> You've probably heard about the pathetic sums that creators earn from Spotify streaming, often blamed on the tech industry's unwillingness to pay creators what they're worth. Maybe you've also heard the rebuttal – that Spotify pays plenty to entertainment companies, but they intercept this money before it can get into creators' pockets.
> That right there is the false binary – either Spotify is cheap, or the Big Three record labels are greedy. But what if – and hear me out here – Spotify is cheap and the Big Three are greedy? What if Spotify and the labels are actually colluding to rip off the "talent"? What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
The search results are filled with adverts for Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's book, but Cory Doctorow hasn't tagged many of those adverts "chokepoint capitalism": his website lists examples, instead. https://pluralistic.net/tag/chokepoint-capitalism/
Summarising https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/, I'd define it something like:
> Chokepoint capitalism is where one party becomes both a monopoly and a monopsony: a gatekeeper, or "chokepoint". This gives it more leverage than any single other party, which it uses to extract and exploit with impunity. ⸻ While it may once have added value, once an entity becomes a chokepoint, it can cease to add value, and even start making people's lives actively worse ("enshittification"), without losing its position of power.