By Sepehr Haghighi

In the 21st century, technological transformation has introduced new tools into capitalism and affected 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 that has emerged in this context is how the system of distribution reshapes power dynamics between platforms, record labels, producers, and artists, together with the behavioral patterns that this system produces and reproduces across the 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 that extends beyond the firm itself. Spotification is a platform-economic form in which access becomes the commodity and ownership loses its former centrality. The listener pays for a subscription to a catalog, and a good that was once accessed as a discrete unit becomes a continuous service. From the perspective of political economy, such a shift changes what is measurable and 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 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.’[1, p. 43] Platforms are intermediaries; they rely on network effects and embody politics in their architecture and rules. As intermediary infrastructures, they typically circulate goods whose means of production remain outside the platform firm. In music streaming, the content is produced by artists who formally own the means of production through home setups or contracted services that they pay for. Spotify 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.[6]

One example of this control can be observed in Spotify’s track-monetization policy. Since April 2024, a track must reach at least 1,000 streams during the previous twelve months and meet an undisclosed minimum number of unique listeners to be included in the recorded-music royalty-pool calculation.[7] When announcing the policy in November 2023, Spotify stated that tens of millions of tracks had between 1 and 1,000 annual streams and that their small payments amounted to approximately US$40 million per year. Importantly, the size of the royalty pool remains unchanged, and the amount is redistributed through streamshare among eligible tracks. At the time, Spotify also stated that 99.5 percent of streams were of tracks with at least 1,000 annual streams.[8] This redistribution leaves Spotify’s own revenue share unchanged. The concern here lies in the platform’s capacity to define the point at which streamed cultural production becomes economically recognizable within its allocation system. Tracks below the threshold continue to be streamed and participate in the circulation of music. The platform establishes a minimum threshold of economically recognizable cultural labor and reallocates the value below that threshold according to the existing hierarchy of attention. The undemocratic character of this arrangement lies in the concentration of decision-making power over the allocation criteria, through which the platform determines whose cultural labor qualifies for remuneration and how the resulting value is distributed.
Spotify’s control over access, attention, and monetization shapes the relationship between the labor on which the platform depends and the allocation of the value generated through it. 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 difficult to measure precisely through conventional industrial metrics.[9] That labor continues beyond the production of a song. It extends into a second layer consisting of 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.[10] This expanded labor increases streams, which increases platform engagement, which in turn increases the platform’s attractiveness to advertisers and investors. The platform, therefore, benefits from labor performed outside a direct employment and payment relation. Thus, the platform’s political economy is built on a dependency on artists’ labor under conditions in which monopolization leaves artists with limited choices for publication of their works.

This is why Spotification can be understood as an expropriative predatory model that extends beyond ordinary exploitation. Exploitation, in the classical sense, is based on owning the means of production and capturing the surplus value created. Wage laborers can also receive protections through labor law. 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.’[11] Expropriation 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 and 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’s formal choice takes place within a system with few viable alternatives. The relation then becomes predatory in Mehrdad Vahabi’s sense: the predator appropriates the subject’s ability to escape or hide.[12] In streaming, this appropriation concerns the artist’s economic and cultural capacity to withdraw without exiting a significant part of the ecosystem.

Another example in this regard, can be observed in Spotify’s treatment of Premium subscriptions after audiobooks were introduced. In 2024, Spotify began classifying relevant Premium plans in the United States as bundles that included music and audiobook access, which changed the statutory calculation of mechanical royalties paid to songwriters and publishers. The Mechanical Licensing Collective challenged this classification in court, and in January 2025 a federal judge dismissed the claim, finding that the audiobook service had more than nominal value and that the subscription qualified as a bundle under the applicable regulation.[13] In June 2026, the National Music Publishers’ Association estimated that bundling by Spotify and Amazon Music had reduced mechanical royalties to songwriters and publishers by nearly US$500 million since 2024, with about US$480 million attributed to Spotify’s practice.[14] Here, the platform’s ability to reorganize the form in which access is sold becomes directly connected to the calculation of remuneration. The commodity is administratively redefined through bundling, and the definition itself has material consequences for the amount distributed downstream. Within the framework of predation developed here, this becomes meaningful, as the actor governing access also possesses considerable capacity to shape the commercial form used in the royalty calculation.

