Look. I’m not about to talk about how Spotify is evil or how it killed the music industry. Like any discussion of a global tech corporation on which we’ve all become dependent, the finger pointing is useless. To the extent that Spotify has done harm to the industry, it’s the symptom, not the cause. What’s the cause? What is it always? It’s capitalism run amok. Or, more aptly, as Naomi Klein calls it, Corporatism. Because Spotify does not exist in a free market. It’s a tightly controlled market. Not controlled by the government, of course, but by the corporations themselves. And THAT’S the problem, not streaming technology.
Technology is not human and has no goals or free will so can not be assigned blame or bear responsibility for its effects. Having discussions about what “streaming will do to the music industry” is pretending that technological and sociological changes happen passively, like the introduction of a new species into an ecosystem. But that’s not true at all. This technology is pointed in a direction by the corporations who own it and it’s given a mandate by humans, and the mandate is what it always is under capitalism: Try to sell the easiest, cheapest-to-make product for the highest possible profit. If we used streaming technology for another goal, say, to create the most sustainable business for independent artists, we’d be living in a different music landscape.
And we can talk more about that, and perhaps we should, but right now I wanna talk about this collective toxic ritual that us artists who have our music on Spotify are pressured to participate in. It’s Spotify Wrapped, a moment at the end of the year when everyone is supposed to share their data with the world.
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