, the government has to prop up the company to keep it from collapsing, so taxpayers take the loss.) If the company fails gracefully, hopefully they will have a collection of resources to sell off to get some of the money back.

Finanical gain was never the purpose of Spotify. What spotify provides is the closest channel we know to monitor human emotions. The ability to corelate this data with all the other data gathered from social networks and search engine is well worth the loss.

https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly

The only time I'd buy stuff like that is if I knew most, if not all that money is going to the band. At least since a lot of the bands I listen to are smaller.

Especially if it is the way it is with movies where you don’t really own it, just a license to play it.

it’s been 15 years since DRM vanished from online music stores, so i don’t understand why people still keep bringing this up like it’s a thing.

I think the modality of spotify is ok, but the model could be very different. In exemple, imagine if you payed 10$ month, but instead of those being distributed across all of spotify statistically, they where divided and distrubuted to the author YOU actually listened to, on a monthly basis.

Maybe one month you only listened to 10 songs, so 1$ for each song author that month.

Of course, there should be a cut for the platform from that monthly fee, after all they have maintenance and administrative costs. And perhaps it should also take into account how much of a song you listened to, down to the second.

This is not a new model, but it is not an interesting one for venture capitalist funds, because it is too egalitarian. It is up to us to create it.

"To have a fair music market, there needs to be a fair market".

They already give first dibs to people with more streams, I would imagine they worked out some sort of deal on that one.

Ignorant here, can you talk about the alternatives a bit?