Spotlight on Spotify
Spotify: Good or evil? The point of view that I have heard expressed recently - primarily by artists (musicians and songwriters), but also from other people is that Spotify is the second coming of the devil. There is a littiny of criticism , much of it alleging that Spotify is unfair to artists. This may be true to some degree, but my thesis is that the issues being cited are not Spotify's "fault" but a direct consequence of digital music economics. I will explore this topic in this blog post. Let's go back to the good old days, long before Spotify. Before CDs and digital music. Records were vinyl and analog. Recording your tune meant paying an exorbitant amount for studio time, record manufacturing, distribution, inventory, marketing, channel costs, etc. A recording was a physical good, something you could touch, hold, keep, trade or sell. Economists call such a thing a rivalrous good . If you possess a rival...