How has what you read, watch, and listen to been shaped by the economic structures that control creative production? Shanti Mathias reviews Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism.
The chaos of the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster debacle affected millions of very angry fans earlier in November. In brief: Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars (and poets), released pre-sale codes for her upcoming Eras tour to fans who registered through ticketing platform Ticketmaster. It went wrong: thousands of fans were unable to get tickets as the website collapsed due to demand, a dynamic pricing setting meant that advertised prices skyrocketed, and a whole lot of Swifties suddenly developed a class consciousness and avid hatred of Ticketmaster. Swift’s promoter said that they didn’t have a choice, as Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation has exclusive deals with most of the venues scheduled on the tour; the debacle has prompted a congressional hearing in the US.
None of this would surprise Australian law professor Rebecca Giblin and internet copyright activist Cory Doctorow, whose new book Chokepoint Capitalism uses both Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster as examples. The book discusses what it calls “anti-competitive flywheels”: systems that “loc[k] in users and suppliers, mak[e] markets hostile to new entrants, and leverag[e] that power to force suppliers and workers to accept ever lower prices.” Per their thesis, this operates through “chokepoints”: concentrated markets where a few corporations are enriched by the majority of cultural output, limiting the choices of consumers and creators. The book focuses mainly on the law and policy in the US, where the regulatory environment corporations have created the chokepoints Giblin and Doctorow highlight, but they don’t hesitate to pull examples from elsewhere when it serves their argument.
Co-author Cory Doctorow, who has been extremely online since being online was a thing, has long agitated for changes to digital policy to support creatives (to me, this has been most visible on his Twitter threads, where you read the first three tweets, get outraged about some new thing, and move on). He hits some of these same notes in Chokepoint Capitalism: Digital Rights Management (DRM) is not good for creative production; the EU’s GDPR bill was a good idea in theory but raised the costs of compliance in a way that shuts out smaller, innovative players; collectively owned artist initiatives need to seize the means of production and find ways to distribute their content themselves.
Chokepoint Capitalism is structured in two parts – the first shows how “chokepoints” have made creative labour more difficult, and the second section looks at what can change. That first part covers lots of examples, including looking at Ticketmaster fee structures and the impact of LiveNation purchasing Ticketmaster on musicians, and how Taylor Swift made sure that her deal with Apple Music would help other artists too. The authors traverse a swathe of creative industries, from audiobooks to scriptwriting to app stores to YouTube to digital news. It feels repetitive at times – perhaps they could have lost one of their chapters – but the authors are working hard to demonstrate that it’s the structures of chokepoints that are a problem for creatives, not unique aspects of publishing or TV or copyright laws.
A key strength of this book is this focus on concentrated creative markets. As the authors point out, concentrated markets occur in all sorts of contexts, from meat processing to fossil fuel extraction. By looking at commercial artistic output – and taking as given that this work is valuable – they are able to examine what they call “monoposonies”, where “the buyer has power over the seller instead of the other way round”. With music streaming services, for example, artists don’t have many options about how to distribute their music (as three big companies control music licensing and are in kahoots with Spotify, Amazon, and Apple) and consumers don’t have many choices about where to stream their music (as a few services are dominant and often bundled into phone plans). Here, the streaming services are the chokepoint: their concentration over the market means they can collaborate to give a bad deal to the artists and a bad deal to customers.
This all sounds kind of boring and technical, but it’s totally readable. What helps, I think, is that Doctorow and Giblin are interested in how their audience interacts with these systems. There’s lots of “you”: you have a Spotify account, you might browse the Google Play store, you have gotten into the habit of listening to music from Spotify generated playlists and not in albums. Cultural production creates tremendous societal value, and everyone is involved, but only a few corporations reap the enormous wealth that this work creates. They’re trying to point out that, as someone who consumes cultural products – who presumably wants to watch compelling TV shows and listen to new music – your interests are aligned with creators; that cultural production is better and more interesting when creators are compensated fairly for their work and given the time and resourcing to produce more.
The second part of Chokepoint Capitalism is arguably more important, but also somewhat drier. If the problem is chokepoints, what’s the solution? Changing copyright law is one option, giving successful artists a chance to renegotiate their contracts and erase debt every 25 years. Mandating interoperability so that consumers aren’t locked into platforms and are able to migrate files from, for example, a Kindle to another e-reader would help too. While loosely structured, some of these chapters read like a jumble of good “ideas lying around” to implement; why, for instance, is a chapter about collective action through the Writers Guild of America before a chapter about why creative labour needs to unite?
Reading this section felt encouraging in some ways, with Giblin and Doctorow drawing on successful, usually small-scale examples of systems working better from around the globe. But, as they point out, getting big corporations and tech firms to agree to any of these changes using legal or policy mechanisms is very difficult (it’s an example not used in the book, but Apple has been dragged kicking and screaming through European regulations to change its Lightning Port to generic USB-C connectors). These corporations are well-funded because they’ve been enriched by exploiting artists and users for decades, and they will use that wealth to reinforce their power. There’s a sidenote that should have been expanded: that the desirability of creative work (and it is work!) means that people will draw and write and film and act for very little pay regardless of policy interventions.
Nonetheless, the book ends on an encouraging note, taking the scope bigger, beyond the US. Chokepoints can be shattered with the attention and cooperation of everyone who they affect – the kind of collective action that can mean artists get fairly paid, readers and listeners and watchers be able to access work more easily, and give everyone better choices. Chokepoints aren’t limited to creative industries – but both authors are convinced that systemic change can happen, and make better creative labour possible.
Chokepoint Capitalism: How big tech and big content captured creative labour markets, and how we’ll win them back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, (Scribe) can be purchased from Unity Books Wellington or Unity Books Auckland.