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Your Convenience is Now Mandatory

  • Apr 24
  • 11 min read

I come from the era before Spotify and Apple Music. Not quite as far back as the days of vinyl, but rather the days when physical media was just beginning to die.


Caught in the weird transition period where CDs were on the way out, and big companies hadn’t yet figured out how to swindle us for monthly payments to listen to music, there was a sea of pirate websites where youngsters like me could get hold of music.


The two biggest ones that I remember kids at school using were Napster and Limewire.


These were both person-to-person (P2P) file-sharing networks focused on music from any and all genres. For the kids at my school – and people around the world – these two networks became the go-to for all our piracy needs.


P2P file sharing is simple. Person A selects the files they want to upload, then the file names would be stored on a central server, which Persons B, C, D, and Beyond could then search through and download. For the likes of Napster and Limewire, this was excellent because the files themselves weren’t stored on their own servers but rather on the computers of individual users.


This method of sharing files would be the dominant style for years to come. For me personally, I was never a Napster or Limewire kid. Instead, I was fond of a platform called iMesh, which worked the same as the countless other P2P file-sharing platforms.


As a kid, my favourite artists were Eminem and Johnny Cash – two wildly different ends of the musical spectrum. Yet I remember being in awe that I could type either name into iMesh and find countless singles, albums, and unreleased gems from both artists. The first year of my learning how P2P file sharing worked was a blur of downloading files and burning discs.


Unlike many other kids my age, I never had one of those portable CD players. I’d always see them in films and on TV and think they were the future of music, but for whatever reason, I never got my hands on one. Regardless, I’d burn CDs for hours at a time. No doubt the reason I never got my hands on a portable CD player was because the money that would have paid for it was all being used to fuel my disc-burning habit.


(For those that are too young, burning a CD means putting files onto it, which you can then play in a CD player. I feel like a granddad explaining that.)


Back in my day (granddad allegations will never be beaten), I’d have a stack of these burnt CDs sat on the desk next to the family computer. I could flick through the stack and see my own personal greatest hits of the music I loved. We’re talking Eminem, Johnny Cash, AC/DC, Linkin Park, and so much more, all neatly stored in individual plastic sleeves, with the track and artist names neatly printed in black Sharpie.


The idea that any of this could have been considered illegal didn’t even cross my mind.

There was the vague feeling that one was doing something a bit mischievous, but music piracy had become so ubiquitous, so widespread, that you lost any concept of this being theft.


To me, and to the millions of people all over the world, downloading music from platforms like Napster, Limewire, and of course, iMesh, was just a thing we did. It was the way to listen to music.


Naturally, big media companies weren’t going to let this happen for long.


Taking Control


One by one, the music sites we knew and loved began to shut down.


Like I say, Napster was never a tool I used, but I remember there being some talk about it. That platform was a little before my time, so it was never that big a deal to me. The big killer for the kids at school was when Limewire went away.


After a huge battle between Limewire and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the platform was forced to shut down. And with that went access to hundreds of thousands of music files.


I remember being somewhat smug when I was one of the only people in school who was able to get hold of new music. My beloved iMesh was still alive and kicking when the doors were shuttered on Limewire. For a time, I would be the person people in school would go to for music. It was me with the music, and another kid – Alex – with the movies. Whilst I never did find out where he was getting them from, we both had a similar process.


Tell us what you want, give us a couple of quid, and the next day we’d come into school with a CD – or DVD in the case of Alex – with your order ready to go. For a little while, it was good money for the two of us. But naturally, as is the way with the internet, when one thing went away, a dozen others sprang up in its place. So, as people discovered other ways to download music, it didn’t take long for the orders to dry up. Regardless, my short-lived music entrepreneurship would have died when iMesh shut down anyway.

For the music industry, they’d put a stop to online piracy. Well, a large part of it, anyway.


Things like The Pirate Bay were still going. The bigger lesson, however, was that the Internet was here to stay, and if they played their cards right, the music industry could cash in on this innovative technology.


And cash in they did.


Streaming


The 2000s were a huge time for music on the internet. In quick succession, you had YouTube launched (2005), Spotify launched (2006), SoundCloud launched (2007), and Grooveshark launched (2009).


