Will books survive Spotify?

SPOTIFY may have made it easier than ever for us to listen to an enormous trove of music, but it extracted so much money in doing so that it impoverished musicians. Now, the company is turning its attention to books with a new offering. It will do the same thing to writers, whose audiobooks Spotify has begun streaming in a new and more damaging way.

We’ve read this story before. Tech platforms and their algorithms have a tendency to reward high-performing creators – the more users they get, the more likely they are to attract more. In Spotify’s case, that meant that in 2020, 90 per cent of the royalties it paid out went to the top 0.8 per cent of artists, according to an analysis by Rolling Stone.

That leaves the vast majority – including many within even that small group – struggling to earn a living. The promise of the business strategy laid out in the book The Long Tail was that a slew of niche creators would prosper on the Internet. That has proved illusory for most content creators. It’s a winner-takes-all game; too often the tech platforms aggregating the content and the blockbusters win it all, starving the vast majority of creators. The result is a gradual deterioration of our culture, our understanding of ourselves and our collective memories.