41 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Streaming to the masses
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description: >-
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Most musicians carry a dream. In the beginning of the new millennium internet
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had an intrinsic promise that spoke directly to that dream: to liberate the
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market from the middle-hands.
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date: 2020-10-22 12:07:00
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artist:
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author: set
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category: highlights
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album:
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tags:
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- article
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image: /images/posts/markus-spiske--cpu-nljxie-unsplash.jpg
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video_path:
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download:
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link:
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url:
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buttontext:
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chat:
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check_this_if_cannot_be_bought: true
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stores:
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- name:
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url:
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icon:
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download: false
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---
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## What happened to our dreams?
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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.
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{: width="749" height="403"}
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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\! Well... if it was that simple right? It has to be determined by some marketing chief that the music may generate profit first. 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 usual megastar sense. But it's out there and known. Not first because of any particular musical value, but because millions of people were made aware of it. Music doesn't have to bring any actual value to society to become valuable: 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 of music is organic and arbitrary at the same time. Like a living-dead [Schrödinger cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}. Or a ticket to an upcoming lottery. Yet entire buildings of people depend on it to pay their rent...
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And the shadiness remained, worse it got amplified on the Internet. Now music isn't only a mean of motivating workers to produce, it also became a tool of surveillance. The industry abandoned sales and opted for [rentification](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni_Dosi){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}. Why sell an album for 9$ when you can rent it out for 9$ per month? Centralizing like this comes with added benefits: there is no need to risk capital in printing a bunch of packages that might end-up in a pile collecting dust. And the nature of the central source of the music being a database, it also enables for exact monitoring of what plays, when, by whom\! Better yet\! If we correlate that with social media profiles, we also know what age, gender and religion responds better to what.
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{: width="1024" height="678"}Photo: ["August View"](https://www.flickr.com/photos/99804259@N00/20809008233){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} by [Rantz](https://www.flickr.com/photos/99804259@N00){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} is licensed under [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&atype=rich){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}
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## But did the dream really die though? |