We Own Nothing

From the archive: A recent rideshare experience confirmed that our digital hellscape is deepening, and that the things we pay for don't buy us much at all.

This piece is from the What Am I Making Archives. It was first published on March 3, 2024. This version has been lightly updated and edited for this posting.

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On a grey and wet February day in East Lansing, Michigan, I picked up a young woman named Olivia at her apartment building near the campus of Michigan State University. Olivia hopped in. As soon as we had exchanged polite hellos, she began talking a mile a minute.

“I am so glad you came to get me,” she said. “The other Lyft driver was supposed to get me but her service went out and it’s like the whole AT&T system, or something.”

I would later come to find out that the ‘or something’ was a roughly six hour outage across the AT&T network. During the outage, customers around the country had no access to the network at all. If you were on AT&T’s network and drove for Uber or Lyft or Grubhub or any other gig job, you would be forced to take the day off without any service. This is of course, not to mention the major imposition of not having wireless or internet service for several hours. Most of us would be unable to do even basic tasks at our jobs without some kind of cell or internet service.

As Olivia hurriedly explained the outage issue regarding her previous driver, I did my best to keep up. As soon as I had the general idea of what was going on, Olivia shifted topics.

“Do you have Spotify?”, she queried.

“Um, I have Apple Music. My wife has a Spotify account. Why do you ask?”, I was most curious to see where this was headed.

“Well, I have been having this problem for the last three days where I can’t get Spotify to take my payment. I have tried a bunch of different cards and used chat support but it just won’t work.”

It was clear she was exasperated with the situation. Then, she offered the kicker that made me sit straight up in my chair.

“I am leaving for Florida on Spring Break super early tomorrow morning and if I can’t fix this, I won’t have MY music for the trip!”

Oh, the things that I so badly wanted to say. I longed to rail against the poor payment structure of Spotify and the way that it exploits musicians. I wanted to shout from the rooftops that even Apple Music would be a better option than the digital devil that is Spotify. Calmly, I tried to offer support and guidance to our would-be traveler in need.

Image by Robert Reich

“Well, you could sign up for an Apple Music subscription”, I suggested. “I don’t know if it matters to you, but they do pay artists three times as much as Spotify does. And if Spotify won’t take your money, I’m quite sure that Apple will gladly relive you of our cash each month.”

I knew what was coming next. There would be talk of playlists, number of plays for favorite songs, albums in her “collection”, and the data she gets every year for the December parade known as Spotify Wrapped. She wanted HER music.

I can understand why she wants her profile that she has been creating for however many years at Spotify. That data is a part of her personal history. It’s a log of musical education and upbringing. I’d want that too if I could find it in digital form somehow. But, I can’t have that, and neither can Olivia. Spotify might own that data that Olivia so deeply craves, but Olivia owns nothing in this exchange. She is merely renting this space.

As a second year student at MSU, Olivia is a young woman who has never known a time in her life when music was a commodity that could only be obtained through a physical purchase at the store. To her, music has always been in the ether and available at all times, in any genre, and at any locale. It is the cultural equivalent of air or water, always present, ever available, never transactional; or so it seems.

After much back and forth discussion it was clear that Olivia didn't just want access to music for her trip, she wanted her Spotify account and she wasn't giving up. It’s easy to understand why she might be stubborn about it. Yet, she confessed to me that the Apple Music price for students is a paltry $4.95/month, while Spotify had recently bumped their student rate to $5.95 a month.

This was a young person so unwilling to pay for music that she hesitated to spend even the tiniest amount of cash. Whatever she would purchase at the Starbucks where I dropped her off would certainly set her back far more than either of those monthly music subscriptions. Yet, still she winced.

It’s not Olivia’s fault that she doesn't understand the economics of this shitty system, it’s all she has ever known. To her, music is a constantly flowing fountain of choice that requires almost no economic investment. Yet despite paying just a few dollars a month, Olivia has not ceded the idea of ownership. Even though she has only been leasing these songs from month to month, she spoke as if someone had stolen her record collection.

“I just want MY music for the ride. That’s all.” The frustration oozed from her every pore. I understood it and I empathized with her. In fact, I empathized so deeply that I kept my genuine thoughts to myself. These are thoughts that would have seemed cruel and pedantic in the moment. While I spared our young rider, you will not be so lucky.

What I so desperately wanted to share with Olivia was that she doesn't own anything in her music collection. She is simply renting it from month to month and when she stops paying the bill or Spotify goes out of business, it all disappears. Olivia as a listener has made zero investment into the music itself or in the artists who make it. She has simply paid the bare minimum entry fee to listen to the majority of musical output ever recorded.

If you listen the way that Olivia does, you own jack shit as far as music is concerned. You have no rights that you have earned. You borrowed music for a month and then you are given the chance borrow it for another month or not. Your call. To say that you own your record collection would be to say that you paid rent at your apartment for seven straight years, and so now it belongs to you. That’s not how it works. And you know it.

These might as well be the Spotify terms of service, frankly. Apple, while it pays a bit better per spin than Spotify does, is far from a good faith actor in this space either. The customer will eventually lose out on the time investment they have made in curating their “collection”, while artists lose out by being severely underpaid. The only real winners are tech giants like Apple and Spotify.

Yet, we keep digging our own digital graves.

It was clear that Olivia did not want advice or counsel, or even a different solution. She just wanted her Spotify to work. There was no concern about the lack of payment to artists, only nervousness over having her entire “collection” taken away because she can’t pay the monthly bill due to a technical error.

Sadly, I think most of the buying public are more like Olivia than not when it comes to their music and the rest of their cultural intake. They want it. They want it now, and they want it as cheaply as possible. Whatever happens to the people who make it or the economics behind it doesn't matter. It’s simply a firm policy of “Just give me my shit right away!” Folks want to believe they care about the workers who make their goods, but our buying patterns bear out the truth.

The truth is there will come a day when Spotify will stop working altogether. It will go out of business, be shut down, or change its business model so that it’s no longer the deal it used to be. And then where will you be, dear reader? Years, perhaps decades of stats will disappear. Your playlists will vanish. The items in your “collection” will no longer be at your fingertips. Likely you will truck off and build your new musical existence in whatever shiny new palace the internet offers.

Our culture is much like our children, if we do not foster it and invest in it, it will not thrive. Even when Olivia was paying her $5.99 a month, she wasn’t investing. She was renting her sounds at the lowest possible rate. I hope she found a way to get her music together for the trip. I also hopes she learns someday that music is made by real human beings with lives to lead and bills to pay. I hope she learns that music is not a gift to which she is entitled, but an art form that requires her investment.

I hope you can learn the same thing someday. The future of our collective culture is all that’s at stake.

Cheers,
Matty C