Spotify teaches us a lesson about capitalism. In the mid 2000s illegal downloading of mp3s threatened to wipe out big music labels, and my generation experienced a rather smug sensation of victory over "the man."

“F*ck big corporatations maannn, they can't stop me pirating, the age of the record label monopoly is OVER, power to the artists!”

A new age of smaller competitors to the big names was to arise, where we sent what $$ we wanted to spend directly to the ppl we wanted to have it.

Now we HAVE seen an explosion of grassroots small labels/artist, but wasn't “big music” supposed to take a hit?

Spoiler alert, they didn't.

How'd they pull it off?

VPNs and torrenting have only made it easier to pirate music, weren't we going to do this forever, we were never going to give those pigs a cut of the pie again!

Well, turns out all they had to do was give us a convenient, user friendly product, and sure enough, most of us fell into line and paid em their monthly due. With music streaming services less of our money goes to the artist, and don't forget, we actually own NOTHING now.

Record labels went from this nightmare of attempting to police CD ripping and torrenting, to having many of the same people that used to pirate music dutifully pay their monthly fee. The modern music consumer owns far LESS than the mid 2000s era listener, pirate or otherwise.

What's the lesson? Big money wins. They paid people that are smarter than you more money than you will ever touch to figure YOU out, and they were largely successful. You can still pirate music, but most of you won't, because Sp0tify is right there (the first month's FREE!).

Without oversight, capitalism ensures that immense power accumulates, allowing corporate forces to target us with better intel and manipulatory power than we can accommodate for.

So much power that we might even find ourselves paying them for something we could get for free.