Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Chokepoint Capitalism

If you had a cool $22,000, a reseller could have supplied you with an early ticket to Taylor Swift’s recently announced American tour. If you didn’t, you confronted a glitching website, long delays and, eventually, the cancellation of all public sales.

The Swift debacle illustrates Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s argument in Chokepoint Capitalism: namely, that the culture industry screws over artists and fans alike. Picture an old-fashioned hourglass. Imagine arts creators at the top and arts lovers at the bottom. To move from one to the other, sand must trickle through a narrow aperture.

That’s the chokepoint – and it gives predatory corporations immense influence. Live Nation Entertainment, the corporation presenting Swift’s tour, was formed from the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster with the events promoter Live Nation. It became simultaneously the world’s largest live entertainment business, ticketer and concert producer, as well as a huge management company. Its dominance over almost every aspect of music performance means that, according to Time magazine, ticketing fees can now account for as much as 78 per cent of concert prices.

We all know about monopolies but Chokepoint Capitalism also draws on economist Joan Robinson’s concept of “monopsony”: a term that describes not a single seller controlling buyers but a buyer dominating sellers. For instance, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon under the motto “Get Big Fast”, in explicit recognition of the power of scale. He told his team to approach small publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”, using their dependence on his site to demand extortionate terms. Today, Amazon’s size means manufacturers must grin and keep trading, even as the company identifies their most profitable products and sells them as cheaper clones.

Giblin and Doctorow use the metaphor of the flywheel: a heavy, revolving gear used by engineers to generate momentum. It takes a lot to get a flywheel spinning – but once it’s in motion, nothing slows it down.

For instance, Apple deployed digital rights management (DRM) technology on all songs sold via iTunes. That became a flywheel: a tremendous force locking customers into the Apple ecosystem on which their music library depended. Similarly, the iPhone App Store began life not as a revenue raiser but as a way of encouraging iOS content. But when developers flocked to the platform, Apple changed its terms, forbidding purchase options outside the app store and then demanding a 30 per cent cut of all transactions. Thanks to the flywheel effect of the iPhone’s hegemony, app sales became a major Apple revenue source.

You can find similar examples throughout the economy. As Chokepoint Capitalism documents, a tiny number of megacompanies dominate most industries, with chokepoints apparent in everything from airlines to cheerleader uniforms. Three companies control the American poultry industry, selling farmers birds and feed, contracting the conditions under which production takes place and then using their massive accumulated data to receive the most favourable terms from suppliers.

Cultural chokepoints deliver particularly egregious results. In 2019, the top five executives at Warner paid themselves a share package worth $590 million and a remuneration package equivalent to the earnings of the 27 biggest-selling tracks. Yet streaming services offer musicians so little that Fiona Bevan’s song credit on a chart-topping Kylie Minogue album earned her just £100.

More broadly, the corporate stranglehold impoverishes us all, restricting and deforming public culture. Spotify’s business model incentivises “streambait”, encouraging musicians to supply inoffensive and undemanding tracks that can be left on as background noise. Meanwhile, the tech companies’ near monopoly on ad sales allows advertisers to stipulate that content must not appear near controversial news items. The result? Editors learn that stories about, say, the Black Lives Matter movement won’t generate the revenue earned by blander articles.

In response, Giblin and Doctorow argue for radical transparency, insisting that corporations must be prevented from hiding their depredations behind incomprehensible algorithms. They advocate time limits on the copyright contracts through which corporations enrich themselves; denounce DRM as an infringement on what should be a basic right to repair, modify and re-use technology; and propose a mandated minimum rate for artistic labour to prevent monopolies driving artists into complete penury.

Chokepoint Capitalism emphasises exchange and distribution. An additional focus on production would have enriched the argument – after all, arts workers toiling for small companies often endure merciless exploitation. Nevertheless, this is an important and powerful book, not least because it crushes the myth of artists as out-of-touch elitists.

Rather than painting creatives as different, Giblin and Doctorow emphasise the similarities between the problems they face and those endured by the great bulk of the population at a time when 40 per cent of Americans say they could not find $400 to cover an unexpected expense.

“Chokepoint Capitalism hurts nurses and rideshare drivers and delivery riders and adjunct professors at major universities,” they conclude. “It affects fast food workers and thoracic surgeons, journalists and auto mechanics and countless more professions.”

If we want change, Giblin and Doctorow say, we need to act collectively. That’s true for artists; it’s also true for non-artists. Whether you’re a Swiftie or not, the broken system epitomised by the Ticketmaster debacle affects us all.

It’s only together that we’ll shake it off. 

Scribe, 320pp, $32.99