You make a great point about "Spotify is the new radio" - I personally discover most of my new music by maintaining a "records to listen to" playlist with anything cool I hear about. Streaming makes it possible to keep checking out new bands daily -- without it, who knows.
I think in the end we really do need to cross the bridge of "Is Spotify Good For The Music Industry?" when we come to it. As individual artists and music influencers, all we can really do is work with ethical services and encourage others to do the same. Beyond that I try not too think too much about big business stuff.
Yeah the "Spotify is the new radio" part was not something I was really thinking about. The thing for me is that Spotify is losing so much money every year and I don't understand the insane valuation for it. Twitter had to bail out Soundcloud a couple years ago and they are not optimistic about getting their money back.
Twitter put the money into SoundCloud in 2016, via its Twitter Ventures unit, in a deal that valued the company at $700 million. Now Twitter, via its 2017 annual report, says it has written off $66.4 million it invested in SoundCloud because that money is “not expected to be recoverable within a reasonable period of time.”
Everyone likes these streaming services because people are used to not paying for music which makes the radio analogy make more since. I don't see this changing but Spotify has a huge uphill battle to really earning the 20 billion valuation people are giving them. Spotify is also doing a direct listing which means they are bypassing the fees companies typically pay banks when they go public. They are just trying to bring liquidity to their existing share holders that have funded the company. I still firmly believe that the streaming industry is going to see some major disruption through blockchain tech. As we see more and more artists taking a much more independent approach and embracing this new tech we could see a huge disruption to traditional music industry ways. I wrote a post here on steemit addressing this.
https://steemit.com/music/@rumble/spotify-ipo-valued-at-usd20-billion-plus-what-this-means-for-blockchain-music-dapps-like-peertracks-find-your-creative-freedom