6 Comments

Did you mean to say Lucifer twice in the manifest example sentence?

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I'm also long a small amount of SPOT and share your opinions on the bull case, but the concern that has thus far led me to not increase beyond a starter position is competition from the crypto/NFT space and/or Square/Tidal. Chris Dixon put out a nice thread on this recently "Web 3 - your take rate is my opportunity." To be fair, Dixon's hypothesis could be applied to any social media platform with an advertising business model and also represents a risk to Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1425645850672308225

From Dixon's tweet: "Today there are over 8 million musicians on streaming services, yet less than 15,000 musicians (less that 0.2%) make more than $50K/year. That’s because the vast majority of the revenue is kept by the streaming services and music labels. With NFTs, musicians keep over 90% of sales. By cutting out layers of intermediaries, musicians can credibly support themselves with just a thousand true fans."

One project in the space is Audius (AUDIO) which was described today by Packy McCormick in Not Boring as web3 Soundcloud. After inking a deal with TikTok AUDIO's market cap recently surged above $1B - there's real traction here and it's soooooooooo early!

With Square/Tidal, the concern is that if the whole music rights/labels/streaming ecosystem is disrupted by web 3, Square/Tidal seems much better positioned to recognize/catalyze the shift and accrue value on their platform vs. Spotify.

Idk what this all is going to look like yet, I don't think anyone does but at this point I don't think it's a negligible tail risk that the whole music rights/labels/streaming ecosystem is completely disrupted by web 3 within the next decade.

Do you have thoughts on this?

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It soudns nice but I 100% disagree.

How do they monetize in this future way in a way that's different from current?

Right now, musicians make tons of monetization outside streaming. Concerts, merch sales, sposnorships. Streaming is in many ways a loss leader for musicians to acquire fans and then monetize them, except its a loss leader that gives them money.

I don't doubt that NFTs will be great for artists with passionate fans, but to break SPOT / the labels you need to find a way to monetize streams better t han current. I strongly doubt that happens. Now, maybe you can find a way to cut labels out, but that would be great for SPOT.

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Say what you want about $WWE but they try to be as creative as possible. One of the things I love about em

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Isn't one of the challenges for SPOT breaking into the non-entertainment sector? They're strong in music and podcasting but those are all mainly creator direct to consumer. The advantage Twitter has in spaces is that there's a pre-existing network of finance tweeters who are used to the interactive format, jumping to audio is simple from there.

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The likely end-state in podcast monetization is a SPOT/SIRI duopoly. SIRI has thus far been the unquestioned champion at turning (speech) audio into EBITDA.

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