Andrew Gilhooley's Blog

I am well aware that writing a blog is something of an exercise in vanity, and that as well as being the author of this blog I am also probably its only reader. However, I write it mostly for the pleasure of getting my thoughts out on the page and to be able to read about what was on my mind at some point in the past.

On August 4, 2014 – eleven years ago! – I wrote a post on my old blog titled Duplicating the Arts Out of Existence. It was a lengthy lament on the “everything-for-free-or-close-to-free” online culture of the time and its effect on artists’ ability to make money from their work. In the post, I say of the then-current climate:

I think that we have hardly begun to see the effects and unintended consequences of these things, as they have been around for such a relatively short amount of time. 

It’s interesting to reflect, eleven years on, on what some of those effects have actually been.

Spotify finally made a profit in 2024, thanks to steadily growing subscriber numbers over the previous decade. It’s still paying artists between $0.003 and $0.005 a stream, so you have to be a big name to make any kind of money from that.

Streaming services, if anything, have proliferated. Film and TV production companies who previously licensed their products to Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu realised that they could make more money by offering their own subscription services, so once the licensing agreements expired, many title disappeared from the popular streaming services and now you have to buy additional premium subscriptions.

In fact, subscription seems to be the business model for a lot of things these days. Buying a piece of software, for example, seems like a thing of the past. Where once you might have spent a good amount of money on a copy of Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite, now these are monthly or annual subscriptions, meaning that if you want to use the software, you have to keep paying for it. The option to just keep using your old version even though a newer version is available is not an option.

My old car had GPS navigation. I paid for it once (when I bought the car) and after that it was up to me if I wanted to pay for a new DVD with updated maps. I recently bought a new car, and if I want to use the GPS, guess what? It’s an $80 per year subscription. No thanks, I’ll use the Maps app on my mobile phone, at least until that becomes a subscription too!

BMW infamously tried to make heated seats an $18 per month subscription a few years ago but it proved so unpopular they had to walk it back. (Think about why customers didn’t like it: the heated seats were already installed in the vehicle, they already paid for the equipment and now had to pay for it to be turned on!) However, BMW still offers some software-based features on a subscription basis and other manufacturers are following suit (see my GPS). According to an article on CarBuzz, subscription features in cars are quite popular with younger drivers, as is leasing a vehicle.

So is the vision of the future one where we do not own anything outright but rather pay lease and subscription fees? Who knows, but it looks as though these types of arrangements are going to become more rather than less common. In the meantime, I cancelled my Netflix subscription today, which was in part what inspired me to write this post.

I simply wasn’t watching Netflix enough to make the subscription worthwhile, as much as I like certain shows. After all, I already have Amazon Prime, which provides me with more television and movies than I could possibly watch. With some recent changes to my financial situation I have become increasingly aware of all the small monthly charges hitting my credit card and did not want to fall victim to the death by a thousand cuts, so started trimming them down. I saw a vision of a future where we all have so many subscriptions to so many things we just pay them all without thinking, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.