A very nice TV series about the history of Spotify has sprung up on Netflix, It’s called The Playlist and tells how a very young Daniel Ek, starting from a small Swedish town, managed to create the largest platform in the world for streaming music.
Illegal content and respect for rights, too many problems to solve
by Andrea Monti
There are many curious details, such as the fact that Ek, when he was looking for a job, was rejected by Google because he was not a graduate. But the key point of the story is how Spotify managed to change the revenue model of an entire industry sector: when Ek started, there was Pirate Bay, a site from which songs were downloaded for free, illegally. Ek’s fundamental intuition was that users, in exchange for a better service (Pirate Bay was difficult), would be willing to pay – little – or even listen to advertising. That same model is now also being followed by Netflix in search of new subscribers: if you want to pay a little less, Netflix says, watch advertising too.
Media
Digital piracy: a habit for 43% of Italians
by Dario D’Elia
In short, music, films and TV series have managed to monetize their products in the digital age and with that money they can help finance better products. The newspapers still don’t. Despite several attempts, a news Spotify was never born; and not even a Pirate Bay, that is a pirate site that published all the contents online for free because it was the newspapers themselves that made the news available for free to everyone with a double perverse effect: the pursuit of users’ clicks, publishing the most striking and superficial, to show them banners; and the progressive loss of resources and therefore the possibility of investing in better journalism.
Events
View Conference: if the video game is used to understand cyberbullying and cybersecurity
by Alessandra Contin
Now some publishers (including the one who publishes the newspaper you are reading) try to change course by focusing on “third-party cookies” that are widespread on the web: they are those software that when you go to a site you start to follow to profile yours your tastes and habits and then pass that information on to advertisers. The choice is: either you subscribe or you accept cookies. It is a strong choice, it is not the only one possible (Le Monde does it, the New York Times does not) and it has some weaknesses but it starts from an indisputable concept: journalism is not a social enterprise paid for by the state but is paid for. with the revenues it is capable of generating. Two decades of gratuitousness have led us to an ever worse quality of information. It’s time to try to change course. Return to investing in journalism.