Years ago, I saw a sign at a junkyard mechanic's shopyard: "We screw the other guy and pass the savings on to you." I laughed, as one does. A little dark humor goes a surprisingly long way, though the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial as you realize that maybe the laugh is meant to take the sting out of the truth that you may never know if you're the other guy or not.
This is what Spotify was from the beginning. It was always going to be exploitative, it was always going to turn to the dark side and embrace the every form of enshittification possible because it was born that way.
It was born out of sleight of hand between broadcast and retail.
It was born out of papering over the economics of piracy with a thin veener of false legitimacy, where the word decimated doesn't begin to cover what actually happened to artist payouts because it's off by more than an order of magnitude. The shameless scale of it would make Walmart blush.
It was born out of collecting consumers with convenience and a dash of zeitgeist.
It was born screwing the people who create the work the platform depends on and passing the savings on to you.
Screwing with you was inevitable, it was just put off until later.
> you may never know if you're the other guy or not
The older I’ve got, the more I think on kindness.
With kindness, there is no ‘other guy’. Sure, this was funny. It is funny. It really is! But it’s _not that funny_. And I feel I couldn’t have said it wasn’t that funny until I’d seen enough (got old enough?) to understand.
Like you I think I’ve thought about being the other guy or not. As for Spotify — I don’t subscribe. I don’t want to be part of it.
> the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial
This is what Spotify was from the beginning. It was always going to be exploitative, it was always going to turn to the dark side and embrace the every form of enshittification possible because it was born that way.
It was born out of sleight of hand between broadcast and retail.
It was born out of papering over the economics of piracy with a thin veener of false legitimacy, where the word decimated doesn't begin to cover what actually happened to artist payouts because it's off by more than an order of magnitude. The shameless scale of it would make Walmart blush.
It was born out of collecting consumers with convenience and a dash of zeitgeist.
It was born screwing the people who create the work the platform depends on and passing the savings on to you.
Screwing with you was inevitable, it was just put off until later.