*People will pay for this service, sort of. They just won't pay for all of them.
*What happens to the colossal holdings of recorded music when they collapse?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-04/in-apple-spotify-world-soundcloud-can-t-find-room
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For the first time since the heyday of CDs, revenue for the largest record labels is consistently rising. But things don’t look as bright for the streaming companies driving this revival.
Spotify, the biggest platform, has swallowed huge losses while paying about 70 percent of its revenue to record labels and publishers. It’s attempting to renegotiate those deals before a planned initial public offering this year. Pandora, which has consistently lost money throughout its 15 years, is trying its hand at a pricier subscription model based on technology from Rdio, another struggling service it bought in 2015. Streaming services Rhapsody and Deezer face similar problems, and internet radio company IHeartRadio is trying to stave off bankruptcy. Services from Apple, Amazon.com, and Google are used largely to lure people to the companies’ other businesses.
“It is virtually impossible to run a streaming-music service as a profitable business,” says Mark Mulligan, a former dance club DJ who’s the founder of industry analyst Midia Research. “The model is still broken.”
No company exemplifies the travails of digital music services better than SoundCloud….
