Quite a few years ago, I published a series of articles on why streaming services, be that for music, for film or for games, were a fundamentally bad idea and ultimately audiences, or “consumers,” if you want to be crass and capitalist about it, were going to wish they hadn’t become the standard.
A lot of people got surprisingly mad at me about it. Streaming services were “good value” they insisted, and how dare I criticise something that meant they could have all the things they wanted for a few bucks per month?
In fact, it was these “debates” that made me realise that mainstream consumers, and yes I’m using that as a pejorative, aren’t great at thinking beyond their immediate gratification. Or, being more generous, it’s easy to fool someone when you present them with a great deal. So you buy into it and enjoy it while it’s good.
And now, for one example of those “excellent deals” that people en masse fell for, Microsoft Game Pass limits you to as little as 5 hours/month for cloud gaming on your subscription (but of course you can pay for extra time, on top of the subscription!). Yep, that’s right: after getting a lot of people hooked on the idea that they could enjoy the Microsoft library on their modest tablets or handheld PC devices, Microsoft is now telling them that, unless they pay for a higher-tier subscription or extra hours, they get as little as five hours of cloud gaming each month.
It’s not the only example of where a short-term “great deal” has now started to ratchet up the cost. Netflix puts its prices up every few months. These “ad-free” services are starting to shove ads back in, a little like subscription TV did back when I was a kid. Get them in with the promise of a superior experience and then, once they’re on the service, hit ‘em with the ads. Over in the music world, Spotify has been less aggressive with upping the cost of its service, but then again they don’t pay the artists streaming on it anything near what they should be, so of course they can keep their prices for the consumer down when they’re ripping off the artists behind the content they seek to productise.
And I know it’s not a “streaming service” per se, but all these AI companies have gone into overdrive in restricting the number of “tokens” you can use for searches and generations on their plans, precisely so they can, like Microsoft with Game Pass, charge people extra beyond the subscription just to be able to use the service as it was intended.
Finally, there are just so many more services now. Remember when one music subscription and Netflix basically covered everything? Well now, if someone recommends a movie to you, you’re probably going to have to sign up for yet another subscription service, and all those music playlists keep having your favourite songs drop off them, so you need to figure out who else to pay so you can have the privilege of spending more time switching between apps than watching films and listening to music.
The point here is that it’s not only becoming a usability nightmare, but it’s also becoming ridiculously expensive to enjoy the arts. And anyone paying attention would have been able to tell you that exactly this was going to happen a decade ago. I know I did.
It genuinely does my head in that people honestly thought that switching from charging audiences $30 for a film or music album or $100 for a game to giving audiences thousands of them for $20/month was commercially sustainable. It was like no one had ever heard of the concept of a loss leader, and that when a company wants to establish its position in a market it will often do so by selling its product for less than it costs to produce (or in the case of streaming services, maintain). The idea is that once the service has a critical mass of captive consumers (i.e. tens of millions of people that have made the product or service part of their daily routine), the company could start increasing prices and work towards profitability.
This is business 101 stuff. With the tech sector, where the company’s ability to behave ethically comes down the decency of a collection of libertarian executives, there has been a particularly aggressive use of this business tactic (not only does scale through loss-leading ultimately result in rapidly growing costs for consumers but it means job losses from over-growth as the company scales… but of course libertarian executives don’t care about ruining employee lives when growth pads out their own annual bonuses).
Unfortunately, the short-term perceived “value” of streaming services to consumers was a particularly overwhelming success for the aforementioned libertarian types. Music CDs are almost dead in the Western markets (things are slightly better in Japan, but on the decline). Earlier this year I went to an electronics shop to buy a CD player (for my Japanese music CDs), and the Zoomer kid salesman looked at me like I was asking for a typewriter or something.
Equally, not only are DVDs dead, but most people aren’t even aware that you can still buy films on iTunes. Video games have been somewhat resilient to this trend, largely because Microsoft and Sony have been utterly incompetent with their platforms, and people realise that games leave Game Pass etc very quickly, so they still need to buy a copy of the game if they like it anyway. But with those same companies deciding to do away with physical media, it’s quite clear that games are heading in the same direction.
Really, the only areas of entertainment that are properly resilient to streaming and subscription services are those where the analogue experience is sufficiently impossible for a digital experience to supplant. People still prefer the tactile experience of books, no matter how much Amazon tries to push its Kindle and Kindle Unlimited (which, from experience, is more a platform for the right wing to dump their propaganda than an interesting library of books to read). Vinyl is experiencing a resurgence among music fans precisely because it sounds like vinyl and you can’t digitise that audio experience.
