By Sepehr Haghighi

In the 21st century, technological transformation has not merely introduced new tools into capitalism; it has affected organizational forms, modes of exploitation, and the regime of accumulation itself.[1] Information technology and the internet have become infrastructures we use in our everyday lives, and industries that once relied on tangible circulation have been modified for continuous digital access.[2] The music industry exemplifies this modification. Streaming has risen to the dominant revenue model, and this shift also includes the restructuring of the industry’s economic model.[3] The issue here is not simply whether streaming ‘pays enough,’ but how the system of distribution reshapes power dynamics between platforms, record labels, producers, and artists, and also how the behavioral patterns produced by that system reproduce themselves across actors involved.

Rasmus Fleischer uses the term ‘Spotification’ to name Spotify’s broader model for commodifying and consuming media products beyond music.[4] This term points to a logic rather than a firm. Spotification is a platform-economic form that makes access – not ownership – the commodity. What the listener pays for is not a record, but a subscription to a catalog. A good that was once accessed as a discrete unit becomes a continuous service. From the perspective of political economy, such a shift matters because it changes what is measurable, what is negotiable, and where value can be captured. It also changes what kinds of behavior ‘makes sense’ for each actor, and embeds this ‘making sense’ into norms, as a platformed distribution of the sensible that fixes what counts as a rational conduct.[5]

Spotify is best understood through the concept of the platform as defined by Nick Srnicek: ‘digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact.’[6] Platforms are intermediaries; they rely on network effects and embody politics in their architecture and rules. As intermediary infrastructures, they do not typically own the means of production of the goods they circulate. In music streaming, the content is produced by artists who own, at least formally, the means of production through home setups or contracted services that they pay for. Yet it is Spotify that governs access to listeners, defines how attention is organized, and dictates the conditions under which circulation is monetized. The platform’s reliance on network effects is crucial here. It must continuously expand and stabilize its user base to generate revenue. Therefore, its strategies – playlisting systems, recommendation engines, frictionless interfaces, data-driven personalization – are aimed toward expansion and user lock-in.[7]

The central issue here emerges from the mismatch between where value is created and where value is captured. The economic value of music originates in labor that is ‘neither tangible nor predictable,’ therefore not precisely measurable by conventional industrial metrics.[8] That labor does not end with the production of a song. It extends into a second layer which is the constant promotional work demanded by the platform ecosystem, including self-branding and content circulation on social media, in the hope of feeding the streaming algorithms and growing audience reach.[9] This expanded labor increases streams, which increases platform engagement, which in turn increases the platform’s attractiveness to advertisers and investors. The platform, therefore, profits from a form of labor that it does not directly pay for. Thus, the platform’s political economy is built on a dependency on artists’ labor, but not necessarily artists’ consent, since monopolization leaves the artists with limited choices for publication of their works.

This is why Spotification should be seen as something beyond ordinary exploitation. Exploitation, in the classical sense, is based on owning the means of production and capturing the surplus value created. Here, laborers are often protected by labor law. What streaming platforms establish, however, can be defined as an expropriative predatory model. Nancy Fraser’s concept of expropriation refers to a process of ‘confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital’s circuits of self-expansion.’[10] Expropriation differs from exploitation because it targets subjects who lack the protections that wage laborers possess, leaving them structurally exposed. In the streaming economy, artists function as formally independent, atomized subjects. They are not salaried workers within the platform firm. They are suppliers whose income depends on rules they do not set. The platform’s scale and market dominance – reinforced by network effects – renders exit an irrational move. The artist may ‘choose’ to participate, but only in the sense that the system allows choice when no other viable alternatives are present. The relation becomes predatory in Mehrdad Vahabi’s sense: the predator appropriates the subject’s ability to escape or hide.[11] Streaming platforms appropriate not the artist’s physical freedom, but their economic and cultural capacity to withdraw without exiting their ecosystem.

Here, Spotify’s commitments to ‘independent artists,’ such as mentoring programs and discovery initiatives, should be understood within this predatory perspective. Programs like Fresh Finds are not necessarily philanthropic, but are integral to market expansion.[12][13] By continuously drawing new artists into the catalog, the platform increases the depth and diversity of supply, strengthens its claim to universality, and tightens the dependence of both listeners and creators on its infrastructure. Artists are encouraged to interpret visibility as a reward based on meritocracy, even though it is accessible through systems optimized for platform growth. The behavioral pattern produced here is competitive atomization. Artists are pushed to compete for algorithmic attention and to build their careers utilizing dashboard metrics. This is not a side-effect, but a political-economic model in action, reproducing neoliberal tenets of competition and self-responsibilization in the realm of creative labor.[14]

