In March 2018, a few weeks before its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, Spotify hosted its inaugural Investor Day event. The company was rounding out a decade of exponential growth, with more than 150 million monthly active users and about 70 million paying subscribers. By these metrics, the Sweden-based Spotify was the largest subscription music streaming service in the world. At the time of its listing that April, the company’s market value stood around $26 billion.1 Achievements like this are rare among startups, and even rarer in Europe, where cities like London, Berlin, and Stockholm have produced far fewer billion-dollar technology companies than Silicon Valley.
Behind the scenes, though, Spotify was bleeding cash. Having burned through $458 million in operating expenses in the first quarter of 2018 alone, on top of the billions it had spent in previous years, the company needed to chart a new course, one that would appease current investors and appeal to new ones. “Investors may not insist on Spotify turning profitable for a few more years,” Variety’s Jen Aswad and Janko Roetgers wrote at the time, “but they do want to be assured it has a path to profitability.”
When he took the stage for his Investor Day speech, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s cofounder and longtime CEO, set aside concerns about churn rate and subscriber growth.2 He had a far grander narrative to weave. Dressed in a dark blazer, loose T-shirt, and sneakers, Ek launched into a conveniently abridged history of the company, one in which the music industry, after an extended period of decline, now stood to recapture its former glory—all thanks to Spotify. Fans “wanted all the world’s music for free,” he said, so Spotify built a pleasing user experience that could finally compete with piracy. The recording industry expected to be paid for all of the music it licensed, so Spotify worked to negotiate a standard per-stream royalty rate.3 Musicians and their managers were concerned with tour promotion and fan engagement, so Spotify collected vast amounts of data from listeners, which artists could in theory use to schedule tours in underserved markets and to sell concert tickets and merchandise.
“Why does this matter?” Ek asked his audience. He paused for a moment, letting the question ring out before delivering a well-rehearsed if somewhat cryptic answer. “Because we know that information is power, and for many, it really helps bridge the gap between the struggling and the successful. Through this, once again, the power is rebalanced.”
Many parts of this story were dubious, not least the claim that Spotify, with its data-trawling surveillance, was ultimately a democratizing force designed to benefit working musicians. Yet Ek’s use of a word like power hinted at a deeper awareness of the role that his company had come to play during the previous ten years. Spotify’s enterprise reached far beyond the scale of individual users and musicians, or even of record labels, management companies, and music publishers. If the company could secure market dominance, edging out SoundCloud, Tidal, and Apple Music, it could achieve something the music business had aspired to for generations, something that tech disrupters like Uber and Airbnb were also vying for in their own sectors. With enough power, Spotify could become a monopoly.
The history of the music industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.4
Digital streaming emerged from a moment of crisis in the music industry, as record companies scrambled to respond to the rapid rise of file sharing. For years, the big labels refused to accept that the MP3 marked a new era in music distribution; instead, they tried to crush Napster and other online platforms through litigation and lobbying. Yet revenues from album sales continued to freefall. From their $14.7 billion peak in 1999 (more than $28 billion in 2025 dollars), recorded-music revenues plunged by more than half by 2014, bottoming out at $6.7 billion.
Streaming, and Spotify in particular, would prove to be the industry’s deus ex machina. These services not only offered cheap, easy-to-use products that were secure against illegal downloads; they also restored investor confidence and the promise of renewed growth after an extended period of decline. Last year, subscription and ad-supported services accounted for more than 84 percent of US recorded-music revenues. In true neoliberal fashion, a crisis of profitability was met with a series of technological adaptations, giving rise to a new regime of accumulation sometimes called “platform capitalism.”
