Transparency as Spectacle
My friend recently asked me why the music industry doesn’t use blockchain technology to guarantee artist royalties. I’ll answer that, but while I do, consider a reframing of the question to: “Who gets to extract value from creative work?”
Let’s consider some of the implicit assumptions in the original question.
- The music industry is a unified actor
- Use implies rights violations happen at discrete trackable moments
- Artist royalties presumes programmatic definitions of valid use
- Guarantee conflates verification with enforcement
- Blockchain technology implies that decentralization solves trust
The blockchain assumption is actually the most straightforward to refute. The central premise of blockchain technology is that by decentralizing a ledger and verifying it through communal consensus one can prevent bad actors from manipulating the record. This means that ledgers can be managed without requiring a trusted intermediary. However, in the context of the music industry, musicians and music companies literally need courts and lawyers and infrastructure to interpret and enforce rights. Music rights are full of edge cases that require human judgment.
It is well documented that streaming services pay garbage rates to artists, that the majors take most of the money. Putting that on chain just gives musicians an immutable record of getting screwed. The push for “transparency” in music industry finances is a form of spectacle. Creating the illusion of accountability while obscuring the actual mechanisms of power. Promised transparency without agency, verification without power, and most ironically, trustless systems for problems that fundamentally require trust.
The implication of the guarantee of royalties on a collective ledger betrays its own impossibility. Perfect accounting doesn’t create perfect power, the ledger is simply another tool for capital to set the terms of extraction. The music industry already has perfect information about who owns what. They remain indifferent.
Valid use itself is politically determined. Streaming destroyed the very concept of discrete “plays” that traditional royalty systems were built on. The industry maintains the pretense that listens can be counted when the whole notion of a listen has become philosophically incoherent. Streaming platforms have broken the notion of the music listening experience into a series of micro-experiences that don’t have clear boundaries.
The transubstantiation of music into pure commodity exposes blockchain as spectacle. Streaming platforms have achieved what the old cartels could only dream of: the total transformation of music into pure commodity. Where traditional industry power relied on artificial scarcity and controlled distribution, streaming achieves hegemony through unlimited access that paradoxically strengthens central control. By atomizing the very concept of a listen into algorithmic micro-experiences, platforms don’t just extract value–they redefine value itself. what appears as democratization of access is actually the final victory of exchange value over use value. The attempt to “fix” royalty systems through blockchain merely accelerates this process, further reifying music as property while promising false liberation through perfect accounting. The industry achieves exactly what capital demands: the transformation of art into pure circulation divorced from production. Blockchain becomes not the solution to this subsumption but its mirror image, both promising democratization while delivering commodification through the spectacle of perfect verification.