And worse—we are accepting it.
I don’t quite know how to write this so you will read it to the very end, but I am going to try. It is simply too important. And if you pay attention, I might just prevent you from committing a murder yourself.
We love to criticize today’s youth. We despise their passive lifestyles, glued to screens, devoid of outdoor motivation, listening to computerized background noise. We boast about how different things were when we were young—when our mothers had to drag us inside at night, when meeting friends meant actually looking them in the eye, and when music was made by real, flesh-and-blood human beings. We roll out the holy names: The Beatles, Deep Purple, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Sex Pistols.
Everything was better in the past, right?
Yet, here is the uncomfortable truth: you and I are actively helping to kill that very past. We are suffocating the modern descendants of those musical legends.
Are we hypocrites? Absolutely. And if we don’t change how we consume art right now, we are about to pay a devastating cultural price.
Our Excuse is a Big Lie
You stopped buying records. You’re streaming, in spite of the fact that you know exactly where the money goes—just look at my blog about the price of a coffee cup, or even better the previous piece written by English top guitarist Nigel Price, he should know, he’s right there in the middle of it! (The links to the previous post are below.)
But once again, you have a convenient excuse. Yes, you pay your monthly fee to Spotify, but you tell yourself: “I only listen to local Prague artists. Last month I didn’t listen to anything else besides Kristina Barta and Libor Šmoldas, since they just released brilliant new records.”
Records which, by the way, you didn’t actually buy. Nice going, jazz fan. Have your brown eyes gone blue, or are you just… just?
Here is what I’m talking about:
The Corporate Pop Hijack
You pay your monthly streaming subscription—let’s say 165 CZK—and you spend the whole month listening to nothing but local Prague jazz legends. You assume your money goes to those artists.
You are wrong. Here is how the “Pro-Rata” trap actually works:
- The Big Bucket: The tech giants don’t look at your individual listening history to distribute your specific money. Instead, they pool all subscription cash from the entire country into one massive corporate bucket.
- The Numbers Game: They distribute that collective bucket based on total global market share. If millions of kids leave a global pop playlist running on repeat while they sleep, that pop star claims the entire pool.
- The Result: Up to 99% of your 165 CZK is instantly redirected to fund global pop mega-stars and their billionaire record labels.
- The Reality: The local Czech jazz musicians like Libor and Kristina, whom you actually spent hours listening to, are left fighting over the microscopic crumbs of a single Koruna.
By using the app, you are literally being forced to fund the corporate machine while starving the local culture you claim to love.
But don’t worry. At this speed, we won’t have any real music left to listen to soon anyway, and you will have one less thing to brag to your kids about. Because you cannot eat or pay rent purely on creativity, Libor and Kristina will soon be forced into professional re-education—thanks to you and me.
We are watching a mass murder. And worse—we are accepting it.
You think this is unbelievable? Just wait until next time, when we start talking about the corporate contracts!
The three previous parts in this series can be found here:
