![]() According to Reuters, Spotify plans to file its intention of a public offering with U.S. The company could be worth $20 billion by next year, when it will likely be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. As of September 2017, the platform has been valued at $16 billion by venture capitalists who see it as the next Netflix, and who have perhaps fooled themselves into trusting that this exploitative model will “save the music industry.” Spotify’s endgame, for now, is to go public. What could go wrong?īillionaires have thrown a lot of money at Spotify. Every song in the world for less than your shitty airport meal. ![]() Indeed, the platform has now convinced a critical mass that paying $9.99 per month for access to thirty million songs is a solid, even virtuous idea. As the world’s largest streaming music company, its network of paying subscribers has risen sharply in recent years, from five million paid subscribers in 2012 to more than sixty million in 2017. Yet for now it has manipulated the vast majority of music industry “players” into regarding it as a saving grace. In fact, it only exacerbates such conundrums. Most important: How can artists distribute and sell their work in a digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests?Įnter Spotify, a platform that is definitely not the answer. The music world continues to be exceedingly vulnerable, and there are looming questions that desperately need to be addressed. It is all of these things, and it is also becoming the operating motive of the music industry. It’s also a disadvantageous mutation of principles that marketers have historically leveraged to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll buy more shit we don’t need. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with. This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. This person hates her job, but she’s lucky that, for the moment, she still has it. Instead she grabs the thing and helps you finalize your purchase. “Can I just tell you my order?” you ask, half-laughing, thoroughly hoping for a moment of commiserating solidarity over this disruptor™ fail. Of course, this doesn’t make your experience any easier: within minutes, an employee scrambles over to assist you with the device, which keeps freezing when you choose the “bowls” tab. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that line every other table, a machine that allows you to order without talking to other humans-a circumstance provided by capitalism’s boundless quest to cash in on convenience. It’s a mistake you will pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch.
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