November 13, 2025
The Same Stream Twice
Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking
Two recent books, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine and Andrew deWaard’s Derivative Media, explore the consequences of these technological intermediaries for the music, film, and television industries. While Pelly’s account focuses on the power of Spotify’s ever-changing playlisting practices, deWaard turns to the rise of intellectual property, as remakes, reboots, and spin-offs have come to saturate mass media markets. Both center on the changing relationship between labor and capital in the platform era.
