Is It Time to Press ‘Reset’ on the Streaming Business Model?

say last week wasn’t particularly good for Guvera might be an understatement. The Australian streaming service announced it would seek an $80 million (AUD) IPO, and the response from other Aussie tech bigwigs was swift. That response, unfortunately, came in the form of comments generally associated with horror films or mass catastrophes — one venture capitalist dubbed it “horrifying,” while another claimed it left him “terrified.” The only response Guvera’s CEO could muster was to basically call them haters, which works if you’re a rapper or Taylor Swift but isn’t so great if you’re the head of a major company.

In all fairness to Guvera, they’re not the only streaming service that’s struggling right now. Deezer called off an IPO last year, and Spotify has yet to pull the trigger despite multiple rumors of an offering. Spotify also came under fire during a panel at music business conference MIDEM, where a prominent VC pointed out the despite being the biggest player in the space, they still lost a couple hundred million dollars last year. She went on to explain that this was why VCs tend to avoid the music space.

And while more users have been adopting streaming technology, the numbers don’t suggest the massive uptick that these services might need to survive. There’s a decent possibility we could be left with streaming services that are all part of much larger companies that essentially subsidize them as loss-leaders for other products or services. Add to this a growing backlash from many artists who feel they’re not being paid enough, and it looks like dark days for streaming up ahead.

The beta version of a new business model for news

In the era of newspapers, people never really paid for news.

News have always spread freely among people, thanks to radio and television, word-of-mouth, small talks at bars, phone calls: “Did you hear what just happened?”.

What people paid for, for years, were essentially two things: the work of research, curation and fact-checking conducted by journalists, and the physical support on which they were distributed. That is, paper.

The former is still valid, while less noticeable: if the role of filtering and monitoring of news by news organizations is getting more and more disrupted –in an era where information overload grows at a rate of millions of bits per hour– the role of reporters is still crucial to guarantee accuracy and truth, to debunk hoaxes and verify the reliability of the sources. In this sense, nothing has changed. What has changed is the way this process happens; the techniques have changed, the available tools have changed, the platforms have changed (Reported.ly, anyone?). But even in this radically transformed scenario, the role of journalists has stayed the same. They should provide reliable information: it is a service. And people, I think, are still willing to pay for it.