And specifically for the gaming space it is nice to see a resurgence in interest in retro gaming. Companies like Analogue, with its N64 and Game Boy player models, allowing you to dust off actual, physical, retro games, or Evercade in giving players collections of retro classics on new cartridges (even with instruction manuals!) are doing incredibly valuable work. Even the emulation console manufacturers like Anbernic and Retroid and Ayaneo are giving us a chance to preserve games that were free of streaming, always-on service models.
But even then, those areas are increasingly niche. Half the population no longer reads books (boy, is that a good sign for the intellectual health of society) and vinyl is almost the dictionary definition of a hipster niche activity for millennials and little else. It’s not like Analogue and Evercade will ever enjoy the market penetration of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, Overall, the undeniable truth is that for the most part, subscription services and “new business models” have won.
And now, having won, and replaced all the ways we used to enjoy music, films, and to an extent, games, these new business models are why things are going to start getting very expensive, and very quickly. What can we do about it? Nothing. The cat’s out of the bag, and the residual platforms that do things the traditional way are going to be increasingly pushed into boutique areas, where commercial realities demand that they become more expensive as well. Welcome to the dystopian future we, sadly, let happen.
This was always obviously going to happen. But for music and even TV/films I’m still paying far less per month than I would have done for a comparable amount of content back when I was purely buying and renting things.
In the case of TV/film I might be paying slightly more total, because I’m subscribed to basically everything. But then if I had this level of disposable income back in the day I’d probably spend at least this much renting and buying things too, and for music I was easily spending way more than a Spotify subscription costs.
Of course prices will continue rising and the maths may well stop mathing one day, but by then I’ll have probably had 25+ years of good maths (considering that I’ve had Spotify for almost 20 years now), so I can live with that.
On the gaming side the maths is far worse – Game Pass is no longer good value, so I unsubscribed. But for now on the gaming side you don’t have to miss out on stuff by doing that, so I don’t see this as a big deal (yet) either.
And AI – the sooner that becomes unaffordable the better probably.
Thanks for this, Matt.
This is indeed a very important conversation, and I think it is high time it pierced into the mainstream.
There was a recent article by Emily Topping in Current Affairs entitled “You Should Get to Own Your Media, Not Rent it Forever”. The article contained some shocking anecdotes, like how digital content (such as literature) already purchased by an audience is being altered by publishers, without the knowledge of the audience, to make it more politically correct, for example. This is blatantly destroying our cultural and historical heritage. How can we learn from history, if we keep erasing the parts we don’t like as we go along? Society cannot introspect and question itself under such conditions. It can only be manipulated and misled. I highly recommend people read that article!
As for my own opinions on the proliferation of digital media, I would be less concerned about it if it were not for the trend toward getting rid of the physical counterparts. As just two recent examples: (1) Sony getting rid of physical game discs for PlayStation consoles, and (2) Anthropic buying up massive amounts of old books and destructively scanning them to train their models, because it is legally more convenient to do so than to face copyright laws! Yes, they are literally destroying books, not unlike Third Reich era Germany destroyed books. This is all very concerning to me, and should be to society at large. Here, too, Anthropic (and perhaps soon other big AI companies) are destroying our cultural and historical heritage.
When I think about how modern audiences consume media in the era of subscription services, I am reminded of the following exchange, in an episode of the old sitcom Seinfeld, between George Costanza and the NBC executive about why the executive should fund Jerry and George’s show about nothing:
Executive: “Well, why am I watching it?”
George: “Because it’s on TV.”
And that is where we have finally arrived. The future, unfortunately, if we don’t fight against it, will be subscription or add-funded services being the only source of media, and us, the people, having to swallow whatever is offered on those services, because it is the only show in town.
I, however, am fighting against it. I do not subscribe to any of those services, and I buy and own my physical media. Also, I try to go to the cinema every once in a while to encourage filmmakers. Don’t let physical media die!
You make a great point. Destroying books and getting rid of physical media completely is the real danger here imo. Censorship and destroying the arts concerns me a lot more than the price of it.
For me personally, streaming or tv is the exact same thing except I find streaming much more convenient. It’s also still significantly cheaper than tv ever was. Still a decade removed from that changing. Games are still dirt cheap if you’re budget minded and that doesn’t seem to be changing in any significant way. The one expense that’s drastically going up in my life is hardware. But the hardware seems to last longer as well so I’m not even gonna complain about that. Financials is the least of the issue. It’s creativity I’m worried about.
Keep in mind that I live in Belgium and things like tv, internet, phone bills etc have been notoriously expensive here since forever. Regular tv is ridiculously expensive and streaming services don’t come close. Telecom wise everything has gotten a lot cheaper and prices are going down even more with latest developments.