Thanks Andrew. As a financial economist doing a simple calculation on a cocktail napkin I have long argued that streaming is uneconomic and unsustainable. They’re subsidizing their subscribers with shareholder value and still not paying out their supply chain. If the subscription fee were raised to make this streaming profitable while remunerating artists fairly, they would lose all their customers. This has led me to conclude that owning digital music is far cheaper than renting it and P2P exchange in the digital world is almost costless, so who needs a middleman?

What Spotify has done is solve the search problem of music with machine algorithms, but that has its own problems because an algorithm can’t tell the sounds of silence from Beethoven. What it hopes to do is reap data value from the customer network and engagement. (See also Amazon’s Kindle Online Lending program.)

We at tuka seek to put humans back at the center of art curation and consumption: www.tukaglobal.com: Connecting the Creative…