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1) A supermarket does not bill itself as a neutral discovery platform.Neither does Spotify? It's the "pay once, listen to anything, more convenient than Torrents" thing; discovery sucks everywhere anyway.
> 2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).
Yeah, but then if you read it carefully, you may be surprised to learn that the Premium Brand Cereal X, and the Value-Add store-brand cereal, are literally the same thing, made in the same factory, differing only in packaging and price (and perhaps in quality brackets).
Perhaps like with supermarkets, if Spotify users cared more about provenance, they'd realize that the same people are doing the 'high art' hits and cranking out supermarket music - that the preference for "high art" of specific bands may have nothing to do with quality of art, but rather is just falling for the brand marketing.
So perhaps musicians were better off with Spotify not drawing users' attention to the in-store background and to who made it.
> Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
I can't help but think that this is not a problem that actually exists, because a supermarket that keeps brand products forever in the stocking room in favor of in-house brands, would be much better off not ordering the brand product in the first place. Why pay money for product that you're not going to sell anyway, and lose the storage space too?
The dynamics of what's happening with in-house vs. outside brands in stores are quite complex, as are the underlying reasons, but I argue it all has very little to do with discovery.