Convenient as these platforms have been for consumers, and lucrative as they have become for investors—Spotify’s stock price has risen 37 percent in the past year alone—this centralization has also allowed streaming platforms to consolidate cultural power on an enormous scale. Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries. While Pelly’s account focuses on the power of Spotify’s ever-changing playlisting practices, deWaard turns to the rise of intellectual property, as remakes, reboots, and spin-offs have come to saturate mass media markets. Both center on the changing relationship between labor and capital in the platform era. From song catalogs to movie franchises to so-called prestige television, cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from the work of artmaking. But this disenfranchisement has provided new opportunities for cultural workers at every level to reassert the value of their labor. A new labor movement has emerged against the backdrop of this struggle, suggesting a more equitable path forward for the culture industries that stands to benefit workers and consumers alike.
When the company first launched in 2008, Spotify’s calling card was its search function: Users could easily find and play millions of songs in a single place. The later emphasis on algorithmic taste analysis and playlist curation was years away. In those early days, Ek’s aspiration was for the company to become “the Google of music.” This strategy hit an early roadblock when Spotify’s proposed royalty model, which would license music from labels in exchange for a guaranteed cut of advertising revenue, was rejected by major companies like Universal. By 2012, it was clear that the search-centric approach wouldn’t be enough to meet the company’s ambitious growth targets. In response, Spotify launched a series of marketing campaigns promoting the utilitarian function of its playlists, with songs as lifestyle accessories: “Music for every moment,” went the new tagline. From a single universal music repository, Spotify rebranded itself as a celestial jukebox, tailor-made for individual listeners.
The playlist would become a foundational medium for the company, the key to its lasting success. Yet Spotify was slow to appreciate the significance of “editorial programming.” As Pelly first reported in 2017, the Big Three labels had already realized the new opportunities afforded by strategic playlist placement at the turn of the 2010s, when the oligopoly established various playlisting companies, including Filtr (owned by Sony), Digster (owned by Universal), and Topsify (acquired and rebranded by Warner Music). This small network of elusive companies produced playlists filled with music from their parent labels, for distribution on Spotify. Before long, Spotify itself was scrambling to catch up. In 2013 it acquired a company called Tunigo, which produced mass-appeal playlists—Today’s Top Hits, Mood Booster, Your Favorite Coffeehouse—that remain popular today.
Many of these early editorial decisions were guided by the “Music for every moment” branding strategy, with playlists loosely organized by time or occasion, or by generic and stylistic categories inherited from the recording industry. But Spotify soon began experimenting with the monetizable frontiers of the playlist form. Pelly points to the growing number of playlists designed for rest and relaxation: Chill Vibes, Calming Classical, Ambient Relaxation. “Mood,” she notes, would become Spotify’s primary moneymaking proposition. “Organizing music by mood is a way to transform it into a new type of media product,” she writes. “It is about selling users not just on moods, but on the promise of the very concept that mood stabilization is something within their control.”
Novel and even dystopian as it might sound, this half-curatorial, half-therapeutic approach to music is almost as old as the recording industry itself. In a chapter titled “The Conquest of Chill,” Pelly traces the history of music deliberately composed to create a calming atmosphere, from the high-minded experiments of Erik Satie and Brian Eno to commercial concerns like Thomas Edison’s phonograph company and Muzak, the main purveyor of what used to be called elevator music. As Pelly notes, working musicians have long relied on background and stock music companies to pay the bills: Former employees of Muzak, which was headquartered in Seattle in the 1980s and ‘90s, include Mark Arm of the grunge band Mudhoney and Bruce Pavitt, who went on to cofound the legendary indie label Sub Pop. But the rise of Spotify has further blurred distinctions between independent artistic projects and commercial compositions, as the platform recontextualizes recorded music through mood-calibrated playlists and consumer-tailored interfaces.
Some of the most profitable music on Spotify, it turned out, was highly compatible with the platform’s increasingly popular playlists. This in turn drove musicians to produce new recordings specifically composed for playlist placement. In a nod to clickbait, which marked a similar moment of commercial and editorial convergence in digital journalism, Pelly coins the term streambait to describe songs “created for the sake of engagement.” “Like Facebook and Twitter before it, Spotify was after whatever kept people on the platform, whether they were paying attention or not,” she writes. “Over time, though, the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music: an ease of use that, in turn, facilitated easy listening.”
