Platforms, Creative Communities, and the Need for a Radical Reimagining - The Reboot

Spotify’s main form of compensation is the promise of exposure. Put your music on Spotify and it’s instantly available to 138 million subscribers, a veritable nation-state of potential listeners. But with that promise comes the relinquishing of even more control. Reaching any of those listeners depends primarily on Spotify’s recommendation systems;... See more

Once again, a creative community faces an unsure future because it doesn’t have any ownership or control over the infrastructure on which it depends.

If platforms like Vine and TikTok aim to make us all content creators, subscription platforms like Spotify aim to make us all content curators, picking our favorite tracks and sharing them with friends and the internet at large. While curating our music choices might give us a brief flash of empowerment, like we’ve somehow escaped the clutches of c... See more

And we need business models that incorporate creators and curators in the platform’s governance, allowing constructive behavior to flourish organically while encouraging audiences to discover and engage with art rather than being surveilled and force-fed content.

“Digital content has been demonetized: music is free, writing is free, video is free, even images you put up on Facebook or Instagram are free, because people can (and do) just take them. Everyone is not an artist. Making art takes years of dedication, and that requires a means of support. If things don’t change, a lot of art will cease to be susta... See more

This dynamic — the dependence on our creative labor to develop content and our curation labor to teach recommendation algorithms, while optimizing for ad revenue — is actually the core business model of virtually all content platforms, from YouTube to Facebook, Netflix to Instagram.

But Bandcamp isn’t the answer. Moving all music from Spotify to Bandcamp is no more of a solution than moving all of TikTok’s content from ByteDance’s data centers to Oracle’s cloud. The Bandcamp model might offer artists a greater degree of control and revenue share, but Vine has shown that there’s too much to be lost by investing so much in a sin... See more

Take the music industry, for example. From Napster to the iTunes Music Store and now Spotify, the last two decades look a lot like an exercise in how to use internet platforms to effectively deny income to musicians while extracting maximum value in content and data.

Spotify pays $0.00318 on average per stream, or $3.18 for every thousand streams.