In a moment of thrilling generosity, my 17-year-old son recently shared one of his many music playlists with Mom and Dad. But my admiration for my son's impeccable (to me) taste was accompanied by a feeling of vague discomfort: I recognized virtually every artist on there, from INXS to the Beatles, the Bee Gees to the Pixies. What I had just witnessed was the Spotify effect, argues Kim Scott in a guest essay this week. A best-selling author and a former executive at Google and Apple, Scott believes that Spotify has squeezed so much value out of the industry that many would-be musicians cannot afford to enter the field. That means that growth is left to songs made in an earlier era, which may help explain why my son and I know some of the same music. And now, Scott argues that Spotify, which has a new audiobook offering, will do the same thing to books that it did to music. She notes that the largest demographic group of Spotify premium subscribers already listen to audiobooks. What's more, under Spotify's terms authors will be paid in full only if users finish the book, a problem given that many books are never finished. Of course, Spotify isn't the only technology company accused of taking advantage of a market it dominates. "The promise of the business strategy laid out in the book 'The Long Tail' was that a slew of niche content creators would prosper on the internet. That has proved illusory for most of them. It's a winner-takes-all game; too often the tech platforms aggregating the content and the blockbusters win it all, starving a large majority of creators," Scott writes. Let's hope we find a way to balance the scales, so I can return to being baffled by whatever my son is listening to.
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Friday, December 15, 2023
Opinion Today: Will Spotify flatten the world of books, too?
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