Words by: Fox Keane (he/him)
Did Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek really make $345 million just last year—more than any artist has made on Spotify ever? Did Disney really try to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit because the victim’s family had signed up for a one-month Disney+ trial ~four years beforehand? Had Bandcamp, one of the last bastions of good music writing, been sold and gutted by Epic and given over to Songtradr, with only a day’s foreknowledge to founder Ethan Diamond?
For some of us, ethical concerns about art may feel secondary. Opinions, it seems, don’t come cheap: on top of rising living costs, a recession and a serious rise in unemployment since 2023, access to media is becoming a luxury. Headlines like the above should be very familiar to us now, and a dire warning: a warning about streaming.
Our ability to watch, read and listen is mediated almost entirely by corporations who follow the lone star of profit alone. Subscription fees climb faster than people can afford them, quality is paywalled like never before and only in recent years have people begun to seriously critique these platforms.
According to NZ On Air’s 2023 Where Are the Audiences? survey, 57% of Kiwis ages 15+ use video streaming services daily. Compared to only 6% reported in the 2014 survey, that’s one hell of an increase. NZOA’s chief executive Cameron Harland finds that “audiences on demand are growing”, and claims that “the future of media is clearly now on digital platforms”. This applies to music and audiobooks, too: currently, over 33% of Kiwis use Spotify alone, which is almost as much as radio (39%). According to The Infinite Dial 2022 findings, Spotify is the most used online audio brand in New Zealand by a whopping 55% majority.
Wellington’s own Vera Ellen put forth that music streaming sites are “completely unsustainable”. We got talking about Spotify: while for consumers it’s a dream, the service is utterly “terrible for artists, and could be way better.” Spotify isn’t even the worst of them: Amazon music pays a mere $0.00402 USD per stream, with Soundcloud even less at $0.0019 USD per stream. That’s not to say Spotify’s much better—there are plenty of other services that offer higher payouts to artists.
But even these are slim pickings. Take Vera’s latest album Ideal Home Noise, as a $27 CD at Flying Nun Records—to make that money from Tidal (at $0.021 NZD per stream), you would have to listen through the entire album roughly 1,285 times before her label sees the same return!
It’s not just creators that lose out. Since COVID, streaming companies globally have changed a lot about their services: Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ both introduced premium plans that pushed the high quality customers used to have behind a higher fee, depriving them of the original service they subscribed to. Netflix’s infamous Basic plan offers shockingly poor quality—720p—for the price of $14.99 per month, while its Premium plan, offering 4K quality and priced at $27.99 a month, is far beyond an acceptable expense for most Kiwis.
Outside of streaming however, this quality just doesn’t come cheap. Ownership of, rather than access to media is becoming increasingly uncommon for people all over the world. Gone are the days of the boxset, and the towers of CDs your parents mysteriously accumulated. Blockbuster is ancient history, and in this ailing economy, even the price tag of books is becoming harder to justify.
So what? It’s cheaper to pay for Spotify Premium or Netflix now than buying copies of all the albums and movies and TV you’d ever want to watch or have done already. Indeed, ownership is expensive: do I pay around $100 NZD a year for Spotify Premium ($200 if not a student), or do I pay the same amount for four albums at best?
The same is true for video: do I spend little over $300 NZD a year for “unlimited” movies, or buy them directly? Usually, films can only be bought physically. Even when buying them online, you’re often only purchasing access for as long as the site is up—so you might as well bite the bullet, right? For most of us, subscriptions are simply more economical.
But digital streaming services reserve the right to change or remove content without notice. This is because these platforms are only buying temporary licences to show their products (unless made by the parent company, like Netflix Originals). So while owning the content personally is lossless, only having access is really rolling the dice as to what you’ll get to keep watching.
A certain sense of institutional invulnerability seems to pervade these applications, too: there is nothing stopping a streaming platform from revoking or being forced to revoke content because they do not own the content. In other words, they set the terms; they are not beholden to give their customers specific media. If a platform were to shut down, you would have spent hundreds of dollars on nothing; in essence, by subscribing to these companies, you are gambling on both of your fortunes.
“But I can’t buy every song I listen to!” No one can, and no one should have to. There are plenty of good reasons to stream: it’s cheaper than cable, and on-demand in a way cable or buying media directly aren’t. Let’s not forget that buying video online is basically impossible, too.
But the ethical considerations are becoming harder to ignore. Besides the fact streaming platforms show very little return to their contributors, these platforms often have you at their mercy when it comes to how much they want you to fork out. Despite Netflix seeing a $100 billion USD increase in company worth during COVID, and an increase of 26 million subscribers in the first financial quarter alone, the company increased their Standard and Premium plans by $1 and $2 US dollars respectively. This followed a long history of price hikes, and preceded a 2022 change, where they introduced ads to one of their plans for the first time. Vera said that “art should be for everyone”, a viewpoint extolled by streaming services—but it is growing increasingly clear that we are not their focus.
Though it would be difficult to entirely abandon streaming, there are alternative—and free—ways to find movies, books and music out there. And, if you’re looking for a better way to buy, we've got you covered.
There’s this weird misconception I keep hearing about libraries—that it’s a hard or long-winded process to get in that system. In Wellington, getting a card could not be easier. It’s not only free, it only takes 10 minutes. After that, you’ll have access to every audiobook, film and physical book the capital has to offer.
Not only that, Wellington public libraries and most others in Aotearoa have access to Beamafilm and Kanopy. These are video platforms with a ton of good, free content. A very similar site is Plex, except it isn’t run through the libraries: it’s an app that comes with a variety of content entirely for free, and acts as a library and sharing platform for all your personally-owned video. And finally, if you’re looking for ebooks, look no further than the admirable Project Gutenberg, where over 70,000 ebooks are freely available for download.
If you love audiobooks, consider buying from the website Libro.fm! Like CDs, vinyls and digital releases, you’d be maximising the amount of money you pay back to the author and audiobook publisher. But most importantly, you can support local bookstores: when you purchase an audiobook, you choose which bookstore you’d like your money to support! Additionally, audiobooks bought from Libro.fm come as downloadable MP3s, forever available on your phone or computer hard drive.
Times are tough, especially for creatives. Single-minded devotion to profit and exponential growth are making life harder for artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and more. While owning media is more expensive than ever, there are plenty of ways—including more not listed here—to access it, and thwart prohibitively-expensive streaming platforms. So get out there, and explore those alternatives!
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