Big Tech companies are terrible custodians of our cultural artefacts. They exist to collect revenue and attention: they have no interest in the preservation of culture or how their systems might influence or replace existing social fabric. Even worse - what happens when breaking changes are introduced and years and decades of "content" are affected.
Recently my 14-year-old and I were horrified to discover that at some point in late 2023, Final Space got deleted from the internet. While we were separated by the pandemic, we watched every episode of this show together. Our group chat was called "The Chookity-Pok Alliance". This was an important part of our memories. But then Warner Bros. needed to find some tax write-offs, and completely deleted everything to do with the property. There's no opportunity for us to enjoy these memories - it's just gone.
The internet now functions on what is known as "recurring revenue" - it's why everything is a subscription instead of a product that you purchase once. Remember how you could buy a copy of a version of Photoshop and use it forever? Adobe hate that - so they've aggressively moved the business to licensing their software as part of their Cloud subscriptions.
Recurring revenue means that once you've secured a reliable base of users, all you need to do is tweak your unit economics. You can lower your costs - putting downward pressure on your suppliers or "finding efficiencies" (e.g. firing people) - or put your prices up. Tech companies regularly do both - that's why your Spotify or Netflix subscription keeps getting more expensive, and why the service doesn't seem to really change all that much.
If tech companies have a reliable base secured, they'll also do everything they can to water down or erode value for users to make their costs go further - or prioritise opportunities for generating more revenue, even if it works against the user's best interests. Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification".
Culture (or "content", as Big Tech companies would rather call it) is annoyingly expensive, and it's a black mark on the P&L of any business. So it's not surprising that Spotify is trying to increase the percentage of subscription revenue that they get to keep as profit. See Liz Pelly's astounding deep dive on how Spotify is happy to commission and ingest music that doesn't require them to pay out a per-stream royalty to artists. They're basically commissioning muzak: anodyne recordings designed to represent the most inoffensive reflection of a genre or mood. This after Spotify deigned to tighten their rules around stream payouts - including not paying artists for tracks with less than 1,000 streams.
In the last 10 years, subscriptions have replaced the lion share of your spend on media. Effectively that makes you a renter - you have access to all of the riches of a platform, as long as you keep forking out for the monthly spend. When Netflix was the only game in town, it was amazing: all of this content, for only $15.99? Now we have around 10 platforms, all duking it out over who gets a share of which content libraries. You no longer get the benefit you once had of everything (or a lot of it) on one platform with one subscription.
In order for the platforms to protect their profit, they keep optimising. For the benefit of you, the consumer? Of course not. For the benefit of the creators that they got you start paying for their platform? Dream on. That's why every platform is introducing ads - even for paying subscribers.
In a world where it's likely that you might be paying for 3-5 video streaming platforms (conservatively) and at least a couple of music subscription services... at what point have we reached a tipping point where you're better off paying for media once and then owning it forever?
Especially when your purchasing decisions are far more likely to fairly reward the artists.
Especially when the platform or rightsholder could choose to delete anything you love at any moment.
Buy your music. Buy the video content you want to hang onto. Don't rent culture. We need it to last longer than the platforms do.
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