[Kalium]

> If this is the comparison, then be afraid, because streaming has both destroyed a huge amount of value in recordings and redirected a significant portion of remaining value towards new middlemen.

Counterpoint: streaming didn't destroy value, it exposed how much value was fictional or an artifice of a dearth of consumer options.

Apps have done something similar. They have exposed that many customers, in many cases, don't actually care all that much about things that restauranteurs believed they did. The supposed value largely didn't exist.

One example is supposed relationships between vendor and customer. Most people don't have strong, deep, and enduring emotional attachments to relatively generic pizza shops. They do not deeply bond to an artist they kinda like one song from, but otherwise find interchangeable with several dozen other artists on their lofi playlist.