Why have there been so many "free" streaming services for movies and TV but not for music?
Why have there been so many "free" streaming services for movies and TV but not for music?
Several movie and TV sites have come and go where you can just visit and watch without even creating an account. Quality might not be as good as a paid service and they are no doubt in the grey-to-red zone legally. I don't see the same service for music.
Why do you think is there such a difference in trends?
It's because streaming in movies is exactly the same one thing everyone thinks about, while streaming in music is dozen of different things and you meant just a single particular one while excluding all others. If we consider all types of music streaming, there are countless free streaming services for this: youtube, soundcloud, mixcloud, spotify, thousands of internet radios.
Doesn’t Pandora & Spotify have free tiers with ads?
The radio has been playing free music since 1906.
What are you talking about? YouTube? The Pirate Bay? The radio? I'm honestly don't understand why these sites don't count.
Availability. You can just straight up search on YouTube to find a song and find it. Same goes on Spotify. If you're not an audiophile, no one would care if the song quality is low. If you listen to well known songs, you can likely find the music files available on public trackers and youtube.
If you care about a certain style of music not available on public tracker and want higher quality files; you likely can find a private tracker invite through people that listen to it. So there's no reason for both people to use a music piracy site.
I'm not sure I understand. You can stream music for free on Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, Bandcamp, YouTube, and probably several other services. Not to mention the thousands of radio stations you can stream. It seems like there are exponentially more music streaming options compared to video. If you're asking about sites where you can stream without ads, I'm guessing those exist too, but I suspect most people are either willing to listen to ads or pay for ad-free with one of those services.
Or they use ublock origin.
uBO + YT background play add-on on Firefox Mobile is a game changer
People don't like to hustle with pirate sites if given reasonable alternatives. Currently youtube, spotify, apple music and online radio stations fulfill these demands. Just like netflix originally killed most of pirate streaming, it was easier just to pay a bit to get all the content, then content providers decided each to create their one limited content service and pirates were back in business. Once you'll have to pay a different providers to hear different songs you'll start seeing more and more pirate music streaming sites.
Most if not all music is on YouTube for free already. Maybe the equivalent is the sites that let you download music from YouTube and these come and go like the movie streaming sites.
None of them could compete with Youtube
So Pluto TV can compete against YT with their old school cartoons? Because I love those damn old cartoons that they have lol.
The payout for audio ads is a lot less than video advertising. It's just not as profitable to do an entirely ad-supported music streaming service as a video one
You look at the screen while watching video, making ads profitable (they obstruct the view making you click something to close it, hijacking the click and generating visits).
If you do it for music people walk away and nobody clicks on the ads.
Spotify will force you to listen to an ad by pausing it if you mute the volume, then resuming it when you unmute.
I quit Spotify long ago so I don't know if they still do it today, but they do have a way to force ads.
RIAA was famously litigious but music was also much more widely available to pirate so it made it harder for streaming services to offer enough value to tempt users away from piracy. Services like pandora that (originally, at least) offered good value in terms of music discovery were the only ones to really offer a compelling reason not to pirate.
When it comes to movies, though, the much larger file sizes kept piracy a more niche activity for longer. When I was in uni pretty much everyone was running Kazaa or similar for music, but only techy folks would put in the effort to pirate videos.
YouTube Music + decent Adblocker or Vivaldi Browser.
because Spotify has no real competition, the music mafia has no reason to change their business model, and people are less tolerant of ads in their music.