Futurology

There’s a little competition now with like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, whatever, and competition can keep things from becoming deeply shitty. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if in 5 years the big players had merged together, and then things get more expensive.

But the distribution side is only one part of the equasion and tbh the much easier one, which is why there are still so many even smaller players that offer a more or less complete (or at least large) library. Besides the ones you mentioned i can also think of amazon music, youtube music, deezer, and napster. I think there are also plenty more. It's really not that hard from a technical side to stream audio, certainly easier compared to the high bandwith you need for visual content.

The more interesting part is if anything could happen on the rightsholder side, which unlike with movie/tv-streaming is completely seperate. There you have Disney, WB/Discovery, and so on all doing their own streaming services primarily with their own content (Sony is one of the few to just produce and sell). But on the music side you don't have the large record labels like Sony, Universal or Warner Music to try and make their own streaming service. And smaller indipendent labels also make up a much larger share, and sometimes the music rights might also lie with the artists themselves or descendants.

That fragmentation of rights combined with the large variance of musics tastes requiring a mostly complete library to make sense imo is what currently holds of enshittification. So i would actually say there is decent competition, although at the same time it is very hard to truly distinguish yourself from the other services.

The question is whether something can break this balance.