This model’s power dynamics do not remain limited to the platform. Spotification reproduces itself in the conduct of intermediary firms, especially record labels and distributors. In the streaming era, labels frequently capture a majority share of streaming revenue, while artists have to pay back the costs of their production, such as studio time and marketing, from their share of revenue before they can make any money.[15] The label’s position offers a secondary gateway to visibility by playlist pitching, marketing muscle, data analytics, and industry connections. Once the platform defines circulation as a competitive struggle via algorithmic procedures, labels adapt by intensifying their own terms to secure more revenue. Thus, the industry develops a layered predatory structure, starting with the platform dominating attention and setting the monetary rules, then by labels dominating access to competitive visibility within their own rules. Each layer reproduces the other’s logic. The platform’s expropriative behavior becomes the template for the label, and the label, by normalizing these terms, reinforces artists’ dependence on the platform. Predation becomes systemic, no longer limited to a ‘bad actor,’ but to an economic form that leads to similar behaviors across actors.

This reproduction also leads to the long-term persistence of low incomes among most artists. Here, precarity is the functional outcome of this economy. As Mangset and colleagues argue in their broader account of how low artistic income tends to reproduce across generations of artists, structural conditions normalize precarity and reframe it as the natural state of cultural work.[16] Streaming intensifies this by widening the gap between the highly visible few and the vast majority who remain statistically insignificant. The platform economy, therefore, strengthens inequality while masking it with the rhetoric of openness – a rhetoric that implies anyone can upload, anyone can be discovered, and success is supposedly a matter of ‘engagement.’ Yet, here, engagement is distributed within a system that favors scale, continuity, and specific ways of marketing. The majority’s low income is not a failure of effort; it is the result of a system in which value extraction depends on expropriation and predation.

Arguing that the platform model is expropriative and predatory, the issue is not only limited to payment rates but also to bargaining power. The current model positions artists as isolated entrepreneurs, each negotiating individually with firms and platforms that operate globally and algorithmically. This is the condition under which predation thrives. Atomized subjects, unavoidable rules, and a lack of alternatives all contribute to that. The platform economy, as Srnicek notes, tends toward monopolization because network effects reward concentration.[17] In such a context, the behavioral pattern of treating platform terms as unavoidable facts starts to ‘make sense’ and becomes widespread. The system reproduces itself through this procedure of ‘making sense’ – a procedure in which artists comply because they must, intermediaries extract because they can, and platforms expand because compliance and extraction make expansion profitable.

Consequently, what ‘makes sense’ here gets reproduced in the conduct of artists when they themselves become buyers on platforms such as Fiverr. Here, the online labor platform structurally privileges buyers through search rankings and review systems, keeping sellers independent and outside collective wage protections.[18] This creates a space where engineers and producers compete as atomized service providers in a global oversupply of labor, leading to systematic price undercutting.[19][20] Within this setting, artists’ rational survival strategies – seeking the most efficient mixing/mastering or visual services – render as an expropriation of underpaid engineering labor. Importantly, the point is not to blame artists, but to show that Spotification creates a code of conduct that reproduces itself across the actors involved in the system. Artists whose share of revenue is micronized and expropriated repeat the same behavioral pattern when hiring engineers, also in a predatory way, since – given the monopolistic trait of platform models – leading platforms such as Fiverr push engineers and producers to utilize them to offer their services, effectively entrapping them.

Additionally, a parallel reproduction occurs on the listener’s side. As mentioned, Spotification makes access the commodity. Subscription streaming has become the core consumption norm worldwide.[21][22] This has led to standardizing a low monthly fee – typically around the US$9.99 baseline in major markets and often cheaper in emerging ones – as the user’s contribution, while granting near-universal catalog access for much less than the cost of owning even a handful of albums.[23] Yet paid services remain uneven and globally price-sensitive. Industry forecasts stress that much of future growth depends on expanding into regions where paid streaming penetration is still less than 10 percent and subscription fees may need to go lower to convert listeners into paying subscribers.[24] Considering hundreds of millions of free-tier listeners alongside 752 million paid subscribers, widespread service availability at minimal cost becomes normalized.[25] Under this dominant model, this cheap mass access leads to the micronization of royalties for most artists and, on the other hand, increased accumulation at the top for platforms. Consequently, users collectively reproduce an expropriative behavior by treating ultra-cheap access as a rational cultural value.

