---
title: Streaming to the masses
description: >-
  Most musicians carry a dream. In the beginning of the new millennium internet
  had an intrinsic promise that spoke directly to that dream: to liberate the
  market from the middle-hands.
date: 2020-10-22 12:07:00
artist:
author: set
category: highlights
album:
tags:
  - article
image: /images/posts/markus-spiske--cpu-nljxie-unsplash.jpg
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download:
link:
  url:
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chat:
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---

## What happened to our dreams?

It's a fairly simple and common story. It wasn't a dream but an illusion\! We thought that the music market operated differently from other markets. We thought our new tools would be a remedy to a social problem. At least i did. I was convinced that if Internet could put a [freshly grown into a global multi-billion industry](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} could suddenly be on the brink of fall, Internet had to be bringing a new variable to the table. And it's almost true: music is a bit different. And while the variable internet brought to the table was indeed new, it wasn't any different. Maybe even worse.

![](/images/posts/photo-2020-10-22-13-59-23.jpg){: width="749" height="403"}

The music market is shady. But it's not the shadiness of the music market that sets it apart from others. It's how it's value is being created. In that sense, making music is a bit like any art: it can be compared to printing money. You do something with a couple of tools and little funky shit. And boom\! Because of X and Y factor it is determined by some marketing cheif that it may or may not generate profit. Sure, there are many acts that are being blown up by the marketing department of a major record label who never see any real success in the habitual megastar sense. But it's out there and known, not first because of any particular musical value, but because millions of people where made aware of it. Music doesn't have to bring any actual value to society: it will not transport goods, build housing, make food... Sure, it might motivate someone to do all those things, but that's about where it stands. This means the value is organic and arbitrary at the same time. Like living-dead [Schrödinger cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}. Yet entire buildings of people depend on it to pay their rent.

And the shadiness remained, worse it got amplified by the internet. Now music wasn't only a mean of motivating workers to produce, it also became a tool of surveillance. The industry abandonned sales and opted for rentification