Coldplay and Adele Showing Music Industry How To Emulate Film Distribution

That's right. I said it. Just when we figured the Film and TV business were the dinosaurs in the room - lagging way behind in their understanding the digital business - the music industry is beginning to look more and more like the film industry.  "How's that?" you may ask.

As you may have read in other places, Coldplay, like Adele, will not be bringing their new release Mylo Xyloto to streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio and the like. The official "artistic" reason from Coldplay's side was that the new album is a work that should be experienced from start to finish. Pretty lame excuse since single track downloads would be counter to that principle and the likelihood of a full album listening experience is much higher on streaming. (Unless, of course, they are making it a Full CD download only from iTunes)

While a four-track sampler of Adele's 21 is available on Spotify, that seems to be more timed with the release plan to drive CD and digital sales from iTunes and other  stores. With 21 being the top selling album of the year so far, and Coldplay well positioned to enter in at No.1, there's no need to speculate on the obvious. There is more money to be made by these artists from digital sales than from streaming. Here's the deal. Artists get a fraction of a cent every time a song is streamed vs. around 20 cents per download from iTunes (according to calculations presented in a recent article in Rolling Stone). That's all well and good, and works for the likes of Adele, Coldplay, and a handful of other world-class artists,

Spotify and Napster. Kissing cousins?

Wow! Big Green Spotify has launched in the USA. Hallelujah! (Jeff Buckley Spotify link attached) All in all the reviews have been very good for the gang in Sweden. Tweets from Brit-Brit, Ashton, and Mark Zuckerberg changing his FB status to mention Spotify. Even Sean Parker calls it "The realisation of my Napster dream". And that brings me to the point of my post today - the one key piece that all of the tech bloggers out there seem to miss when doing their comparisons of Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody and others - it's shared DNA with Napster. That's right. Call it a distant cousin or a half-sister but Spotify and Napster Classic (not the New Roxio/Best Buy Napster) have more in common than Spotify and any other similar music service.

Nearly every review I have seen listing the pluses and minuses of various services gives Spotify a minus because it is a dedicated app and not a web app accessible from a browser anywhere. At the same time I did see one review which actually mentioned the speed of Spotify's streaming response (200 milliseconds). That post also failed to explain the fundementals behind Spotify's technology and therein its coupling to Sean Parker's Napster dream. Here it is.