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, in this context, are integral to market expansion.[15] 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 listeners and creators on its infrastructure. Artists are encouraged to interpret visibility as a reward based on meritocracy, even though access to that visibility is organized 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 a political-economic model that reproduces neoliberal tenets of competition and self-responsibilization in the realm of creative labor.[16]

This control over visibility can also be observed in Discovery Mode. Spotify allows eligible artist teams and rights holders to select tracks for its recommendation system and applies a 30 percent commission to the recording royalties generated by streams of those tracks in Discovery Mode contexts.[17] Visibility, in this case, becomes connected directly to the artist’s royalty share. This matter has also reached the level of European policy. In January 2024, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for a fairer distribution of streaming revenues, greater transparency in algorithms and recommendation systems, and also action concerning schemes in which authors accept lower or no revenues in exchange for greater visibility.[18] Considering the argument developed here, the importance of this mechanism lies in the organization of attention itself as an economic relation. The artist is encouraged to allocate part of the revenue generated by a work to increase its chances of reaching listeners within an infrastructure whose recommendation system is controlled by the same platform.

This model’s power dynamics extend through intermediary firms, especially record labels and distributors. In the streaming era, labels frequently capture a majority share of streaming revenue. Artists may also have to pay back the costs of their production, such as studio time and marketing, from their share of revenue before receiving income.[19] The label’s position offers a secondary gateway to visibility through playlist pitching, marketing muscle, data analytics, and industry connections. Once the platform defines circulation as a competitive struggle via algorithmic procedures, labels retain considerable control over contractual access to revenue. Contractual outcomes vary. In the UK for instance, the UK Competition and Markets Authority found that average royalty rates in new major-label artist deals rose from 19.7 percent in 2012 to 23.3 percent in 2021.[20] Thus, the industry develops a layered predatory structure, starting with the platform dominating attention and setting the monetary rules, followed 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 therefore becomes systemic and takes the form of an economic structure that produces 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.[21] 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 under a rhetoric of openness – a rhetoric that implies 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. Thus, the majority’s low income follows from a system in which value extraction depends on expropriation and predation.

Arguing that the platform model is expropriative and predatory, the issue includes payment rates and bargaining power. The current model positions artists as isolated entrepreneurs, whose access to income is mediated by contracts 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.[1] 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.

Concerns regarding bargaining power have also become more explicit in European policy. A European Commission study published in 2025 examined contractual practices and their effects on creator remuneration and bargaining position.[22] Such developments reflect growing institutional attention to the unequal bargaining capacities through which streaming income is mediated.

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.[23] This creates a space where engineers and producers compete as atomized service providers in a global oversupply of labor, leading to systematic price undercutting.[24] Within this setting, artists’ rational survival strategies – seeking the most efficient mixing/mastering or visual services – can produce an expropriation of underpaid engineering labor. Importantly, the concern here is the code of conduct that Spotification reproduces across the actors involved in the system, and moral blame of the individual artist remains outside this argument. 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.[25] 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, granting near-universal catalog access for much less than the cost of owning even a handful of albums.[26] 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 less than 10 percent[27] and subscription fees may need to go lower to convert listeners into paying subscribers. Considering hundreds of millions of free-tier listeners alongside 837 million users of paid streaming subscription accounts, widespread service availability at minimal cost becomes normalized.[28] Under this dominant model, cheap mass access contributes to the micronization of royalties for most artists and 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, from commodity sales to access services, from clear wage-like payments and unionized wages to extremely low royalties and payments, from negotiated forms of mediation to predatory enclosure, and from collective cultural labor and inclusion to individualized, competitive, efficiency-driven behavior. The economic scale of this system has continued to expand. Spotify reported more than US$11 billion in payments to the music industry for 2025 and stated that independent artists and labels accounted for half of the royalties.[29] Considering that growth, the question of how revenue is allocated and under what conditions becomes more relevant everyday. Streaming has established a regime that reorganizes power dynamics downward, concentrates control systems upward, and reproduces itself through the strategies artists, intermediaries, and users adopt to secure advantage and survive. Therefore, any serious confrontation with this expropriative predatory system should address the platforms and the ways they produce behaviors, normalize predation, and turn expropriation and predation into an everyday condition within the cultural ecosystem.

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?,’ Communications of the ACM 47, no. 7 (2004): 37–42.

[3] Matthew Bass, Year-End 2023 RIAA Revenue Statistics, Recording Industry Association of America, 2024; Samuel Cameron, ‘Past, Present and Future: Music Economics at the Crossroads,’ Journal of Cultural Economics 40, no. 1 (2016): 1–12; Orçun Kasap and Altuğ Yalçıntaş, ‘Commodification 2.0: How Does Spotify Provide Its Services for Free?,’ Review of Radical Political Economics 53, no. 1 (2021): 157–172; Saskia 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.

