The numbers of people using the music streaming provider Spotify have risen to 170 million in May 2018 [1]. A little less than half of the users have a premium account (about 44%), paying money to get high quality audio and an ad free service [2]. Meanwhile YouTube introduces their own premium model with similar features as ad free videos [3]. The highly wanted feature to play videos in background on the YouTube smartphone app is now behind a paywall. The internet is becoming less and less free, nothing spectacular in a capitalist society.
So, why even bother to complain about it, when all of us – hopefully – know that we need to fight for another model of society to fix this? Because this is not merely the usual struggle of picking between providers the one that seems to have the most human attitude. It is not about where I buy my clothes, or where I buy my food, if it is fair-trade etc. As others have shown this approach won’t change the root cause and even give you the false perception of having a influence while keeping you in a consumerism. This is a struggle about property.
Former free content is put behind walls. While Spotify allows users free access to its audio content, it gradually takes steps to build walls – even if not intended. First of all you have to create an account even if you want to use the free service. This only makes sense in the context of Spotify as capitalist entity – as every other company – which needs to generate money. As a free user the only value you provide is either the possibility that you will pay in the future, advertise this service to other people who will pay in the future, or you watch/listen to content that somebody else paid for (a.k.a. ads). There is virtually no other reason, why content is given to you for free by companies. In order that this logic works out, all other services that give you the same (not similar) content for free needs to be destroyed or at least inaccessible.
No wonder that Netflix boosts its anti-piracy team [4]. The problem for Netflix is not so much, that the firm loses money when its content is pirated, but rather that property is the *condition* for the business (as every capitalist company) to make money at all. Nobody will buy food, if they can get it for free in the same quality. The struggle about virtual property is still highly active. This is so because the internet has a highly democratic beginning [5][6]. Though YouTube was never really ad-free, you had the ability to use an adblocker and there exist a variety of tools to download the content and share it with others [7]. This changes with the recent development to closed source apps for your smartphone in opposition to open source websites – http is an open protocol, and html/css/js is easily changeable. This is the condition that allows YouTube to ask for money, for something as minor as continuing playing a video, while the app is closed. Even setting up and adblocker becomes quite complicated. Luckily there exists apps like NewPipe, but only if you have an android and if you look outside the PlayStore [8].
But enough of ads, lets go back to the property issue. The reason that the Spotify app exists is not only for your convenience, but also because it makes it harder for pirates to access it and make it available for you. In the anonymous cyberspace the security code is the police women that fulfills the orders of the class that profits from the exploitation. To deanonymize people on the internet is an interest of this very class to make privatization of free content possible since it is the condition for their profit.
This is a bold comparison, but lets have a look at the enclosure during the land revolution in England [9]. Common land is privatized, creating one of the condition for the working class, as they do not own anything else than their own ability to work. Thus creating the need to work to survive. You don’t have access to the forme shared land any more, only if somebody from the land owner class grants you access or if you somehow are able to ascend to the land owning class by buying a piece of private land – but you probably will have never enough money for it. Though Spotify is not the reason that you have to work to get a barely livable life – if you not wealthy enough – it still shows the very process why this still remains as it is: privatization of goods or in other term private property.
But privatization is not something that needs to be done one time, and then the owners can live in peace – far from it. Every day the structure of this society needs to be enforced again. Every police women that hinders you taking a bread from a store without paying is enforcing this property law. It is so common in western ideology that we barely recognize it, only in extreme instances as land grabbing for example [10]. As former free content is put behind walls it seems more and more acceptable for people that this is so. One of the main argument is that the people who created the content – this is where the common land and common good comparison failed – need money to survive.
First of all, this ignores the situation, that not the people who create, but companies who make profit out of them, get the money. It does not matter if Spotify pays to less or the music producer (or even both), it is the old conflict between work and wage [11]. Though services that pay the artists directly seem more likable, the reason why anyone needs to sell is ability to work and the product of it did not change at all. The system of private property is one of the main reasons why people need to work in shitty jobs, not because you didn’t pay for the music. By merely accepting these circumstances – because you can afford the premium account – other people lose the ability to enjoy content because they can not afford it. This may seem harsh, but as I said earlier, you are only valuable for the service when you either pay (at least in the future [12]) or watch ads – which implies that you’re only valuable for the ad provider if you are likely to buy these things. This does not mean that the service provider will necessarily deny access to all poor people. But it will certainly ensure that people with money do not easily get the same content with the same quality for free. Which implies that it gets more difficult for everyone.
This is exactly the state we see the piracy community in. Illegal streaming services are taken down one after another, one of the easiest method to watch a movie for free, even in your language. Sites that allows you to download YouTube content cease to exists after enormous pressure [13]. If you want to pirate via peer to peer you often need to use a VPN, making it difficult for beginners. Content in non-English is very difficult to find since all the users seem to be already using these services (at least in Europe). Where the heck are all the people that once had a huge disk full of pirated media? It seems only people working in tech still have these. My concern is not to call upon the users, but to call upon the techs to create piracy software that is easy and secure to use.
Piracy is not the revolution, not even close to it. But not only is access to knowledge one condition of a revolution, furthermore piracy is one element of the struggle against private property. Join the struggle!
[2] https://www.spotify.com/int/premium/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/premium/about/
[4] https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-seeks-to-boost-its-global-anti-piracy-team-180623/
[5] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
[6] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7282/
[7] https://youtube-dl.org/
[8] https://newpipe.schabi.org/
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
[10] https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/land-grabbing.html
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
[12] This is the same argument why some people declare piracy valuable for the movie industry: You pirate movies that you wouldn’t have payed for anyway, but you still watch the good movies in the cinemas where paying is enforced. This argument misses that the movie industry is not fighting against piracy because of its loss but because it is the condition to earn any money at all. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/10/hollywood-director-piracy-is-necessary-and-doesnt-hurt-revenues
[13] https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-download-sites-throw-in-the-towel-under-legal-pressure-180614/