SIGNALS

Boy, oh boy, do I feel like an idiot. I read a news item this morning, and it unleashed a series of tremendously brilliant insights that rocketed through my brain . Surely, no one else had ever so deeply penetrated into the nature of the truth of things. Now, it occurs to me that in fact, everyone else had realized all this long ago. Captain Obvious had struck again.

The news item concerned Amazon. My flashes of supposed genius concerned the music business. As you probably know, Amazon has jumped into music streaming. Its Prime Music Service lets its Prime subscribers stream music from a library of 1 million tracks. The streams are free (well, free with your membership, anyway), and free of advertising too. Conveniently, you can skip songs or replay them, and listen offline too.

Music from Sony and Warner is available on Prime Music, but Universal Music is not. That means, for example, artists like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Eminem, Maroon 5, and Kanye West are AWOL. On the other hand, much of the music that customers purchased from Amazon (since it began selling CDs in 1998) will automatically appear in their personal Prime libraries. And, this includes Universal tracks. On the downside, recent hits (within six months) are not available on Prime Music.

Outfits like Spotify and Beats Music offer over 20 million tracks. I wondered, why on earth would Amazon launch a streaming service with only 1 million tracks? Moreover, Amazon already has over 25 million tracks for sale and in fact is one of the world’s biggest retailers of music. Why would it compete against its own downloading business with “free” streaming? The reasons are simple. In fact, the numbers tell it all: According to Nielsen, in the first half of 2014, downloaded music sales declined by 12.5 percent compared with a year ago. At the same time, music streaming was up 35 percent.

The golden age of CD is a distant memory. Now comes the era of streaming.

The golden age of CD is a distant memory. And, it’s the beginning of the end for downloading. Now comes the era of streaming. It was essential for Amazon to get into the streaming market. The same reasons compelled Apple to buy Beats, with its streaming service, for $3 billion. Amazon and Apple and everyone else realized that the sun was setting on their music downloading cash cows, but it’s just now dawned on me: In the future, our music will come to us through streams.

But all that aside, why, why, why did Amazon feel so compelled to start streaming? The deeper answer is depressingly obvious. There are 20 million Amazon Prime subscribers. They get benefits like free shipping on Amazon orders. Amazon likes these people because they are tightly bound to the company and buy lots of stuff online. Amazon recently raised its Prime subscription from $79 annually to $99. Amazon certainly does not want to lose Prime members.

Amazon Prime Music is a way to keep existing Prime members, and get new members too. Few serious music lovers would choose Prime Music instead of Spotify or other services, but Prime Music makes Amazon Prime an even better deal. That’s right, my friends: Prime Music is a sweetener, to get you to sign up for Amazon Prime. Amazon has 244 million active customers, and now Amazon can dangle yet another carrot to get them more tightly bound to the company.

Yes, my friends, it has come to this: Not only has music become a commodity, it is an incentive, a perk. The thing we hold dearest—music, the sound of the heartbeat of our souls—is now a way to get people to buy blenders online. And that development led me to the last, and most banal of my insights into the nature of today’s music business: As usual, the captains of the music industry have managed this newest technological revolution really well. Obviously.