Matt Stoller and Charles Perrow on consolidation and monopolisation in the audio media world

Podcasting, like blogging, was supposed to be a way for people --- actual human beings rather than corporate golems or AI vampires --- to talk to and reach other humans, peer-to-peer, requiring nothing more than a microphone, audio editor, website, and RSS feed. The latter-day E.F. Schumacher, Doc Searls, asserted in the long-ago, social proximating days of 2017:

Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever owned the human voice, or ever will. (Other, of course, than their own.)

Because podcasting is about the human voice. It’s humans talking to humans: voices to ears and voices to voices—because listeners can talk too. They can speak back. And forward. Lots of ways.

Podcasting is one way for markets to have conversations; but the podcast market itself can’t be bought or controlled, because it’s not a market. Or an “industry.” Instead, like the Web, email and other graces of open protocols on the open Internet, podcasting is all-the-way deep.

-- Doc Searls, \"Open Word—The Podcasting Story\", April 16, 2017

http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2017/04/16/open-word-the-podcasting-story/

In his latest critique on ~~creeping~~ rampaging monopolisation on the Internet, Matt Stoller looks at Spotify's grab for an ever-increasing share of the podcast space, and concomitant advertising, with its recent exclusive contracting of several large podcasts: On the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting. \"Spotify is trying to do to the open podcast world what Google did to publishers\" indeed.

Spotify is gaining power over podcast distribution by forcing customers to use its app to listen to must-have content, by either buying production directly or striking exclusive deals, as it did with Rogan. This is a tying or bundling strategy. Once Spotify has a gatekeeping power over distribution, it can eliminate the open standard rival RSS, and control which podcasts get access to listeners. The final stage is monetization through data collection and ad targeting. Once Spotify has gatekeeping power over distribution and a large ad targeting business, it will also be able to control who can monetize podcasts, because advertisers will increasingly just want to hit specific audience members, as opposed to advertise on specific shows.

I'm reading Charles Perrow's 1972 classic Complex Organizations which discusses both intra- and inter-organisational structures and dynamics. Stoller's description of the consolidation of podcasting strikes me as quite similar to the deconsolidation and reconsolidation of the music industry, in about 1955 and 1962-1973. The golden age of decentralised music production and distribution lasted less than a decade:

After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.

But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.

How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process” through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.” The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.

Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, pp. 186--187.

https://archive.org/details/complexorganizat00perr/page/186/mode/2up

https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-critical-essay/oclc/979139067

(Perrow's discussion draws heavily on Paul M. Hirsch, The Structure of the Popular Music Industry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Survey Research Center, 1969); P. M. Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (January 1972): 639–659; P. M. Hirsch, “Organizational Effectiveness and the Institutional Environment,” Administrative Science Quarterly 20, no. 4 (September 1975): 327–344; Richard A. Peterson and David G. Berger, “Entrepreneurship in Organizations: Evidence from the Popular Music Industry,” Administrative Science Quarterly 16, no. 1 (March 1971): 97–106; and R. A. Peterson and D. G. Berger, “Cycles in Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music,” American Sociological Review 40, no. 2 (April 1975): 158–173.)

Decentralisation is a frequently expressed goal of Web technologies, but so long as there is an available point of control, and a means to assert exclusive relationships or ownership, centralised control will reestablish itself, and the commons will again be enclosed.

And advertising, ever the anti-Midas, turns every golden thing it touches to shit.

Perrow's description in the next few paragraphs of the production side of music, and the various distribution of risks amongst headline performers, agents, labels, printing facilities, retail outlets, radio, and side musicians, seems to me to have direct correspondences to much of the consumer-facing (and business-services) Web-startup world.

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Matt Stoller and Charles Perrow on consolidation and monopolisation in the audio media world