Is Spotify And Other Streaming Services Doomed?

This post by Joel Gouveia resonates. I was a prolific CD collector until streaming service took off. I remember of the days of paying $18 for an album just to listen to one good track. Paying $10 a month for most of the recorded music in human history seemed like a good deal. Streaming always felt like renting a relationship with your favorite artist though and so in the last few years I’ve gone back to buying records and built a Plex server to stream my personal library from, no algorhythms, the only taste is my own.
Streaming is also hard for smaller artists to make a living. This article does a good job outlining how money flows through the music industry.
The micro-community framing of post by Gouveia is exactly right. In the future artists will be better off with 500 people who seek out their work than 500,000 who passively heard it on a playlist and forgot it by the next track. The algorithm was never a fanbase — it was just traffic. And traffic doesn’t show up when you’re playing a 200-cap room in February.