Music streaming platforms have way too much control over musicians and music lovers. It’s time to rein them in.
Spotify Co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström speak onstage at the Spotify Investor Day 2026.(Bryan Bedder / Getty)
If you are like nearly 200 million other Americans, you have an account on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. You probably access the music you love primarily by streaming. Recorded music is likely the backdrop to many of your fondest memories. Listening to it may well be an essential part of your daily life.
But log on to any of these streaming services today, and it becomes immediately clear just how far they have strayed from their role as an unobtrusive means to access one of life’s most basic pleasures. From intrusive ads to AI DJ features you didn’t ask for, the overall experience has degraded—not that it’s stopped billionaire executives from hiking subscription prices.
If you’re a musician whose music is on one of these platforms, the odds are that your experience is even worse. You are likely paid fractions of pennies on the dollar per stream—after a process for determining compensation that is often opaque to you but filled with contractual quirks and kickbacks. You might be further squeezed if you want any chance of the algorithm pushing you to new listeners. You might even be nudged—covertly or overtly—to change artistic directions based on what the platform describes as your music’s most and least popular characteristics. You’re all too aware that platform executives’ decisions have the power to make or break careers—that it is, in other words, a game of pay-to-play.
This is all pretty demeaning, and harmful to musical culture. There is a legal tool kit at our disposal if we want a fairer, less destructive way to enjoy one of humanity’s oldest art forms. But it involves reconceptualizing what these services really are.
Hating the streaming giants has gone mainstream. Musicians from Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift have spoken out against them, even as they are some of their highest-paid artists. And our understanding of their harms has grown even more acute in recent years, as journalists like Liz Pelly have richly documented the deep problems at the heart of the business model and user experience. Meanwhile, independent musicians are organizing to divest their local scenes from Spotify. Many have started to ask themselves: Why can’t we ditch these platforms?
A range of ideas have been proposed, adopting familiar models from labor organizing (organizing musicians into new unions capable of exercising countervailing power) and tax policy (creating new categories of royalties for artists by taxing streaming platform revenues). Private market-based solutions—like competition from new, upstart streaming platforms, or consumer boycotts—have also attracted attention and, in some cases, endorsement from the streaming platforms themselves (as applied to their rivals).
But none of these solutions account for the fact that music streaming platforms are not like the retail businesses that supplied past generations with records and CDs. When operating in competitive markets, these businesses might have been responsive to external private power. Spotify and its peers are more like public utilities or infrastructure: large platforms that connect musicians to listeners and vice versa, where scale and connectivity are all-important. This makes them unlikely to be effectively governed by private actors alone—just like electric utilities are unlikely to be disciplined by competing power lines or by households turning off the lights. Without public governance, streaming platforms will likely continue to raise prices on consumers, squeeze musicians, and make the music we hear less interesting and innovative.
Online streaming platforms only make sense operating at a large scale: Their very utility depends on connecting as many different users as possible, since listeners generally want platforms that have most of the music they want, and musicians want platforms with the most listeners. This means that within each platform, music is likely to be distributed in complex webs or networks, connecting many different users to many others. And while platforms might not pay each individual artist all that much, licensing all that music and building an interface to channel it is very expensive—making a system of many small, competing platforms unlikely to succeed. In other words, the nature of these services tends toward concentration. And that’s exactly what they’ve done over the last 20 years: transform themselves into the only means through which recorded music can reach a mass audience.
That’s why it’s time, as I argue in an article published earlier this year by the Columbia Journal of Law & The Arts, to reach for tools that we have used to solve similar problems before.
There is a long tradition in American law of regulating firms with the inherent tendency toward concentration as public utilities—not only electricity and gas, but also railroads, agricultural facilities, stock exchanges, banks, airlines, communication networks like telephone and radio, and many others. Indeed, some firms in the music industry are already regulated like this: the performance rights organizations (PROs) the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which process royalty payments from music distributors to songwriters. The logic of these regulations—which were crafted by antitrust lawyers at the Department of Justice in the 1940s—is that the PROs act essentially like infrastructure for the music industry, giving them significant power over the livelihoods of songwriters. To tame this power, they were permitted only to license particular categories of music copyrights at fair prices, and were required to accept all songwriters who wished to join them. This logic could just as well apply to streaming platforms and the music they host today.
In the early 20th century, the large corporations that manufactured piano rolls—an early recorded-music technology that used perforations in paper to program arrangements for player pianos—posed similar risks to both musicians and listeners. So in 1909, Congress passed a law that mandated that the companies pay fair prices for music, prohibited economic discrimination, and eliminated the legal structures that gave the corporations such enormous power. That law is still on the books today for one category of music license, but we have not yet applied its logic to other parts of the music industry.
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Today, policymakers could reinvigorate this tradition to regulate streaming platforms. They could mandate that the platforms and record labels pay fair, transparent, and nondiscriminatory prices to carry music—enough to make sure artists can make a decent living. They could also separate the platforms’ roles as both hosts and recommenders of music, which lets them choose both what music to highlight and how much to pay for it—a conflict of interest built for profiteering.
We also have another related tool: public ownership. With the political will to do so, policymakers could build a publicly owned streaming platform to rival and economically discipline the private platforms through competition, while providing an excellent public service—just like public libraries. Today, public libraries in cities such as Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Salt Lake City, Utah, have already built streaming platforms that, if scaled up with the resources of a national institution like the Library of Congress, could build a public streaming platform with the capacity to compete with the giants. Without the need to deliver returns to shareholders—only to fairly compensate the musicians who provide the raw material for such a venture to succeed—a public platform could offer service on better terms and fairer prices than the private ones.
Enacting these policies is a tough but not impossible political fight under the Trump administration. Legislation to govern the music industry has advanced at seemingly inopportune moments before. In 2018, Congress unanimously passed the Music Modernization Act, which was signed by President Trump. That law attempted to update the music licensing system for the streaming age—though it has had decidedly mixed results. Industry would likely be far less supportive of a bill that regulated the platforms more aggressively. But if a cross-partisan coalition of musicians, independent record labels, and concerned listeners—even a fraction of the 200 million that use the three largest services—were to rally in support, it might have a fighting chance.
It’s also dawning on more politicians that voters are being crushed by the high cost of living, and that advancing policies to promote affordability and build a fairer economy is becoming necessary to win them over. Policymakers realize that between increasingly concentrated industries (which drive inflation) and persistent wage depression, something’s got to give. The public is hungry for policies that freeze costs and raise wages. Mandating fairer prices for music streaming is just such a policy.
But we need not wait for politicians to act to regulate the platforms as utilities. Private plaintiffs such as musicians or small labels could also bring suits to govern the music industry as public utilities—either for monopolistic or collusive conduct under the antitrust laws, or under the traditional common law of carriers, as legal scholars Ganesh Sitaraman and Morgan Ricks have suggested for other tech platforms. While some judges may be hostile to this approach, it marks another terrain on which these battles can be waged.
Whatever form it takes, we have a model in public utility law for how to address the problems with streaming platforms. By first recognizing these platforms for what they are—utilities for recorded music distribution—we can use public governance to make them more accountable to the musicians and music listeners they serve.
Ramsay EyreRamsay Eyre is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School, where he is a student fellow at the Program on Law & Political Economy. He is also a legal fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, where he conducted research for this article.