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Guest post by Chris Castle of Music Technology PolicyWe live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball… What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south.From The Big Short, screenplay by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, based on the book by Michael LewisA quick aside–Billboard recently quoted the consultant Mark Mulligan as saying the following about Spotify (which is listed as a client of his MIDiA company, among others):MIDiA Research managing director Mark Mulligan says Spotify’s general tune has changed since the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in April and must now aim to become profitable. “As the bellwether of streaming, Spotify has been dictating the narrative for years, but always with the focus of being a partner for rights holders. Now that it is public, Spotify has found that tough talking trumps sweet talking,” wrote Mulligan in a June 12 blog post. “Speaking from the experience of months of deep conversations with large institutional investors, Wall Street has pumped money into Spotify stock not because of how it will help labels’ businesses, but because they expect it to replace labels, or, at the very least, compete with them at scale.”If “pumped money into Spotify’s stock” means, among other indicators, a wave of buyers, that’s one thing that Spotify’s stock does not have and so far never has had as measured by the lower chart below (see arrow):
