Spotify is a sales channel. Walmart doesn't actually make anything, US car dealerships don't make anything. But they have customers and that's all it takes to sell something.

And, strangely enough, once a sales channel is big enough it can begin taking a bigger slice of profits and telling suppliers what they should be doing (a la Walmart).

Walmart doesn’t technically make anything (not sure if it’s true to be honest) but they probably “enable” a lot of manufacturers to “make things” under their Great Value brand

I suppose one could argue whether Walmart's primary value-add is sales or whether it's logistics, but certainly either of those is a higher priority than making things for consumers to sell. House brand items are still produced and packaged by some other company.

The "logistics" of Spotify's business are mostly commoditized (storage, computer, app development), but certainly they have label relationships that would be hard for a new competitor to replicate. But the key part is that for whatever reason 226 million people have given Spotify their credit card number (or local analog) which makes them pretty important to record labels.

That's pretty new in the grand scheme of things? They started making things under their brand once they became established.

I could see Spotify doing the same thing. Particularly around live ticketing, merch, etc.

Yeah it's just playlists and network effects, mostly.

There's a Spotify playlist for everything, young people regularly share Spotify playlists each other, and for many: the hardest part about switching to another service is losing access to those playlists.

The "official" playlists provide two other functions. One is to initially amplify artists. Record labels can buy slots on these playlists, just like they used to buy airtime on the FM radio stations of yesteryear.

The second is that Spotify can use its own filler muzak on its playlists to keep licensing costs down. E.g. they pay a pianist to play generic "Christmas piano music," make up an artist name, and put a bunch of those songs on its official holiday playlists.

> What does Spotify really have?

As far as I can tell, its biggest beneficiaries are the 3 record labels who can use Spotify being one of its customers to be able to negotiate better terms with Apple/Alphabet/Amazon.

Deezer is a completely mistery to me. I'm asking: What does Deezer really have? They don't own the music. They don't own podcasts (OK, they may have some exclusives). All they have is a license, a bit of software, and lots of users. How will they ever turn a profit? What's the end game here? I just switched my whole family from Deezer to tidal and it was literally a matter of minutes. There are even services that move all your favorites/playlists over and it worked flawlessly.

Very witty. Yes, the same applies to Deezer. What I'm saying is: it's a race to the bottom, and in the end, musicians will suffer (they already do).

But I think the problem is the music companies. Spotify says they have given 40 billion (american) to the music companies.

Spotify Connect is a real game changer. I tap a song on the web player and it streams it on our living room amp, which supports it natively. No apps involved whatsoever.

This has been the biggest feature keeping me on Spotify.

Tidal sorta has a connect feature, but I've found it to be really buggy (often wouldn't play or wouldn't tell the remote control device what is playing) and not as widely supported.

Apple Music is even worse since tends to rely on AirPlay, which murders quality and requires the remote to stay on the same network as the player.

I thought other streaming services have similar functionality, right? I know Deezer has Deezer Connect.

TBH - this is the first time I've heard of Deezer and looking at their website - they seem to have ripped off every feature that Spotify has, including the end of year 'wrapped'.

Have they replicated it widely though, and does their stuff work as seamlessly as Spotify's? Rather than look at hypotheticals about what others might offer, look at the present overall experience.

> Do you think this is impossible for other companies to replicate?

They are welcome to do so at any time of their choosing. It's only been an entire decade since the feature launched, I'm sure the competition will figure it out soon. For the most part, the only one I've seen that has more features than what is provided by basic google cast / airplay is ironically Youtube Music.

TIDAL has had it for a couple of years now https://tidal.com/connect

I like their music discovery functions e.g. generated playlists and song/playlist/artist "radio". My playlist variety expanded greatly over the past 3 years because of these features from Spotify. A centralized platform that is relatively to use (nonsensical UI changes aside) is a strong incentive for users to stay, though by no means a moat.

The end game was always about rapidly burning VC money to acquire more users, while kicking the can of profit-making down the road. Now ZIRP has ended for the time being, the chicken has finally come home to roost.

Deezer costs more for family than I pay now on Spotify. Why switch?

Parental control. Spotify has basically no QC on uploaded podcasts, and it is filled with video podcasts with stupid TikToks, porn disguised as "ASMR", and lots of garbage used for money laundering.

They are a music distributor, and they have good relationships with the rights holders and will do their legwork for them.