There’s a sound that once defined art.
The soft click of a record-store cash register - a tiny percussion marking a fair exchange. You gave ten dollars, and a musician somewhere could pay rent. It was a sacred economy of attention and reciprocity.
Today that sound is gone. It’s been replaced by the quiet hum of servers — the algorithm’s lullaby - where music and film have become data points in a trillion-dollar spreadsheet.
The birth of convenience
Spotify promised liberation. It offered everything ever recorded, instantly, everywhere. And we believed it.
But that convenience came with a hidden cost. Where once an artist earned $10 to $15 from a CD or digital album sale, they now earn $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. A million plays - once the milestone of success - barely covers a week of groceries.
Spotify’s executives love to boast about “record payouts.” Let’s do the arithmetic: even if 60,000 artists each earned $100,000, that’s $6 billion. Sounds grand until you remember there are over 11 million artists on the platform. The median artist earns between $40 and $200 per year. That isn’t a music economy; it’s a hobby lottery where the platform celebrates its winners and hides the millions of losers subsidizing the system.
Spotify didn’t democratize music; it industrialized it. The company practices what might be called creative strip-mining: extracting imagination at industrial scale, leaving exhausted soil for artists to rehabilitate themselves.
Access as architecture of control
Spotify didn’t really disrupt the music industry; it disrupted how you access it. The old machinery - labels, contracts, radio play - still exists. What changed was the tunnel through which all sound now travels. Spotify didn’t rewrite the music itself; it rewrote the map of discovery.
If you had bad taste in music before, you still have it now. The difference is that now your taste isn’t even yours - it’s a dataset the algorithm refines and resells. You think you’re discovering; you’re being discovered.
Access became architecture, and architecture became control. Once Spotify owned the gate, it could decide what played on the radio inside your head.
Netflix did the same to cinema. What used to be choice became curation disguised as freedom. You think you’re picking; you’re being guided.
It’s the oldest trick in media: whoever controls what people hear doesn’t need to control what they think. Television spent half a century programming our politics through our living rooms; Spotify and Netflix simply made the programming intimate. They replaced the broadcaster’s tower with a personalized feed, monopoly with choice, programming with curation — and we called it empowerment.
The music industry didn’t fight piracy by innovating; it fought it by becoming the evil it once blamed — a system that pretends to save artists while quietly harvesting them. What it couldn’t win through scarcity, it conquered through surveillance and convenience.
Algorithmic serfdom
In medieval Europe, serfs were tied to land they didn’t own. They could farm, but only under the lord’s terms. The lord didn’t need to chain them - he simply controlled access to the means of survival. Spotify’s version is digital: you can distribute, promote, and track your music — but the algorithm decides whether anyone hears it.
Its “Discovery Mode” feature offers exposure in exchange for a royalty discount - a form of algorithmic tithe. That’s not discovery; that’s feudal rent.
Yes, some artists in regions without legacy infrastructure have found Spotify useful - a first foothold in markets that never had record stores. But a foothold isn’t a floor. Global access doesn’t excuse exploitative payouts; it just internationalizes precarity. The fact that strip-mining is now borderless doesn’t make it less extractive.
And so musicians adapt, posting their “Spotify Wrapped” infographics like loyal tenants showing good harvests to their lords, celebrating millions of plays that yield pennies. It is the psychology of feudal gratitude — algorithmic serfdom disguised as empowerment.
Netflix and the domesticating of risk
On another screen, a different empire learned the same trick.
Netflix began as a liberator of film - a way around Hollywood’s gatekeepers. But as it grew, its incentives changed. The company discovered that stories are not the product; engagement is. It began to treat films the way Spotify treats songs: as instruments of retention.
Pacing, color grading, and run-time are tested like variables in a lab. Thumbnails are A/B-tested for click-through rates. Original films are ordered not because they challenge audiences but because they fill demographic gaps in a recommendation engine.
And then, one day, the film you loved simply disappears. Contracts lapse, licenses shift, and art evaporates.
Take Okja (2017), Bong Joon-ho’s eccentric, brilliant fable about a genetically modified super-pig — a film that caused controversy at Cannes precisely because Netflix refused to show it theatrically in France. For a moment, Okja embodied the promise of streaming: auteur vision backed by global reach. But today it exists mostly as a thumbnail, its theatrical life erased, its prestige compressed into metadata. If even a Palme d’Or winner’s work can be flattened into “content,” what chance does a first-time filmmaker have?
