Like many of these services have 50 million+ songs. Like if I wanted to invent my own streaming service, where would I start? Do you have to contact every record label imaginable and request every song to be sent to you? Like how does one all of a sudden acquire millions of songs to include in a database?
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It usually goes the other way. You create a platform and tell everyone “I will pay you whenever your music is played on this platform.”
Then, each artist signs up, adds their own music, and you would pay the artist for their contribution. The cost to the platform-builder is offset by things that come with the platform: ads, subscription services, etc.
Not that level of detail – but you’d have to contact each music label and negotiate how much of their catalogue you want access to and in what formats, what metadata etc. you require – they get to control for example, what album cover gets embedded in an mp3 or flac of an artists song. In turn, they give you a $price$ and its up to you whether you want to pay it or not. After the technical bits of how you get the library physically are pretty mundane – most likely a few dozen large capacity hard drives filled with the tracks in the formats you negotiated, with electronic subscription transfer keeping up with changes after that. The indexing and organization of the files and metadata, well that’s up to your service developers/architects and IT people, but that’s fairly trivial stuff at this point (but not cheap or “easy” Im just saying a media indexing solution even for a large service, is fairly common place these days, there’s probably at least one open source one I bet.) After that, the costs for site/service/transport/app development and hosting/IT infrastructure are really your barriers to entry. And the IT / software architecture know-how to do it effectively.
Which can be substantial.
So no, there’s nothing “hard” about setting up a new music service, its just $$time and $$money. And the established players like Spoitify have the catalogues to bury newcomers, the huge up-front startup IT and licensing costs are the real barriers to entry.
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