Greatest hits

It’s not just you.

Everything everywhere is on repeat. All those tech platforms that exhort innovation at any price are a chimera, a monstrous fabrication that does nothing but copy and paste the past and present it as the future.

These tech platforms don’t create anything new. They simply plunder and steal what already exists and reformat it as their own. They are nothing but algorithmic distribution channels designed to capture and hold and sell attention to the highest bidder. Nothing more, nothing less.

But unlike previous distribution channels, tech platforms don’t underwrite and support creatives. Unlike publishers, record companies and film studios, tech platforms don’t provide advances or any financial let alone moral sustenance.

Instead of supporting artists, tech platforms chew them up and spit them out. They use their market power to steadily decrease payments to creators, to sell user data and to price-gouge advertisers.

These problems go beyond Spotify. Amazon, Facebook, Google, TikTok, X and all the rest. It’s time we weigh up the positive and negative impacts of these platforms. It’s time we held these unregulated platforms to account.

Now more than ever we need new music, new art, new stories, new ideas to bring us together and remind us of our shared humanity.

For society to move forward we need to feed - not starve - artists.