Jimmy Iovine recently made a blunt call on the Founders podcast: music streaming services are "minutes away from being obsolete." Joel Gouveia broke down why in a great Substack piece. Every platform offers the same 100M songs, turning music into tap water. Worse, the math is upside down. Unlike Netflix, where a show's cost is fixed, Spotify pays out ~70% of every dollar. Apple and Amazon run music as a loss leader for iPhones and Prime, while standalone streaming gets squeezed. Iovine's sharpest point is that streaming is a one-way "ATM machine." Spotify guards listener data because keeping artists from reaching their fans is its only moat. Add pro-rata payouts that funnel indie listeners' money to the top 1%, and working musicians get starved out. The next decade belongs to direct fan ownership and micro-communities: getting 1,000 fans to care forever instead of chasing a million passive plays. Where do you support artists directly?

The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being ObsoleteJimmy Iovine just called the Death of Spotify. He might be right.joelgouveia.substack.com