Spotification has led to a structural shift in the political economy of music, ranging from commodity sales to access services; clear wage-like payments and unionized wages to extremely low royalties and payments; negotiated choice of mediation to predatory enclosure; and collective cultural labor and inclusion to individualized, competitive, efficiency-driven behavior. Streaming did not merely modernize the music industry, but led to a regime that reorganizes power dynamics downward, concentrates control systems upward, and reproduces itself through the very strategies artists, intermediaries, and even users adopt to secure advantage and survive. Therefore, any serious confrontation with this expropriative predatory system should address the platforms and the way they produce behaviors, normalize predation, and turn expropriation and predation into an everyday condition within the cultural ecosystem.

Author bio: Sepehr Haghighi is a producer, musician, sound artist, and interdisciplinary researcher based in Norway. His work focuses on music technology, sound art, cultural production, and political economy.

Notes and Citations

[1] Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).

[2] Donna L. Hoffman, Thomas P. Novak, and Alladi Venkatesh, ‘Has the Internet Become Indispensable? Empirical Findings and Model Development,’ Communications of the ACM 47, no. 7 (2004): 37-42. https://doi.org/10.1145/1005817.1005818.

[3] M. Bass, ‘Year-End 2023 RIAA Revenue Statistics,’ Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 2024; Stephen Cameron, ‘Past, Present and Future: Music Economics at the Crossroads,’ Journal of Cultural Economics 40, no. 1 (2016): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-015-9263-4; Onur Kasap and Alper Yalcintas, ‘Commodification 2.0: How Does Spotify Provide Its Services for Free?,’ Review of Radical Political Economics 53, no. 1 (2020): 157-172. https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613420924163; Sebastian Mühlbach and Payal Arora, ‘Behind the Music: How Labor Changed for Musicians Through the Subscription Economy,’ First Monday 25, no. 4 (2020).

[4] Rasmus Fleischer, ‘Universal Spotification? The Shifting Meanings of “Spotify” as a Model for the Media Industries,’ Popular Communication 19, no. 1 (2021): 14-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2020.1744607.

[5] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).

[6] Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 30.

[7] Paul Roetzer, ‘How Spotify Uses AI (and What You Can Learn from It),’ Marketing AI Institute, n.d.; Kasap and Yalcintas, ‘Commodification 2.0.’

[8] Mühlbach and Arora, ‘Behind the Music.’

[9] N. Iliev, ‘Social Media’s Impact on Music Promotion: How Artists Can Market Themselves Online,’ Forbes, December 11, 2023.

[10] Nancy Fraser, ‘Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson,’ Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 163-178. https://doi.org/10.1086/685814.

[11] Mehrdad Vahabi, ‘A Positive Theory of the Predatory State,’ Public Choice 168, nos. 3-4 (2016): 153-175. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0354-3.

[12] A. K. Justice, ‘Spotify Is Making a Pledge to Mentor and Market Indie Artists,’ Rolling Stone, May 26, 2021.

[13] Spotify, ‘Spotify’s New Fresh Finds Program Helps Independent Artists Build Their Careers,’ Spotify Newsroom, May 26, 2021.

[14] C. Bird, ‘We Need a Socialist Spotify,’ Jacobin, November 5, 2021.

[15] Yngvar Kjus, ‘Twists and Turns in the 360 Deal: Spinning the Risks and Rewards of Artist-Label Relations in the Streaming Era,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2021): 341-360. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211044731.

[16] Per Mangset, Mari Torvik Heian, Bjarne Kleppe, and Knut Løyland, ‘Why Are Artists Getting Poorer? About the Reproduction of Low Income Among Artists,’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 24, no. 4 (2016): 539-558. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2016.1218860.

[17] Srnicek, Platform Capitalism.

[18] Jason Whalley, Volkmar Stocker, and Christoph Lutz, ‘A Platform for Doers? Fiverr and the Gig Economy,’ SSRN Electronic Journal, 2024.

[19] European Training Foundation, The Future of Work – New Forms of Employment in the Eastern Partnership Countries: Platform Work (Turin: ETF, 2021).

[20] Fairwork, Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2025: Advancing Standards in Digital Labour and AI Supply Chain Governance (Oxford/Berlin: Fairwork Project, 2025).

[21] IFPI, Global Music Report 2025: State of the Industry (London: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 2025).

[22] ‘Music Revenues Rise Again in 2024, Boosted by Streaming Subscriptions, Report Shows,’ Reuters, March 19, 2025.

[23] Sindre Hjelmbrekke, From Ownership to Access: The Economics of Music Streaming (PhD diss., Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2021).

[24] Goldman Sachs, Music in the Air: Focus on Monetisation, Emerging Markets and AI – Global Music Industry Forecasts, 2025.

[25] R. A. Lee, ‘Music Streaming Statistics 2025: Global Trends,’ SQ Magazine, October 2, 2025.