Music investing: Tales from the trenches
summary
Market power concentrates in the top four or five streaming services while Spotify Pandora Deezer are losing large amounts of money, making pure-play music startups hard to profitably scale. Investors prefer sprout-stage companies with a demo, early traction and a clear revenue path. Rights complexity slows products—teams report licensing from almost 5,000 music publishers—so white-space bets target niche genres, ecommerce and touring. Examples: Pandora moves into on-demand with Pandora Premium, and a merch product called lyric merch launches to sell one-off licensed items via on-demand printing.
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