How Platform Capitalism Devalued the Music Industry

This essay was originally commissioned by online electronic music magazine and community platform Resident Advisor for its 2010–2019 End of the Decade run of features. Upon reading the essay, Resident Advisor chose to cancel the project citing issues with the essay’s position and focus on major shifts in the standards of music consumption and criticism in the 2010s alongside declining album sales in an increasingly oversaturated digital market. Over the course of a decade the music industry widened and diversified from traditional written artist profiles and reviews by staff journalists to paid media advertising and marketing communications initiatives at the cost of music’s personal and economic value.

In the book Platform Capitalism political theorist Nick Srnicek reflected on the abstract value system of data in a “knowledge economy” developed in the start-up tech industry after the global financial downturn in 2008. Srnicek defines platforms as digital infrastructures that enable individuals to interact within the roles of a user or producer. A platform provides and regulates a space with tools for users to build and exchange their own products in a “lean production model” that both outsources all of its labor to free or freelance workers and uses data as a resource to optimize production and intel on consumer preferences, effectively creating a…