Pelly uncovers a shadowy network of companies that began to commission nearly anonymous ambient and instrumental recordings for “prime placement across [Spotify’s] mood playlist ecosystem.” Firms like the Stockholm-based Epidemic Sound could produce these recordings for far less than the cost of licensing tracks by original artists, paying a flat fee to each producer for their master recordings. (While the company bills itself as a provider of “royalty-free” music, Pelly notes that it technically collects royalties from streaming platforms and splits with artists 50-50.) This corporate synergy benefited both parties. Spotify could avoid paying higher rates to the Big Three by placing cheaper music from Epidemic on its most popular playlists (a shady practice Spotify referred to internally as its Perfect Fit Content program), and Epidemic could purchase rights to work from independent musicians at rates low enough to turn a profit—or at least convince investors of the possibility of profits in the future. “Companies like Epidemic present themselves as disruptors, as new and exciting, when actually they’re just taking advantage of people’s ignorance and desperation,” one Epidemic composer tells Pelly. “All they’re doing is building up an asset class to sell on.”
But for Spotify, Epidemic’s bottom-feeding model showed how much potential for monetization remained untapped. The editorial logic behind Spotify’s early “chill” playlists would become central to the company’s growth strategy. Pelly cites Spotify’s hyperpop playlist as another example. A frenetic subgenre of electronic music that emerged online in the 2010s, hyperpop was worlds away from the “chill vibes” associated with Spotify’s earlier playlists: loud, brash, and playful, often made by and for queer teenagers. In August 2019, Spotify renamed its Neon Party playlist hyperpop (lowercase), after a data scientist at the company discovered the term. As with Spotify’s ventures into the realm of “chill,” the hyperpop playlist reorganized a once subcultural community into a hierarchical, profit-seeking structure, with more plays and thus higher earnings for artists in the playlist’s top spots. Where earlier subcultures like punk rock or hip-hop took decades to be fully assimilated into the commercial mainstream, hyperpop—at least in its commodified, playlisted form—went from an outsider community to a streaming money-maker in the span of a few years.
As in earlier periods of technological upheaval, pop music’s changing political economy has begun to reshape its sound. Pelly notes that Billie Eilish’s breathy vocals were a hallmark of “chill” playlists on SoundCloud long before the music industry ever took notice. Eilish’s music, which found a broader audience on Spotify, was in turn celebrated by streaming services and the recording industry as exemplary of what breakthrough success can look like in the platform era. In 2017, music critics Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica of the New York Times coined the term Spotifycore to describe sonic qualities, like chill beats and hushed voices, that owed their popularity in part to the playlisting model. Pelly also notes that the parallel rise of “genre-less” artists like Post Malone, whose scrambling of styles from pop, R&B, and country can feel calculated for wide algorithmic appeal. The same intensified market logic holds across online “content” creation—as much for aspiring influencers on TikTok as for ambient producers using AI to flood platforms with low-quality “streambait” tracks.
Still, it is dizzying to watch a 125-year-old industry, one that earned $29.6 billion in global revenue in 2024, move so quickly to accommodate a relative upstart like Spotify, which entered the US market only in 2011. And the platform’s role continues to shift. As artist discovery increasingly moves to TikTok, for example, Spotify has taken on a new role as a secondary destination and searchable archive. Some enterprising musicians have sought to cultivate diversified audiences across these online services, as if anticipating that these platforms could go bust at any moment.
Where Pelly’sMood Machine takes Spotify as synecdochic of the larger system of streaming, the film scholar Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media seeks to theorize that system as a whole. The same forces of financialization and monopoly power that drove Spotify’s success have been no less transformative in film, television, and video games. Fittingly, deWaard’s titular motif comes from finance: Derivatives are a class of investment instruments whose value “derives” from shifts in the price of an underlying security, like a stock or bond. While they first gained notoriety with the mortgage-backed securities that sparked the 2008 financial crisis, derivatives have been a major motor of wealth creation on Wall Street since the 1980s. Derivatives trading is a way of monetizing risk, allowing investors to hedge against changes in prices and to capitalize on perceived opportunities in markets beyond more traditional securities.
