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Primitive Streaming Gods (2018)
Lessons from the music industry’s initial consumer-hostile reaction to the Napster saga. Going from $16 CDs to unlimited streaming is really hard.
Popular in the summer of 1996, the song, best known for its inclusion on The Cable Guy soundtrack[Amazon link], represents a low point of a trend that came to define the music industry in the pre-Napster era. Primitive Radio Gods were far from the only band to momentarily glimmer based on the kind of bad music-industry calculus Steve Albini could see from a dozen miles away, but their trajectory highlights nearly all of its downsides. As Apple Music came to life from the purchase of Beats and emerged as Spotify’s most robust competitor, the line was heavily scrutinized after the fact, but it’s possible that the wrong path became the right one for a single, simple reason.
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