The Spotify/Adele/shuffle situation amplifies the fact that streaming is based on the records industry, not publishing. i.e. Streams are equivalent to sales, not radio plays, because of the ability of the consumer to pick what they listen to.
Therefore, Spotify devalued recorded music from £0.6 to £0.003 the moment it was released to the market.
Why didn't they launch with a credit system consumers could top up for fan based royalties to work from the get go? Because they needed to demonstrate forecastable recurring revenue to their investors.
Why didn't they operate on the publishing model, like radio, so there is a better payout for songwriters and composers? Because it benefitted them to call streaming an equivocal sale with a 0.003ish payout per stream.
Spotify didn't save the music industry like they claimed they did - they seem to have stopped claiming that, but they did claim it. They did the opposite. They destroyed an entire industry for the benefit of their own security.
Streaming is a billion dollar industry for a very small amount of companies. Those stats that are quoted, about "music industry growth", do not concern the whole industry, just a monopoly. So, why isn't this competition investigation marching ahead?
Encouraging people to play whole albums for the story is good, but if Adele took it further and said "I'll get paid more for more streams if somebody listens to the whole album rather than flicks around, but shouldn't they have to pay more to experience that entire album?"
Then, we'd be back full circle to realise the value of recorded music as a product, and the fan based royalty model would be the only fair model presented for streaming to work. And that fan based royalty should be much higher than 0.003 per play.
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