The story goes like this. Napster destroyed the music industry. Streaming saved it. The pirates were defeated. Heroes were made.
The problem with that story is that it describes a rescue that didn't happen. Music is still very available. Listeners are still enjoying it enormously. The people who made it are still not being compensated fairly for its use. The infrastructure enabling that use is still controlled by people whose primary stake is financial rather than creative.
Napster was shut down because it provided infrastructure allowing music to be distributed without consent and without compensation. Streaming platforms are legal, listed on stock exchanges, and have terms of service. They are also platforms that pay most independent artists less than $300 a year in median income, that used recommendation algorithms to promote music they commissioned at below-standard rates, and whose AI systems were trained on recorded music without consent and without payment. To our mind... not really heroes.
New blog traces the line from Napster to Spotify to the cooperative argument for why genuine rescue looks like structural ownership, not a new middle layer with a better PR strategy.
👉 https://www.packmusic.au/blog/meet-the-new-pirates
#Streaming #MusicianRights #PlatformCapitalism #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #CooperativeModel #MusicEconomics #Napster #Spotify
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