2013 is shaping up as a momentous year for streaming music, with Google, Amazon, Apple and Beats all in talks about new services to compete with Spotify, Deezer, Rhapsody, Rdio, WiMP and others around the world. But are there dangers in such a competitive landscape? Tomahawk co-founder Jason Herskowitz is warning of the risks as the digital music landscape fragments. “I fear this fragmentation will inevitably lead services into exclusivity wars, where big checks start flying around to get content that their competitors can’t,” he writes in a Billboard op-ed piece. “The more competitive the market, the bigger these bidding wars become – which is dangerous and unsustainable on their own, given the economics of the subscription music market today.” Herskowitz warns of a return to the days of MusicNet and PressPlay when services had “a subset of the content that consumers were looking for”. It’s a crucial debate for the industry to be having. Witness Spotify: an important part of its argument against download-only albums is the need for music to be (legally) digitally distributed as widely as possible, yet how many Metallica albums are available on its rivals?
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Tools :: We Are Giant
With “fan communities” being on every artist’s team’s mind, we’re fans of the fact that…