How Giant Corporations Squeeze Every Last Penny Out of Writers and Musicians

Current Affairs

Rebecca Giblin is a professor at the University of Melbourne and the co-author (with Cory Doctorow) of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. The book is about how corporations that act as gatekeepers between the creators of creative work and the public are able to use their power to extract huge amounts of wealth from workers. From YouTube to Amazon to LiveNation concerts to news conglomerates to Spotify, Giblin and Doctorow look at how corporations that own the means of accessing content are able to keep musicians, artists, and writers from reaping the full value of their work. But Chokepoint Capitalism isn't just a critique of how these institutions hoard wealth and keep creative workers poor. It's also filled with clear and workable solutions that can change the situation and give those who produce creative work a fairer share of the value they produce. In this conversation, we discuss:

• How Amazon locks in its customers and uses its size to dictate extortionate terms to its suppliers
• Why Prince was right about the music industry
• How even Peter Thiel has admitted that it's monopolists, not innovators, who make money
• Why copyright law as it exists doesn't actually protect the creators of intellectual property
• Whether monopolies and market concentration are actually the most important issue, or whether the real problem is that for-profit corporations are the ones with the power.
• Why Rebecca and Cory think they can make the terms "monopsony" and "oligopsony" sexy
• How collective action by creative workers can be effective and why corporate power looks imposing but is actually quite fragile

The Peter Thiel lecture is called "Competition is For Losers." Listen to Cory Doctorow's interview with Current Affairs, which also touches on some of the themes in the book, here.

The thumbnail for this episode is a nod to Amazon's infamous "Gazelle project" which tried to prey on book publishers the way a cheetah would prey on a "sickly gazelle."

"Let's make interventions that directly support more power to creative workers rather than rights-holders." — Rebecca Giblin