Today, it’s likely that no one under the age of 21 has ever owned a copy of the music they listen to — not physically, nor digitally.

Why would they?

They grew up in a world where their favorite songs were accessible to them wherever and whenever they wanted. In consequence, the notion of paying for music has become an act of charity — a symbolic gesture where relatively arbitrary sums of money are donated toward a worthy cause: supporting the artist. If you really love — not just like — the artist, you visit their website or attend a show and buy something. Anything, really. It could be a baseball cap, T-shirt, or a special-edition vinyl. What you’re buying is irrelevant because the transaction never centers around a consideration of material ownership and instead focuses on something far more abstract: doing the right thing. By making a financial contribution to the arts, you are doing the right thing. In any event, you’ll go back to streaming the album on your phone because you’ve done your part, and at the end of the day, all you really care about is being able to listen to the music.

Of course, the problem with an entire industry leaning on the moral integrity of its consumers is that most producers of that industry will not survive. If grocery stores started selling eggs on a pay-what-you-like basis, one must assume that after a few weeks of utter confusion, the vast majority of customers would quickly adjust to the new reality of free eggs and never pay for one again. We operate under the assumption that our actions have no consequences for the outside world — not because we are inherently selfish (we probably are), but because that’s what we are told: that our choices affect only ourselves and we should be so lucky if anyone else even took note.

Speak to someone working in marketing and they will tell you that it all comes down to storytelling. That a good story allows us to obscure messy details in an otherwise perfect image. Consumers can’t be trusted with the full truth because the truth has a tendency of getting in the way of our desires. One can only imagine what it would do to Amazon’s revenue if, instead of advertising free next-day delivery, they included a portrait of the Pakistani guy who is going to be delivering eight rolls of toilet paper to you on a Sunday.

In 2023, Taylor Swift sold a staggering 3.5 million vinyl records of her music in the U.S. alone — a bizarre figure considering that the majority of her fan base are teenage girls who do not have access to a record player. One can picture fathers pleading with their daughters while in line for the merch table at a Taylor Swift show: “But, honey, are you really sure you need the vinyl? We don’t even have a record player or a stereo at home.” But what the father isn’t getting — amongst other things — is that while vinyl is no longer a relevant medium for listening to music, it has been rebranded as a devotional object. A way of demonstrating you belong to a rarefied group of people who get it.

In 2016, the coolest artist in music was undoubtedly Frank Ocean. He had amassed a cult following by continuously postponing the highly anticipated release of his next album without offering any explanation. In doing so, he defied every industry standard and practice, establishing a sense of integrity and mystique around him that no other figure in modern times had come close to. When the album suddenly arrived in August of that year, Ocean released alongside it a limited-edition magazine. The zine was printed in a large A3 format and featured contributions from various super-hot artists of that moment. It came vacuum-sealed in a protective silver sleeve with a copy of the album on CD inside and was available for a whopping $80 through Ocean’s website and select magazine stores in New York and Los Angeles. I remember seeing hundreds of kids my age waiting outside Soho News International on the corner of Prince and Sullivan Street. The irony was that everyone was already listening to the record on their headphones while standing in line to buy it. And it was precisely because they loved the music so much that they were willing to pay for it. I’m only somewhat ashamed to admit that I, too, ordered the magazine when it came out. I realized that its value lay not in the content or object itself, but in the meaning projected onto it. I never opened the magazine and sold it to a collector for 900 EUR during the pandemic.

Attributing exorbitant value to owning things that carry no potential of improving one’s wellbeing wouldn’t be half as troubling if it didn’t come at the expense of abandoning the things that could make a positive difference. The crisis of ownership extends far past music. By establishing and constantly reifying the concept that responsibility is a burden, not a privilege, my generation has surrendered itself to the grand scam of renting. Owning something, so we have been told, is not only expensive but also a commitment that should be avoided at all costs — that instead, renting or subscribing affords so much more freedom and flexibility.

In effect, we rent our apartment, our car, our bicycle, our iPhone, our software, our storage, our movies and TV shows and, of course, our music. But flexibility and mobility — virtues we aspire to both in body and mind — are only useful if there are alternative moves to be made. When the price of renting goes up, we have no leverage. Suddenly, the avoidance of ownership no longer represents an expression of enlightenment but one of total entrapment.

What recourse do we have if we can no longer sign in to our accounts — which in many cases contain the only record of our memories, preferences and tastes?

The debilitating effects of subjugating ourselves to rented services are felt not just financially but also socially. How could livelihoods that are defined and protected by nothing more than a username and password be expected to withstand the force and demands of human connections? How could a society of people who perceive every form of responsibility as an imposition be capable of considering anything other than its own anxiety and self-preservation?

