I’m wondering about the Spotify business model. To me, there’s no particular attachment to a specific streaming service, since most of the songs and podcasts I care about are on multiple ones, it’s not particularly cheap, and I don’t really care about losing whatever custom playlists I put together. There’s no big user community like Facebook or Twitter that you would have to pull out of. A lot of retention just seems like inertia.

For the exclusive podcasts, like America’s Favorite Stoner Meathead, do people really care about that particular talking head, or do people just listen to whatever talking head the streaming service is currently pushing that falls in the listener’s interest space? I’m sure some people want the former, but I’m not convinced a lot of people signed up for a specific service because of That Particular Person. But evidently people can be convinced to leave a service because of That Particular Person.

My thinking is that the management of most of these services assume their users are far more reluctant to change services then they actually are, mostly by smelling their own marketing farts for too long.