Competition = good, one music service to rule them all = bad. Good on Tailor Swift for keeping Spotify on their toes. Good on you for choosing Spotify and not Tidal.

Let a thousand musical flowers bloom, and may they forever compete for attention of the bees, giving us more colors and extravagance as time progresses.

Please keep making alternative music services and please keep giving us more choice, better quality and lower prices.

More choice doesn't mean better quality. It means you are far more likely to make the wrong choice, and that you have to invest more energy into doing so.

And that can really eliminate the convenience such a service aims to provide in the first place.

Choice is good when the options are differentiated. Like choosing between a CD, an MP3, or a streaming service. It's not nearly so good when you are choosing between Stream A, Stream B, or Stream C.

The same argument could be made for cars or airlines or hamburgers. Too much choice, I might chose wrong oh noes you could get locked into the wrong $10 service for a month.

Yes, it could. And I suppose you're going to argue that user experience means nothing? That, as a company, getting "locked into the wrong $10 service for a month" is a perfectly ideal way to treat your customers?

Remember how the Hundred Flowers Campaign ended -- with an extinction event. Something not dissimilar is going to happen to these streaming services, because they simply do not differentiate from each other sufficiently.

Oh my, I had no idea about the grim background of that soundbite... You're right, that totally changes what I thought was a beautiful figure of speech.

That's ok; it is a lovely figure of speech.

Who said anything about one music service to rule them all?

Spotify, iTunes, etc. could all exist and carry all the music, and compete on their software, reliability, etc.

You single out Taylor Swift, the number one recording artist in the country today. She's sold millions and millions of albums. Her brand in this country is certainly bigger than Spotify's.

If spotify had 100 million active users you bet your ass Taylor Swift and every other professional recording artist would be in their catalog. But it's just a fraction of that size. Streaming music is still a fragmented market. Spotify is not the platform your comment suggests.

I didn't single out Swift. I mentioned her in conjunction with Jay Z and Garth Brooks.There are a lot of bigger artists on Spotify than Taylor Swift though.

Jay Z and Garth Brooks are also among the best selling recording artists of all time. All three have bigger brands than Spotify. And Swift is currently the best selling artist in the United States, so "bigger artists" is clearly subjective...

I'd like to see a creative commons streaming service that automatically paid artists using Bitcoin. With no intermediary.

But I'm kind of a weird customer. I've boycotted copyrighted works for long durations.

That said, I am not a spotify subscriber. But I'm enough of a fan of these artists that I will likely subscribe.

> There is literally no reason for them to not be other than various forms of greed.

Isn't the reason more to do with the copyright system than with greed? Unless you're talking about the influence that greedy people have over politics and thus copyright legislation.

Maybe the time has come for someone to write a "pidgin for music streaming services", a wrapper client with playlists and search that jumps between all your subscribed services depending on track availability :P

I don't think Taylor Swift has any more greed than Spotify. It's just less couth because the profit motive is not in a human's charter.

> You have a problem with Spotify? Work with them.

I think that's a lot of what this is about: getting some leverage for deals with Spotify et al.

Crackle is still up and running. They have original programming in addition to movie back titles.

Meanwhile Netflix's catalog has gotten weaker outside of their original content, as more content owners have setup their own streaming services.

why Spotify? If you want one streaming service that has all the artists you complain about not working with Spotify, well, Google Play All Access already exists. And I suspect the same is true of iTunes Radio.