A bunch of movie industry types were worried that MoviePass was "devaluing" their product, but I agree consumers should just be laughing all the way to the bank (or the theatre, in this case).
That isn’t a false premise though - look at what a few tech companies trying to undercut one another did to the music industry. Not that artists were making the money before Spotify, but there was a lot more money in the system then than there is now.
There was a lot more risk and costs too, hence limited supply, hence higher prices. You can't shift the supply curve to the right and expect prices to not move.
I don't know about Spotify's free-tier economics, but personally, I spend a lot more money on music, thanks to a-la-carte subscription services, then I ever did prior to it.
If the artists negotiated taking 0.01% of the revenues from it, with the subscription services taking 30%, and the record label taking the other 69.99%, that's not exactly my problem. I don't pick which record label said artists sign with.
Before music moved online and to subscriptions, I was buying 2-3 CDs a month on average. That's $45/mo in 1990s money.
Today I subscribe to Spotify for $10/mo and buy maybe 2-3 CDs (or their equivalent in one-off songs) a year.
Maybe they make it up on volume but I'm certainly getting a better deal now than I ever did back in the day.
