Keith Nelson Jr. sat down with Pandora’s vice president of global content licensing, Elizabeth Moody, to talk about streaming services, the future of music licensing, and the inherent issues these services are seeing trying to turn a profit:
I think that it’s going to take a shift in the structure of the industry to really allow digital services like Spotify or other competitors to have a fully sustainable business. You see pure-play services like Spotify and Pandora suffering while there are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple that can use music as a loss leader for other services. […] I mean, right now, the record labels (and then the music publishers) are really taking the lion’s share of the revenue. You know, sometimes the artists or others will argue it’s getting stuck at the labels. I think it’s a more complicated problem than just saying, “Oh they’re not paying the artists.”