In much the same way, the management of market risk has become a major consideration in the music, film, and television industries, which are increasingly cognizant of the terms of their relationships with investors. For institutional investors in particular—dominated by still another Big Three, the asset management firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—as well as for private equity giants like Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group, reliable returns on investment override all other concerns, giving rise to what deWaard calls “derivative media.” The effect is most evident in film, where “franchises, remakes, reboots, sequels, adaptations, cinematic universes,” and other downstream products have become ubiquitous. This broad category of commercial production starts to appear everywhere the more you understand it, dripping from inoffensive pop songs and family-friendly summer blockbusters.
It’s hardly a revelation that economic regimes shape and sometimes subordinate cultural production. (“Movies and radio no longer pretend to be art,” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in 1944. “The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.”) Yet deWaard does more than simply update this view for the age of global finance. He seeks to explain “how culture is now managed by Wall Street,” turning it “into a highly consolidated industry with rising inequality, further decreasing the diversity and heterogeneity it could provide the public sphere.”
In the book’s most striking passages, deWaard inspects the artifacts from across popular media for traces of the financial sector. In a chapter titled “Derivative Music and Speculative Hip-Hop,” he combs through Jay-Z’s song catalog for references to fashion labels and liquor brands, documenting a correlation between the brands mentioned and the investment practices of hip-hop’s first billionaire. At one point, for example, Jay-Z stopped name-dropping the champagne brand Cristal in favor of another, Ace of Spades, from which he stood to profit as a major investor. For the “musician-speculator,” deWaard writes, “word choices within lyrics are converted into fungible assets; multiplied by hundreds of rappers in thousands of songs, the textual marketplace becomes speculative.” Other chapters, on the “securitized sitcom” and “brandscape blockbuster,” take a similar tack, adapting the analysis to films and TV series including Space Jam and 30 Rock. “In the era of financialization, the text is now designed to facilitate the speculative process of buying and selling product placement, branding opportunities, cross-promotion, corporate synergy, and other economic relationships,” he writes.
Beyond its titular setting (a “branding mechanism for Rockefeller Plaza”), 30 Rock’s constant references to commercial products seem to willfully blur the line between real and fake product placement: Of the astonishing 722 brand mentions counted by deWaard, only eighty-five were designated as official product placements in the series credits. The series’ show-within-a-show format also casts a winking glance at the audience, with additional opportunities for advertising. DeWaard notes that 30 Rock routinely refers to other NBC series like Friends, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Cosby Show. “Though it might joke about its own low ratings and thus ability to sell advertising, 30 Rock is tremendously successful at behaving as an ongoing advertisement for a diverse range of NBCUniversal products,” he writes. The brand-centric worldbuilding of “this ‘conglomerate satire’ both satisfies and subverts a corporate mandate.”
While Hollywood studios have always been factories of the formulaic, the industry’s reliance on recycled intellectual property has notably intensified. Decades-old franchises like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Transformers, and the endless swill of superhero films produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios and Warner Brothers’ DC Studios have become some of the most profitable entities in the industry’s history, routinely breaking box office records and racking up tremendous returns for studios and their investors. Blockbusters like Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Matrix Resurrections, Ready Player One, and Wreck-It Ralph take this model to new heights. Not only are they all sequels to earlier films or adaptations from other media, but each prominently features characters from other titles in the sprawling “brandscapes” of their parent studios.
The results make the soap operas and adventure movies detested by Horkheimer and Adorno look like fine art. The plot of Space Jam: A New Legacy, for example, follows LeBron James to various planets in outer space, each of which depicts a different Warner Brothers property. The Wizard of Oz, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, DC Comics and Austin Powers are all represented, as are characters from Gremlins, Scooby-Doo, King Kong, and A Clockwork Orange—plus product placement from McDonald’s, Nike, Funko, Kraft Heinz, and General Mills. “Compelled by hedge funds and asset managers that drive the cultural industries toward more and more extraction,” deWaard writes. “Disney, Warner Brothers, Spielberg, and the rest of financialized Hollywood are pursuing their own version of flooding the zone with shit.”