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

[6] Mike Kaput, ‘How Spotify Uses AI (And What You Can Learn from It),’ Marketing AI Institute, January 26, 2024; Orçun Kasap and Altuğ Yalçıntaş, ‘Commodification 2.0: How Does Spotify Provide Its Services for Free?,’ Review of Radical Political Economics 53, no. 1 (2021): 157–172.

[7] Spotify, ‘Track Monetization Eligibility,’ Spotify Support, accessed September 16, 2026.

[8] Spotify, ‘Modernizing Our Royalty System to Drive an Additional $1 Billion toward Emerging and Professional Artists,’ November 21, 2023, updated April 1, 2024; Spotify, ‘Track Monetization Eligibility,’ Spotify Support, accessed September 16, 2026.

[9] Saskia Mühlbach and Payal Arora, ‘Behind the Music: How Labor Changed for Musicians through the Subscription Economy,’ First Monday 25, no. 4 (2020).

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

[11] Nancy Fraser, ‘Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson,’ Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 163–178, especially 166.

[12] Mehrdad Vahabi, ‘A Positive Theory of the Predatory State,’ Public Choice 168, nos. 3–4 (2016): 153–175.

[13] Blake Brittain, ‘Spotify Defeats US Licensing Group’s Lawsuit over Royalties,’ Reuters, January 29, 2025.

[14] Ashley King, ‘Spotify and Amazon Music’s Bundling Shenanigans Have Cost Music Publishers Nearly $500 Million Since 2024, NMPA Reveals,’ Digital Music News, June 11, 2026, republished by the National Music Publishers’ Association.

[15] Samantha Hissong, ‘Spotify Is Making a Pledge to Mentor and Market Indie Artists,’ Rolling Stone, May 26, 2021; Spotify, ‘Spotify’s New Fresh Finds Program Helps Independent Artists Build Their Careers,’ Spotify Newsroom, May 26, 2021.

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

[17] Spotify, ‘Using Discovery Mode in Spotify for Artists,’ Spotify Support, accessed September 16, 2026.

[18] European Parliament, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Conditions for Authors in the European Music Streaming Market,’ resolution of January 17, 2024, 2023/2054(INI), P9_TA(2024)0020, paragraph 12.

[19] Spotify, ‘Royalties Guide,’ Spotify for Artists, accessed September 16, 2026; 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 (2022): 463–478.

[20] Competition and Markets Authority, Music and Streaming Market Study: Final Report, ‘Executive Summary,’ November 29, 2022.

[21] Per Mangset, Mari Torvik Heian, Bård 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 (2018): 539–558.

[22] European Commission, ‘Commission Publishes Study on Contractual Practices Affecting the Transfer of Copyright and Related Rights,’ March 27, 2025.

[23] Jason Whalley, Volker Stocker, and Christoph Lutz, ‘A Platform for Doers? Fiverr and the Gig Economy,’ working paper, April 19, 2024, SSRN.

[24] European Training Foundation, The Future of Work – New Forms of Employment in the Eastern Partnership Countries: Platform Work (Turin: ETF, 2021); Fairwork, Fairwork Cloudwork Ratings 2025: Advancing Standards in Digital Labour and AI Supply Chain Governance (Oxford/Berlin: Fairwork, 2025).

[25] IFPI, Global Music Report 2025: State of the Industry (London: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 2025); Marie-Louise Gumuchian, ‘Music Revenues Rise Again in 2024, Boosted by Streaming Subscriptions, Report Shows,’ Reuters, March 19, 2025.

[26] Sigbjørn Hjelmbrekke, From Ownership to Access: The Economics of Music Subscription Services (PhD diss., Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2021), 43–44.

[27] Murray Stassen, ‘Emerging Markets, Superfans, and Price Rises: 7 Takeaways from Goldman Sachs’ New “Music in the Air” Report,’ Music Business Worldwide, June 3, 2025.

[28] IFPI, Global Music Report 2026: State of the Industry (London: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 2026); Spotify, Q4 2025 Update, February 10, 2026, key performance indicators (ad-supported monthly active users).

[29] Charlie Hellman, ‘From $11B in 2025 Payouts to What We’re Building for Artists in 2026,’ Spotify Newsroom, January 28, 2026.

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