Whilst each of these platforms took a while to grow into the platforms we know now (except Grooveshark, which is in the streaming service graveyard), the potential was clearly there. Given the huge rise of piracy, it was no secret that consumers were looking for easy and convenient ways to listen to their favourite songs.


By the late 2010s, the winner of the platform wars had been decided. Whilst platforms like Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music all hold significant portions of the consumer base, Spotify comes out on top with a whopping 700+ million monthly users.


It had become abundantly clear that streaming was, by far, the most dominant way to consume music, with the same being said for all types of media too. How many people do you know that don’t have a subscription to at least one of the following: Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or Apple Music? My guess would be very few.


This widespread adoption of streaming services is here to stay, and it’s where the problem lies.


Changing Behaviours and Expectations


Streaming has totally changed how we, as a collective, view and interact with media. And the shift is a serious one.


The largest problem is that we no longer have ownership of the things we enjoy. Take, for example, music. Before streaming, you’d either buy a physical copy of the album you liked or you’d (like the younger me) pirate the files and have them saved on your computer… or burnt onto an ever-growing stack of discs. Now, however, we’ve shifted from individual ownership to paying for access.


Through your monthly payment to Spotify, you’re given access to virtually all the music ever released by artists throughout history. Yet, you don’t own any of it. At any given moment, those songs can be taken away, removed from the platform, or otherwise made unavailable to the userbase. This can be for any number of reasons, including removal by the artists themselves.


You could add to this the vast changes that streaming has brought to the way in which we consume media in general. No longer do we rely on our friends or the radio or good, old-fashioned organic discovery to find new music. No, instead we rely on algorithms to feed us whatever they think we’ll like. Or, more commonly, what big record labels are paying to have pushed out, pumped directly into our phones through strategic playlist placements.


We traded the effort of finding music ourselves for the ease of having it piped directly into our phones. We’ve given up ownership of media and instead opted for time-limited access. And we’ve thrown away the permanence of the old world in favour of the convenience offered by streaming platforms.


In 2016, Ida Auken, via the World Economic Forum, published an essay entitled Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better. In the essay, she puts forward a speculative idea of a future society in which people own nothing, instead opting to rent. It’s an idealistic look at what may come to be, in which cities are greener, quieter, and cleaner. People no longer shop as we know it now, but rather have their “purchases” curated by algorithms.


The essay was published in 2016 and very accurately predicted the world we find ourselves in now. The problem with this vision, or rather the problem with the timeline of our current world, is that we’ve got all the algorithms and none of the good stuff.


A core quote from Auken’s essay is: You’ll own nothing and be happy. That seems to be exactly where we are right now, especially when it comes to the media we enjoy.


Paying for endless streaming services has totally changed our expectations of how we operate in the Twenty-First Century. Kids born in the next ten years will grow up with hardly any notion that the world used to be any other way. Already, people my age – blinded by the convenience of streaming services – no longer expect to own the music, movies, and shows they enjoy.


Functional Monopolies


In the 2000s, with the rise of the Internet and easy access to P2P file-sharing networks, people began to build their own digital archives of their favourite movies, shows, music, and more. For a brief time, it felt like we were in the golden age of media ownership, with online communities democratising the process, allowing anyone and everyone to build up a collection with nothing but digital storage space and an Internet connection.


Yet soon, an even easier solution would hit the market. It’s no secret that finding the media you want, waiting for the download, often having to convert the files to something usable on whatever system you have, writing metadata, and more steps still was a laborious process. I don’t even want to think about how much time I spent manually adding metadata and album artwork to the music I painstakingly imported to my iTunes collection.


People were pining for something that would give them the convenience of digital media, without the hassle of doing it all manually. This is where platforms like Netflix rose to the challenge.


The first iteration of Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service. You could order the movies or shows you wanted, a disc would come through your letterbox, and then you could send it back when you’d watched it. To us now, this is incredibly antiquated, but back then, it was cutting-edge technology. And the first victim of the growing success of Netflix was Blockbuster.


Many people my age and above will have plenty of nostalgic memories of wandering through the aisles of the local Blockbuster, picking up movie after movie. For many families, including my own, those Friday trips to Blockbuster became a ritual, something to mark the start of the weekend. If video killed the radio star, Netflix did the same to Blockbuster.