Independent directors have told quieter stories of loss: documentaries sold to Netflix that vanish within eighteen months, taking with them the festival momentum and educational licenses that once paid the bills. A vanished film is not just forgotten; it’s erased from the economy that could have sustained its maker.
Netflix has perfected the same kind of creative strip-mining Spotify pioneered. It extracts cultural ore, sells the engagement yield, and leaves behind empty tunnels where independent voices once echoed.
The working artist’s extinction
It’s fashionable to say there’s never been a better time to be a creator. But for most working artists, there’s never been a thinner one.
In the old model, a musician could sell 5,000 records and survive. A filmmaker could license a documentary to universities and eat for a year. In the streaming model, visibility replaces value. The more people see your work, the less it’s worth.
Consider Taylor Swift and Zoe Keating. Swift’s 2014 withdrawal from Spotify forced the platform to bend - a reminder that only the giants can negotiate. Keating, by contrast, laid bare her spreadsheets: 400,000 streams earned her about $300, while selling 300 downloads on Bandcamp brought in thousands. The math is simple. The moral is cruel. Success no longer equals sustainability.
Streaming’s defenders say the payout will trickle down over time. But it doesn’t. The pool is pro-rata: every subscriber’s fee flows to the most-played artists, not the ones they actually listen to. It’s a popularity tax that punishes individuality and rewards ubiquity.
Homogenization
Every algorithmic economy converges toward sameness.
Spotify optimizes for skip-rates; Netflix for retention. Both reward the predictable. The result is a culture that hums at a steady, narcotic frequency. Songs become “lo-fi beats to study to.” Films become “series to fall asleep to.”
Art used to disrupt your rhythm. Now it calibrates to it.
Risk has become a liability. Surprise, an inefficiency. The algorithm doesn’t crave astonishment; it craves continuity. And continuity is the death of wonder.
What comes after
So what does resistance look like?
It looks like Bandcamp Fridays, when the platform waives its fees and artists keep roughly 82% of every sale - a ratio Spotify will never approach.
It looks like Patreon, where the top 2% of creators earn a living wage. Not universal salvation, but proof that patronage can work at human scale.
It looks like vinyl’s stubborn revival - more than 40 million records sold in the U.S. last year, each one supporting pressing plants, record shops, and a culture of ownership that can’t be deleted from a server.
It looks like theatrical windows, defended by directors like Nolan, Villeneuve, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who insist that some art must still demand a body in a room, a phone turned off, and undivided attention.
If you care about the survival of working artists, the action is simple:
- Buy one album a month on Bandcamp instead of streaming it. That $10 does more than 10,000 plays.
- Subscribe to one creator on Patreon whose work matters to you. Even $5 a month builds sustainable income at scale.
- See films in theaters, especially indies and repertory screenings. Ticket sales still split real revenue with filmmakers.
- Buy vinyl or merch at shows. It’s direct, immediate, and exempt from algorithmic taxes.
None of this is nostalgic primitivism. It’s economic self-defense for a culture under siege.
Scarcity, ownership, and direct exchange are not romantic relics — they’re the antibodies to the liquidity that’s dissolving art itself.
Both Spotify and Netflix preach the same sermon: access equals progress. But access without memory is consumption without meaning.
We used to build our identities on what we owned - the albums on our shelves, the DVDs we loaned to friends. Now our culture lives on borrowed servers. We’ve traded permanence for playlists.
The platforms claim they’ve empowered creators. In truth, they’ve automated inequality. Their algorithms don’t democratize taste; they homogenize it, rewarding whatever feeds the machine.
The streaming dark age
Fifty years from now, when historians sift through the wreckage of early-21st-century culture, they’ll find a peculiar gap: a decade or two of art that existed but left no physical trace.
No reels, no discs, no covers, no lineage from creator to collector. Just missing data - entire oeuvres lost to expired licenses and vanished platforms.
They’ll call it the Streaming Dark Age - not because nothing was made, but because so little could be kept. They’ll wonder how we mistook renting culture for owning it, how we let convenience seduce us into building our artistic economy on sand.
And they’ll notice that the artists who survived were the ones who refused to build on that sand — the ones who remembered that culture isn’t a service, but a commons. Something we tend together.
The rest - the songs, the films, the data - will have evaporated, as if the cloud itself had swallowed its children.