Communism And Streaming
Streaming For Lenin
In New York City because of rent stabilization, renting isn’t a million miles from buying. But everywhere else in the world buying a house is a huge thing, ownership of property has always been very, very important.
I mention this because it is at the heart of not just capitalism versus communism but at streaming versus buying music. Communism doesn’t work (for the most part, except in small countries like Vietnam where it is borderline barter) because people can’t get their minds around a paradox, they can’t believe that what belongs to everyone, belongs to each of us. They believe that what belongs to everyone belongs to no one and they neglect it.
This manifests itself in streaming music as a callousness, a neglectfulness, about the music people listen to. Since they don’t own the music, they don’t have anything invested in it. There interest is as limited as somebody who is spending a coupla nights in a Days Inn. How much time would you waste on fixing up the décor? Of thinking about rearranging the furniture? It’s the same with music.
If you are even a big music fan, how many albums can you buy a week? Two? Four? Five? But if you are on Spotify you have access to two dozen brand new, major artist releases every Tuesday. The music lacks cachet. It doesn’t matter because it is presented as something that doesn’t matter.
In communism, where everybody owned the shoe factory in Stalingrad, the work was lazy and shoddy. Nobody owned it, nobody cared, and Marx’s daydream that access monies from business would be returned to the workers never ever happened.
The problem with streaming is just about precisely that: nobody owns it, it has no life outside itself and its value is so minimal the majority of the world can’t make a living from it.
Imagine how the price of candles was devalued after electricity? The same thing has happened to recorded music and there is nothing to be done about it. It effects every aspect of the music business and the end result will be not unlike communism.