Recently, a friend called me in distress. From one moment to the next, he was unable to access his online banking. Upon contacting his bank — JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US — he was informed that his accounts had been closed and Chase would be terminating “the relationship.” Chase was not willing to offer an explanation and, apparently, was under no legal obligation to do so. It’s worth noting that this friend is certainly not without means, but even that made no difference.

This anecdote served as an unwelcome reminder of how precariously we are living. Getting locked out of your apartment may be a nuisance, but at least you can knock down the door if you have to. When technology malfunctions, there is often no recourse and no one to call. Practically all providers of online services across all industries are phasing out the service component of their business. Instead, they are funneling customer concerns through labyrinthine ticket systems operated by chatbots. These chatbots have been trained to be both maddeningly polite and completely useless: “Hi, my name is Jack. I know how important your concern is to you and I am here to help!” At this point, I have lost what feels like a substantial portion of my adult life to conversations with Jack.

This has been a long time coming. I recall the outrage when local German government agencies — so-called Bürgerbüros — first introduced a ticketing system. Suddenly, it was no longer possible to make an appointment; you had to show up in person, take a number, and wait in an overcrowded room until your number was called. If you were unlucky, the agency would simply close for the day before your number was called. The government apparently had no way of knowing how many tickets it could issue on any given day. It was “up to you” to decide whether you wanted to take the risk of sitting in a windowless room for two hours or try coming back another day. Of course, one wouldn’t be seeking an appointment in the first place if the failure to do so were not already associated with potentially disastrous consequences. In the case of German bureaucracy, the assumption is that if you find yourself in need of assistance, it’s your fault that you’re in that position to begin with.

When systemic changes take place in the name of improving efficiency, they are so often intended to accomplish the exact opposite. The intention becomes not to accommodate, but to alienate those in need — creating an atmosphere of desperation and hostility that could so easily be mediated by treating people, especially those in crisis, with a sense of dignity. The easiest way to deal with people is to simply not deal with them at all.

I don’t find it conspiratorial to say that in the near future, streaming music the way we have for the past 20 years will no longer be a possibility. Between Spotify’s ties to military defense contractors — however indirect — and their bullish investment in AI models that generate fully formed recordings within seconds, there are plenty of indicators that streaming services will no longer see any reason to continue hosting hundreds of millions of songs (~90,000 new songs a day) on their platforms, the vast majority of which go practically unheard. Spotify is not and never has been interested in building an archive of musical history for preservation’s sake. They used an enormous catalogue of recorded music to build an algorithmic machine that is optimized to predict our future preferences by interpreting our past habits. But the past is only relevant as long as it can be mined for data to feed the algorithm. Like so many other tech companies with users in the hundreds of millions or even billions, Spotify isn’t worried about offering a consistent product. The goal is to extract data and monopolize a market by controlling as much of what one might refer to as “cloud capital” as possible. As soon as that algorithm has evolved to reliably predict the abstract, emotional criteria we have for the next song we would like to hear at any given moment, the machine will be able to simply generate its own version of that song. Playing a Nick Drake song will no longer be necessary if, with the help of artificial intelligence, a song that sounds nearly identical can be generated. Spotify will not only be able to save itself the cost of storing artists’ music, it will also no longer have to pay for the copyrights to distribute it.

Instagram is a perfect example of this trajectory. Initially, the app was designed to engage users by showing you photos uploaded by your friends and those you followed. A decade later, the app’s design gradually shifted to no longer showing you the content you subscribe to, but all the content Instagram would like you to subscribe to. We are no longer scrolling through photos taken by people we know — now we are exclusively watching ads from people and companies we’ve never heard of, presented as if they had been uploaded by our friends. By now, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of discussing a niche topic — the cost of condoms — at dinner, only to “stumble” across an ad for condoms on Instagram later that evening. The platform isn’t reflecting your interests; it is manufacturing them in real time. What began as a tool for sharing images gradually turned into an engine for predicting desire and then steering that desire in whatever direction is most profitable.

It goes without saying that in so many regards we have reached a tipping point — environmentally, sociopolitically, economically — that the consequences we were assured our actions would never have are not only real but of a magnitude we have yet to comprehend. The question of what you will do if you are no longer able to access the music — music that, in turn, gives you access to yourself — is likely not the most pressing issue on today’s agenda. However, I do believe that it is fundamentally linked to serious dilemmas facing all of us. How an album about my breakup factors into all of this, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that as long as you have this cassette, you will have access to the music and everything it evokes in you, whether corporate greed betrays us or not. And that, in itself, is a comfort.

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