While financial capital isn’t synonymous with capitalism, the two can be difficult to disentangle, as deWaard notes. He draws on the work of historians Giovanni Arrighi and Fernand Braudel to suggest that, seen on a long enough timeline, financialization forms a “recurring pattern within capitalism,” one that points towards an empire’s maturation, as well as its decline. “The ‘rise’ of finance capital in a particular capitalist development is merely its ‘rebirth’ within the larger capitalist system,” deWaard writes. And while finance capitalism, like neoliberalism, is an analytically imperfect term, he considers it a useful shorthand for the “inequality, precarity, and instability” that accompanies this recurring period, as well as the spread of practices born in the financial sector, like speculation and securitization, to many other aspects of social life.
Song catalogs themselves have become a lucrative asset class. Companies like Recognition Music Group (formerly Hipgnosis) have developed strategies for buying up the collected recordings of artists including Justin Bieber, Pusha T, Shakira, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with their publishing rights and other licensing options. Once an investment backwater, song rights saw a boom during the Covid pandemic, when artists’ income from touring had all but dried up. When Neil Young—an anti-streaming holdout who famously maintains an eccentric archive of obscure recordings on his website, and who spent years promoting his own high-fidelity portable music player—sold a 50 percent stake in his songwriting catalog to Recognition for an estimated $150 million in 2021, it seemed to signal new faith in investors’ ability to recoup returns in legacy catalogs over time. Numerous other “song management” firms, like Primary Wave, Round Hill, Reservoir, and Concord, as well as ventures launched by the Big Three labels, have pursued similar investments.
Live music has been no less overrun by monopolistic conglomerates. Founded in 1996, Live Nation emerged as a major player in the live entertainment market at the turn of the millennium, in part by acquiring smaller regional ventures. Live Nation’s grip on the industry tightened after its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster. The company now dominates American live music, controlling concert promotion, artist management, and ticketing for many of the country’s biggest musical acts, as well as a staggering percentage of major concert venues. In 2019, deWaard notes, the Department of Justice found that Live Nation was systematically “steering its artists and tours away from venues not using Ticketmaster,” yet prosecutors imposed only a few light-touch regulations in response. And in 2022, millions of fans trying to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour caused the Ticketmaster website to crash. Even once the site was back up, those lucky enough to snag tickets were slapped with exorbitant fees and deceptive prices, while tickets on the secondary market were sold at obscene markups. The backlash brought congressional inquiries into Live Nation’s ticketing practices, as well as multiple antitrust suits against the company that are still making their way through the federal courts.
The same asset management firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—that own enormous stakes in Netflix and Spotify are also among the biggest holders of Live Nation stock. They also own major stakes in Cumulus and iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the two main conglomerates in US commercial radio, as well as in media companies like Disney, Paramount, Comcast, AMC, Warner Brothers, and Warner Music Group. Each of these asset managers now routinely coordinates shareholder voting strategies with the other two, working to keep wages low and stock prices sky high, all while meeting “privately with management and board members in order to influence the direction of their investments.”
In their 2020 book on global home ownership and what they call the “asset economy,” sociologists Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings have suggested that the rising price of financial assets—whose returns have for decades surpassed those on labor—has given rise to a new politics of class based upon asset ownership rather than labor or even income. The ballooning cost of real estate and other assets has created a stark divide between owners and non-owners, lavishly rewarding those lucky enough to benefit while leaving workers and renters largely shut out, if newly politicized.
A similar claim could be made of the culture industries in their current state. The growing entrenchment of hedge funds, asset management firms, and private equity groups has put overwhelming pressure on media companies to slash costs to an absolute minimum while doing everything possible to ensure reliable returns. Aesthetic developments are recast in financial terms: Just as an asset, in Adkins, Cooper, and Konings’ words, “has a particular temporal structure” that “requires an upfront investment of (often borrowed) funds,” from which investors can extrapolate returns at measurable intervals, the cultural industries now operate on tight timelines with little room for risk. The genius of the derivative is to mathematically model that risk, the better to diffuse and distribute it for maximum profit.
