Why hasn’t music been disrupted in the same ways movies have been?

Music has had radio and playing an individual song is very close to fair use. Further, music sort of has the same cost to produce, though big band is an exception. Because of this, legislators actually establish rules for commissions to be payed on music where it is hard to opt-out and since it is already setup, you are at a disadvantage if you do.

Music is not capital-intensive unlike a TV show or a movie. But popular music can be manufactured in a sense, like there is a whole industry of Korean companies that train and turn-out kpop stars but that is an exception rather than a rule.

Music is more like books, which is an individual effort more than a group effort like a television show or a movie.

I don't know the answer to your question, but my intuition is that it has something to do with repeat value. I'll watch a movie once, maybe twice, but music? I'll listen to the same song 30 times in one week, not listen to it at all for 6 months, then listen to it with 20 times more, etc.

Music has a very different consumption profile.

I think one reason is that the big record companies rely on each other for discoverability. Consider two artists in a similar genre both signed to a different label. Label A couldn’t profit from people who would have discovered their artist A by listening to artist B signed to the competitor label B.

Also they can just demand more from Spotify etc. by threatening to pull their catalog. This would hurt Spotify a lot because people like to listen to playlists that include all their favorite tracks and not just the ones that aren’t from Universal Music. A lot of people would probably cancel their membership the next day because the value of it just sunk a lot.

Might it be because with music there’s a lot more fandom for specific bands/artists?

For example, if I want to watch the latest Tom Cruise action movie but Netflix doesn’t have it, I might settle for an alternative in the same genre. But if I want to hear the latest Adele album but my “disrupted music streaming service” doesn’t have it, I’m not gonna settle for an artists that sounds like Adele but isn’t her.

So if every label had their own streaming service, you’d basically needed to have a subscription to all of them. I don’t think that’s realistic and maybe the labels’ market research tells them the same?

I see this.

Netflix had a wide catalog of content licensed (or used permissionless in disc form) from many studios at the beginning. Eventually (1) Netflix found it was cheaper to own than rent as they got bigger and (2) studios wised up about the value of streaming.

So streaming is fragmented and the real action today is in things like Disney+, Peacock, etc.

For music there are many streaming services (say Apple Music, Amazon Music, …) that have basically the same catalog.

It sounds like you are asking why Sony doesn’t start a streaming service for just the music they own and other record labels follow suit. Is that right?

It is much easier to produce a hit tv show or movie reliably than music. Music requires much more creativity and can't be manufactured as easily. Name recognition isn't even enough, you have the hottest people like Drake release an 15 song album and 2 weeks later only 1 of them is in the top 50. And there's no money in this business. The money comes from concerts and shit, streaming has changed the music business model forever

I think you've worked it out: because Spotify doesn't sell music.

In producing it's own programming, Netflix started competing directly with the very people providing it's content.

I assume streaming on it's own just wasn't considered lucrative enough; but it still seems ill-advised to me. What happens seems completely predictable, yet Netflix could have had a really good long game here.