Steady stream

The music streaming service Spotify had a fantastic opening as a public company this week, leading many to compare it to the video streaming juggernaut Netflix.

The grand entrance to the New York Stock Exchange left Spotify with a market value of about $27 billion, according to FactSet. (By comparison, internet radio company Pandora Media’s market value is about $1.2 billion nearly seven years after it went public.) Spotify’s market value is among the 10 highest ever recorded by a technology company following its first day of U.S. trading, according to Dealogic.

Investors are banking on the future of subscription-based streaming music, which charges users a fee to access millions of digital tunes whenever they want, instead of buying individual songs and albums. Spotify has yet to turn a profit and has lost more than $3 billion since its founding. The story is similar over at Netflix, which pulls in bundles of revenue from nearly 118 million subscribers but has a razor-thin profit margin, writes analyst Anders Bylund, because it is burning through cash to build up its technology infrastructure and keep marketing its content.

Netflix’s success in the stock market shows investors can tolerate low profit margins from promising tech companies, but Spotify has a few unique challenges ahead as it tries to be worthy of investors’ trust. Streaming TV content suppliers include a broad collection of movie studios and TV companies, and Netflix also produces its own content, like the hit show Stranger Things. Spotify is working with a smaller group of record companies, with each having the power to strangle it with royalties. “The music industry has a high level of concentration, which means that one or a small number of entities may, on their own, take actions that adversely affect our business,” Spotify said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, according to Financial Times. Spotify also has bigger, badder competition than Netflix does. Apple, which turns a massive profit on iPhones and Macs, continues to fight for music market share with the iTunes Store and the Apple Music streaming service.

Another difference between Spotify and Netflix: Independent artists can add their music to Spotify for a low cost and use the platform to make money and build their audience. It lowers the entry barrier for musicians whose music—particularly if it’s religious—doesn’t fit record companies’ narrow definition of marketable sound. One such artist I’m currently loving on Spotify is Beckah Shae, a Christian hip-hop artist whose rhythm and vocals blend the sounds of Mandisa, Amy Winehouse, and Meghan Trainor. Spotify gives Shae and others like her a chance to succeed that they didn’t have when the only place to hear Christian music was the radio and the only place to buy it was the CD store.

Steven Bochco Associated Press/Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision

Game changer

TV writer and producer Steven Bochco, who reshaped TV dramas in the 1980s and ’90s, died Sunday at age 74. Bochco’s hit shows included Hill Street Blues; L.A. Law; Doogie Howser, M.D.; and NYPD Blue. He won 10 Emmys and four Peabody broadcasting awards. With Hill Street Blues, his first critical success, Bochco broke ground in prime-time TV by creating story arcs that spanned multiple episodes. Before then, most network TV shows either were soap operas or had stand-alone plots that were resolved by the end of their time slot. “That’s what I always thought of myself doing in the context of TV: craft a show that over time would have a memory,” he said in an interview two years ago. Bochco also pushed the envelope of TV decency. NYPD Blue garnered numerous complaints with the Federal Communications Commission for nudity and obscenity. During the show’s first season, the American Family Association took out full-page ads in major newspapers asking viewers to boycott the show. The show still went on to air for 12 seasons before ending in 2005. —L.L.

Steven Bochco Associated Press/Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision

A league of their own

Fred Ridley, chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club, announced this week that the club will begin hosting a women’s amateur tournament next year the week before the Masters, which began play this year on Thursday. The elite Georgia club only began admitting female members in 2012 and has never hosted a women’s competition. It admitted its first African-American member in 1990. The Guardian called the news “a leap forward.” Pro golfers also lauded the announcement as progress for women in sports. “This is a dream come true,” said retired LPGA star Annika Sorenstam, who was present at Wednesday’s announcement. “It will be an exciting carrot for these young amateurs.” —L.L.

Family values?

After writing about the Roseanne reboot’s success with conservative viewers last week, I found an article—titled “How Roseanne helped make it OK to be gay on TV”—that made me even more suspicious that the show is getting ready to flip a switch on the conservatives it has baited. The cause it likely will champion? Gender fluidity in children. —L.L.

Small screen standards

I read with interest this snippet from an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook about iPhones and pornography. Steve Jobs set high content standards for the Apple App Store, and it looks like Cook is following suit, but more for reasons of business than morality. —L.L.

In memory

Patrick Cavanaugh, a major contributor to classical music education for children, died this week at age 63. —L.L.