New Orleans       Ross Douthat, the conservative and religion columnist for the New York Times supports the right’s dismantling of the “cathedral” controlled by the left-liberal establishment, but worries that its extremism in the cultural wars will not create a reasonable balance, but simply an equal reaction to its action, changing nothing.  Interesting, right?  A bit out of my lane.  I can’t forecast the changing weather in the cultural winds, but I do know something about workers, and what’s happening to them in the corporate takeover of culture is a real issue.

Two articles were disturbing.  One was “The Spotify Syndrome” in The New Yorker by Hua Hsu, and the other was “Casual Viewing” in N-1 by Will Tavlin about Netflix.  Both of these pieces were long form, so they require a commitment, but are worth the climb.

I found them very similar, despite the difference in subjects.  Obviously, in the corporate phenomenon world, they are wildly successful, world changing business enterprises that have disrupted whole cultural industries.  Spotify has done so in music, and Netflix in TV and film, but both have achieved this as early movers in streaming over the internet where digital products have eviscerated physical objects like records and CDs, as well as Blockbuster storefronts, legacy broadcasters, and movie theaters.  The authors of these articles focused largely on the dumbing down and deterioration of the product.

In Spotify, their business model is becoming more and more like Muzak, where they hire musicians to deliver playlist and algorithmic pleasing pap to compete with recognized artists who they are paying peanuts.  Netflix, Tavlin argues, is just pushing out dreck without any concern for the quality, because its business model is based on subscribers and their overall attention, where they are willing to sell “anything to anyone” without any interest or concern about the quality, except for marketing and reputational purposes.  They have wiped out the industry’s middle-class wages by eliminating residuals, shortening the series offerings, decreasing marketing of titles, and more, so that editors, directors, and talent outside of the A-list has been forced to strike.  This business model is disgorging workers and livelihoods on a daily basis.  There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about any of this.  One Netflix executive explained the end of paying residuals by stating simply “you don’t pay the plumber who fixed your pipes every time thereafter when you flush,” or words to that affect.

Neither company is usually so plain spoken or transparent about their business models.  Spotify, according to the New Yorker dissembles completely about how much of their content is not plain vanilla, music contracting.  The actual musicians, desperate to hold onto a career in the field, take the jobs to make the pay check, while getting no recognition, and usually nothing even if their compositions get millions of downloads.  Netflix for its part in making Wall Street investors happy fudges on the number of viewers on particular shows in a mind numbing fashion, claiming that titles were watched hundreds of millions of times, even as no can remember them, and they disappear from the algorithm recommendations within days of being presented.  In the same way Spotify provides background listening, Netflix provides the equivalent in video, including a feature that will put something on the screen for you based on their algorithm, when you can’t make up your mind about any particular show you want to watch.

Both of these pieces argue with different degrees of intensity that what these streamers are serving is garbage.  The actual garbage men and women are doing their best within these parameters to provide good content, but they are paid a pittance.  Douthat can worry about the culture, but there’s no way to take a hard look at these big streamers and not become a screamer about the way they are killing music and film culture and exploiting the workers.