Both Pelly and deWaard imagine alternatives to the systems they critique. As Pelly notes, labor organizing has a long history in the music industry: The American Federation of Musicians, founded in 1896, historically pushed back against the use of new music technologies (phonographs, radio, jukeboxes) to undermine the livelihood of live performers. Pelly also points to the nonprofit United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) as an example of how recording artists can organize to advocate for reform. In 2021, the organization led a series of protests at Spotify’s New York offices. The UMAW’s Justice at Spotify campaign pushed for an end to deceptive playlisting practices, and for a Living Wage for Musicians Act that would guarantee payments of at least one penny per stream. There are collectively owned or crowdfunded streaming services, like Resonate and Catalytic Sound, along with various streaming efforts initiated by public libraries in the US and internationally. Yet the basic inequality of streaming remains. “Rather than seek out another fix-all app, we should [acknowledge] that this very model fails to meet the needs of most independent artists and listeners,” she writes. “Supporting art is a different equation.”
DeWaard finds further models for reform. Actors, screenwriters, and other workers in film and television have long been organized in unions like the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the Writers Guild of America. When these organizations went on strike in 2023, a major demand was to raise the rates for residuals paid on a per-stream basis, updating an existing model that dated to the era of theatrical releases, pay-per-view, and broadcasting deals. The use of artificial intelligence in screenwriting likewise became a flashpoint, as it did in other areas of the industry, including visual effects and language localization. “The existential threat of generative AI hung heavy over the picket line like a dark cloud, threatening to replace workers and produce endlessly derivative content,” deWaard writes. As the product of endlessly recombined past sources, AI is in a sense the ultimate derivative medium.
At the regulatory level, antitrust policy can provide another check on financialized media monopolies. One of the few successes of the Biden administration was its appointment of commissioner Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission; under her leadership, the FTC filed major lawsuits against Amazon and Meta for their alleged anticompetitive behavior, and later blocked a merger between the microchip manufacturers Nvidia and Arm, among other monopolies. Khan has since left, but her influence can still be felt under Trump; the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta has continued with Trump appointee Andrew Ferguson, who has launched inquiries into surveillance-based price discrimination (even as he has reportedly called for less oversight on artificial intelligence and corporate mergers). DeWaard also urges regulatory reforms to curb the influence of the financial sector, including an end to stock buybacks and limits on dividend payments, both practices that companies use to plump up compensation to shareholding executives, rather than reinvest profits in R&D or other productive activity.
He further proposes combatting the predatory influence of private equity. The trade press in the music, film, and television industries, as he notes, has been devastated by private equity firms, hedge funds, and other “alternative” asset management firms, producing new conglomerates like Eldridge Industries and Penske Media Group, all while disincentivizing critical coverage of the devastation wrought by these investment practices. Even some of the derivative era’s trendiest upstarts are implicated. The film distributor A24, for example—whose auteurist ethos is sometimes likened to a moment of New Hollywood-esque realignment—was founded by former Guggenheim Partners executive Daniel Katz. Other recent film industry entrants like Neon and Mubi have received generous financial backing from funds like Sequoia Capital and Comerica Bank.
If creative IP has become a financialized asset class, this also makes it a potential point of activist leverage. In 2019, UMAW members launched their No Music for ICE campaign, calling on musicians to boycott Amazon platforms until the company ended its contracts with ICE. In 2021, numerous musicians removed their music from Spotify after Daniel Ek made a €100 million personal investment in the AI military technology firm Helsing.5 And at last year’s South By Southwest, UMAW worked with local group Austin for Palestine to organize a far-reaching boycott of the festival, whose sponsors include the US Army and numerous military contractors. Similar demands for divestment have animated strikes at recent film festivals like the 2025 Berlinale.
