– SWithout asking anything, streaming platforms hit the nail on the head during the Césars ceremony. It was Jamel Debbouze, opening the fiesta on February 24, who mentioned the enemy brother of cinema: “For 9 euros a month, you have unlimited access to very good films, you have incredible actors, you can pause and get a yogurt. » In conclusion? « The bastards… This offer is exceptional and we are in deep shit. »
The comedian and actor took malicious pleasure in evoking an invisible danger, when a good part of the Olympia room had undoubtedly already worked in films or series for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, OCS… Or planned to do so. The same goes for music, with Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music… We hardly hear anyone say that paid streaming platforms are enemies of culture – apart from Amazon, predator of bookstores –, but rather members of the family, which certainly needs to be regulated.
Both musical and audiovisual platforms are at the heart of a system where everyone stands together and where many gain, and first of all the public, explain the academics Olivier Thuillas and Louis Wiart, in The Platforms to conquer the cultural industries (PUG, 168 pages, 20 euros). Jamel Debbouze is right on this point: a month of access to Netflix does not cost more than a cinema ticket, a month of music at Spotify is less expensive than a CD. No one is surprised anymore. Is the comparison stupid? Go explain it to the public.
And then, short of shutting down the Internet, paid platforms are the best response to piracy, illegal downloading and the entrenched culture of free. If the music market has lost half of its turnover in twenty years, falling from 1.5 billion euros in 2002 to 766 million in 2022, three quarters of the money comes from digital subscriptions, the rest split between CDs (down) and vinyl (up). The same goes for films and series, where the share of French people fond of video on demand has jumped from 33% to 50% in just four years.
Job cuts
The question that arises about paid platforms is not so much about their existence as their model. Seen like that, the landscape is less cheerful. The fact that they are almost all in deficit raises questions. The Swedish Spotify largely dominates music streaming in the world. In 2023, it will have more than 500 million users, almost half of them paying, but it has been losing money since its creation fifteen years ago: 430 million dollars in 2022. Six hundred deletions jobs were announced in January.
The main reason is that Spotify must donate nearly three quarters of its earnings to music producers or rights management organizations. The percentage prohibits almost any profit. The three behemoths of the record (Universal, Warner and Sony) are therefore the main beneficiaries, their stars too, the bulk of the musicians not at all, but as the public finds it…
The result is the same for audiovisual platforms. They are so numerous, the competition is so fierce, the production costs so high that profitability is extremely rare.
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