Streaming has really just reinforced the primacy of the control of the mainstream culture industries over artists, in that it offers even less than the contracts he was describing at the time, far less than a penny per stream in many cases. Yes, you can certainly get shit to a broader audience, but if you’re not getting the streams to even make up a penny, then you’re making less than someone who is selling CDs and getting, say a quarter of the sales. And as Cory Doctorow has been pointing out with this enshittification thesis, that the bottlenecks being set up by the large corporations (like Amazon) have hurt both producers and consumers and has just a made a few companies dominant over the internet. It seems to me like the promise of the internet has come to be far less liberatory than we’ve been promised this whole time by techno-utopian-bros…
And when he wrote that article, there was a pretty wide-reaching set of alternatives to the mainstream distribution system that existed (indie distribution, college radio, the zine eco-system, etc). Seems like he would have been well aware of that, and was addressing the whole “sell-out” phenomenon and trying to convince more indie artists stick around in the underground infrastructure that had been built up over the 80s by the various post-punk scenes.
