The inevitable fate of Spotify, as it careers towards revenue free bankruptcy is an interesting case in point about who is actually making money from the way in which our economy and society is established and evolves.
Spotify seemed to have been destroying the music establishment by subverting the process by which people obtained music, but instead if one analyses the real direction of travel, it appears much more to be the outrider of the very forces who had been impacted far more by the first forces of the internet, the record labels.
Really it was they who were hammered by file sharing rather than anyone else (including musicians themselves) and it is they who coopted the streaming services to effectively become extensions of the record labels and the music industry.
Now Spotify , despite it's success, has realized the Faustian pact it made and as it desperately tries to extract something for itself from the shitty deal it entered into, it has realized all to late that if you are the company that fronts a service but someone else makes all the money, then it is not in your company where the value lies and where the real control lies. Control is power and it has been a long time since Spotify has been in control of its own destiny.
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