Spotify, Netflix and the illusion of choice

Spotify, Netflix and many other places give the illusion of endless choice.

My impression is it mirrors the development of TV and other media.

In the UK we used to have one channel, BBC; people would meet at their friends house to watch David Attenborough bring Lions and Tigers from London Zoo to perform in Alexandra Palace!

We now have hundreds of channels but it seems like there is nothing to watch. At the start there was no choice, and everything was ground breaking. The problem is, people who are breaking new ground aren't on broadcast television. They're streaming on the internet, where you can take risks. On a side note this was also true in the development of film see Pre-Code Hollywood.

Netflix pretends to address this but is still very risk adverse. It's not taking more risks, just using better data on what is popular.

YouTube and Vimeo, give almost complete freedom to create and see if people will come. YouTube provides a small, and easy to tap income for content creators, and censors. From a design and tech perspective Vimeo is a better service, but it lacks an easy route to cash. I see LiveLeak as a very valuable, if astringent entity within video sharing.

Tom Scott has spoken about how YouTube imperfectly implements Copyright, but how Youtube does it better than anyone else. Much more eloquently and concisely than I could. It all stems from tech evolving faster than legislature.

Spotify provides the illusion of all music at your fingertips, but if you want to see cool new music it's Mixcloud for the new radio shows, and SoundClound who are sharing the new demo tapes.

In conclusion. If it's all free, you are the product. But more importantly, the interesting, scary, fun, original stuff is always happening at the fringes. Look for the weird, offensive, unpopular, and poor because, they might just be changing the world.