The radio has been playing free music since 1906.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Doesn’t Pandora & Spotify have free tiers with ads?
The payout for audio ads is a lot less than video advertising. It's just not as profitable to do an entirely ad-supported music streaming service as a video one
Most if not all music is on YouTube for free already. Maybe the equivalent is the sites that let you download music from YouTube and these come and go like the movie streaming sites.
None of them could compete with Youtube
You look at the screen while watching video, making ads profitable (they obstruct the view making you click something to close it, hijacking the click and generating visits).
If you do it for music people walk away and nobody clicks on the ads.
Spotify will force you to listen to an ad by pausing it if you mute the volume, then resuming it when you unmute.
I quit Spotify long ago so I don't know if they still do it today, but they do have a way to force ads.
YouTube Music + decent Adblocker or Vivaldi Browser.
RIAA was famously litigious but music was also much more widely available to pirate so it made it harder for streaming services to offer enough value to tempt users away from piracy. Services like pandora that (originally, at least) offered good value in terms of music discovery were the only ones to really offer a compelling reason not to pirate.
When it comes to movies, though, the much larger file sizes kept piracy a more niche activity for longer. When I was in uni pretty much everyone was running Kazaa or similar for music, but only techy folks would put in the effort to pirate videos.