Has platforms like Spotify and Netflix been a net positive for making culture accessible?
With endless choices come endless competition. The big issue in modern day culture industries is the limitless choices consumers have. As much as it is great that people in all corners of the world only need an internet connection and some $20 to enjoy hundreds of movies and tv-series and millions of songs, the cost of democratising culture consumption has led directly to it becoming more difficult to make a living by producing culture.
The internet’s commercial logic is all about scale as opposed to curation so internet economics often boil down to feast or famine. If the algorithm picks you up you could become an overnight star, but if it doesn’t your work may languish in obscurity. Services like Netflix and Spotify are more interested in having the most and the latest stuff rather than the highest quality because their business model is fundamentally about making sure you do not cancel your subscription. Being able to brag about how many new movies hit Netflix each month is a great strategy for inspiring the fear of missing out in subscribers, whereas making a very high quality movie is often expensive and is unlikely to singlehandedly get a significant number of new subscribers who will want to stick around.
This means that the production side of culture industries have become more and more difficult to manage as competition has increased. In the Itunes era of music the way to get paid was to make great albums with great singles through a record label, but in the Spotify and Souncloud era going viral on TikTok is your best bet for commercial success. You don’t need a label to do that, and you only need a single great song as opposed to a great album of a dozen songs. Naturally, when there is a small chance of a very positive outcome the optimal strategy becomes to put out a lot of songs in the hope that one will hit the algorithmic jackpot. That’s why artists like Taylor Swift and Drake pump out so many long albums in a short time span.
But that strategy serves to make it more and more difficult for consumers to find what they are looking for as platforms become flooded with new cultural outputs with a low level of curation. It also makes the competition for the consumers’ limited attention fiercer. Making a living in a culture industry has become more difficult as the middle between being a nobody and a global star has been hollowed out. Indeed, as a direct result of the consumption of culture has become democratised the ability to earn a living as someone producing culture has become less democratised.
Does that mean that culture has been more or less democratised on a net basis? I don’t know, that is a big question, but the way music festivals and venues are struggling post-pandemic while global mega stars make millions makes me think that music specifically has become less democratised.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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