Seeing the potential of digital, Netflix soon launched the streaming side of the platform. It didn’t take long for this to become the platform in its entirety, with the DVD-via-mail service becoming less of a priority as the streaming side grew. Officially, the last Netflix DVDs were sent out in 2023, with the service coming to an official end then. Unofficially, though, it died long before that.


It didn’t take long for Netflix to become one of the most subscribed to streaming services on the planet. Then, with competitors like Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Disney+, and more hitting the scene, it soon became apparent that to have the widest access to the movies and TV shows you love, you’d need to subscribe to them all.


This is where the monopolies come in. They’re not monopolies in the usual sense, in which one company controls a whole industry. No, instead, streaming is a monopoly by default because streaming has become the default infrastructure. If you want to keep up with new movie releases or that amazing new show you have to watch, you’ll need a streaming subscription.


In our media-obsessed world, you can’t afford not to have at least one subscription.

Streaming platforms now have the majority share of the global audience.


Enshittification


Enshittification (noun)The gradual degradation of a product, service, or platform over time, especially digital platforms, as a result of prioritising profit extraction over user experience. Typically occurs in stages: first benefiting users to gain adoption, then exploiting users to benefit business customers or advertisers, and finally exploiting all parties to maximise short-term revenue, leading to a noticeably worse experience for everyone.

As seems to be the way with all services in our modern world, streaming platforms are getting noticeably shitter. Anecdotally, they take longer to load, the selections are becoming worse, and (for some reason), they’re all riddled with AI tools that nobody asked for.


The big one, though, is the addition of tiered access levels to platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Focusing on Netflix specifically, the platform introduced a cheaper option for subscribers. This cheaper cost would be subsidised by ads running as midrolls in movies and TV shows. Whilst many people didn’t like the idea of seeing ads on a platform they were paying for, they also saw the benefit of seeing a handful of ads in return for a reduced monthly cost.


Then, in mid-2024, the ad-supported, lower-cost option was discontinued from the platform. Instead, the default for new users of Netflix was to see ads and, suddenly, they were encouraged to pay more to avoid seeing them. See the subtle shift there?


At one point, it was “see these ads and pay less,” and then it shifted to “pay more to not see the ads.” And the problem was that they could do it without recourse. People were too locked into the platform to justify the hassle of leaving and “starting again” somewhere else. And besides, they wanted to see what happened on Stranger Things and Squid Game, so what was paying a couple of extra pounds a month to not see the ads?


Now every major streaming service follows this same model. The default tier shows ads, and users must pay a premium to avoid them. And, because streaming has become the default way in which we get media – and where new shows are almost exclusively released – people have little to no choice but to pay the higher prices. So effectively, this change in pricing model resulted in an increase in cost for the end consumers across the board, for all streaming platforms.


This is enshittification at work.


Convenience Became Control


Through streaming platforms, we were promised a radically streamlined and convenient method of accessing media. And, in a sense, that promise has been delivered. You can, right now, open Netflix and pick from any number of TV shows and movies to watch.


Yet, what happens when you want to watch something that’s not on Netflix, but rather exclusively on Amazon Prime? You have to pay for another streaming service to access the show.


And here is the problem.


The convenience of streaming platforms radically shifted our perceptions of how we should be consuming media. We no longer see owning physical media, or even the digital files, as the default way of doing things. Instead, to see a new show or movie, we expect to have to go to a streaming platform. And part of that expectation is also the tacit understanding that, at any point, the shows we enjoy can be taken away from us after having been removed from the platform. So too, there’s an understanding that the prices can (and very likely will) go up at any moment. We expect these platforms to be shit, and we’ve all but forgotten that there can be any better alternative.


The enshittification of streaming services is, in part, responsible for the rise of the analogue we’re seeing as of late. People are coming to the realisation that digital platforms are exploiting their user bases in the relentless pursuit of profit over people. In droves, they’re turning back to physical media once more, concluding that streaming platforms aren’t all they’ve cracked up to be.


In the quest for convenience, we’ve found ourselves in a place where we’ve traded permanence for ephemerality, and ownership for access. We’ve lost what often made media so special: that sensation of physically holding a DVD (or flicking through a stack of burned CDs) and calling it ours.


Not renting or having temporary access, but rather owning the things we love.


Sources


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