It can be difficult to see what purpose cultural criticism serves in a moment of such rapid change for the culture industries. If “derivative media” is the reigning spirit of our times, saturated with shoddy reboots and padded with robotic background music, is there still any reason to engage with these works as critics? We might follow the example of Horkheimer and Adorno, who simply rejected Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, and other mass cultural products as mere instruments of capitalist domination; yet their mandarin Marxism feels retrograde in a time when the boundaries of high and low taste are far less sharply drawn. In their own ways, Pelly and deWaard both suggest paths forward for criticism, drawn from their engagements with political economy.
In Pelly’s account, streaming as a medium is inseparable from the economic forces that have made it ubiquitous in everyday life, and to be an effective critic today requires close engagement with these economic factors. A kind of vernacular historical materialism underlies her premise that the musical styles of Billie Eilish or Post Malone emanate from the financialized, algorithmically conditioned environment of streaming itself, as well as deWaard’s ruthlessly symptomatic readings of 30 Rock and Space Jam. From there, both turn to critique the funding structures and production process that form the connective tissue between these economic and aesthetic categories. The critic of derivative media must be no less fluent in the language of boardrooms and earnings calls than that of sitcom dialogue or rap lyrics.
The spirit of Fredric Jameson looms over such work. Knowingly or not, both Pelly and deWaard engage questions that the late Marxist critic put forward decades ago. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson suggests that Marxist literary criticism needs modes of interpretation that are able to mediate between the formal features of artistic works and the economic conditions of their production, without reducing them to simplistic economic narratives or descriptions of aesthetic inspiration uncoupled from material conditions. This “allegorical” approach to critique propelled much of his subsequent work, including his 1991 masterpiece Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, with its famous readings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Andy Warhol’s pop paintings, and nostalgia films like American Graffiti.
The irony of aesthetic life under capitalism, as Jameson also reminded us, has always been that even the most debased cultural products contain, albeit in ideologically distorted forms, the promise of a way of life liberated from the instrumentalizing, commodifying drives of capital. If the cultural logic of finance capital—with its degraded platforms, securitized song catalogs, and “derivative media”—is the terrain that the critic must inhabit, then it represents a shared site of struggle with workers from across the music, film, and television industries. It is in this contested landscape where the future of the culture industries will be decided.
In 2018, the definition of a “music streaming service” touted by Spotify executives specifically excluded online video services—namely YouTube, which doubles as an incredibly popular destination for listening to music, and at the time had more than ten times as many users as Spotify. Additionally, the company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) through a process known as a “direct listing,” rather than a more traditional initial public offering (IPO), hence my use of the less precise word “debut.” ↩
Spotify announced in September that Ek would be stepping down as CEO. Beginning January 1, 2026, Ek will serve as Spotify’s executive chair, with the CEO role divided between co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström. ↩
At roughly $0.0035 per stream, the rate was egregiously low even by standards previously set for digital downloads; Spotify was able to justify the policy to labels with the promise of returns at scale. ↩
None of this is limited to the music industry. The specter of monopoly has hung heavy over film and television since the 1920s, when the Hollywood studio system and its eight major companies first took hold of the American motion picture industry. Video streaming services, led by Netflix, have challenged this status quo, not least through their vast output of proprietary content that can only be streamed on their respective platforms. Unlike in the music industry, this ability to control both distribution and production has a specific historical precedent in American antitrust law. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that Paramount, along with the other major Hollywood studios, could no longer operate movie theaters used solely to distribute films that it produced. Yet Netflix has faced no comparable challenge. Meanwhile, the marketplace is now saturated with competing services created by the film and television studios themselves (Paramount+, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock), and by technology companies (YouTube TV, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime Video), all following Netflix’s model. ↩
In June 2025, Daniel Ek followed this with another €600 million investment in Helsing through his investment firm, Prima Materia. In a statement shared with The Financial Times, Ek said that Prima Materia was “doubling down” on its 2021 investment, adding that he is “100 percent convinced that [the investment in military defense technology] is the right thing for Europe.” ↩
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