How much do you spend on subscriptions monthly?
The average American has 4.5 monthly subscriptions, mostly streaming services, and spends almost $1000 a year. That ends up at around $80 a month. Eighty dollars. What else could you buy for eighty dollars that you’re spending on subscriptions? You could get just under twelve Big Macs, forty extra-large Big Gulps from 7-Eleven, or you could save it. A thousand dollars in savings a year, simply from not buying subscription services.
But if not for streaming, how else would you consume media? How would you listen to music? Watch shows and movies? Are you meant to wander through this desolate world alone, with nothing but your own thoughts to entertain you?
I have a solution for you, one that sounds scary not because it is, but because corporations want you to think it is: piracy. “Piracy is wrong!” You shout into the unhearing void (because, of course, we’re still in the world where you’re entertained by your mind alone), “I don’t want to steal from anyone!”
But is it really stealing? When you steal something, you take it away from someone else. When you pirate, you both get to keep the media. And you would be right that stealing is bad. Would I steal a car? Absolutely not. Would I make a free copy of someone’s car, and now we both get to drive wherever we want? Hell yeah.
When people say piracy is stealing, what they really mean is that they’re sad that you aren’t a paying customer of whatever corporation’s media you’ve made a copy of. Piracy is the stealing of non-existent profits. Your ten dollars could’ve gone in Disney’s pocket, and now you can buy a frozen pizza to eat while you watch Mulan for free.
“Sure, it doesn’t particularly hurt corporations to pirate,” you think. “But what about small musicians and filmmakers? I want them to be able to live off their work too.”
And you would be quite considerate for that. However, is paying for Spotify really helping out small artists? The average payout for artists on Spotify is $0.004 per stream. That means 250 streams equals one dollar. 2500 streams are equal to ten dollars, or the average cost of a Spotify subscription. Assume the average song is three minutes. It would take 7500 minutes of listening to that one artist to make them ten dollars. 7500 minutes is 125 hours or just over five straight days of listening. Do you have the time and emotional investment to do that to make sure your favorite artists are getting paid sufficiently? Or would it be more prudent to cancel your Spotify subscription and spend that ten dollars on buying a digital album once a month?
And when you buy these albums, something amazing happens; they’re yours forever. You can download them, keep them in a special music folder on your device, and no corporation can take them from you because they decided they didn’t want to host it anymore. The same applies to movies or TV shows. If you own DVDs of your favorite media, you never have to worry about Netflix, Hulu, or HBO deciding to take it off of their platform. The average person pays $80 a month, and they don’t gain anything. At the end of the day, after all the money is spent, you don’t own any of the media you’re paying for. Any moment, a stuck-up guy in a suit can decide your favorite movie isn’t worth keeping in their catalogue, and sell it off to some service no one has heard of that charges $15 a month.
Does that sound good to you? Do you want to keep paying money to own nothing? Do you want to be subjected to the money-grabbing corporations? When they raise the prices and you’re paying $20 instead of 10 for Spotify, will you feel the same way?
Piracy doesn’t have to be scary. Think of it like a library: someone owns the media legitimately, and the rest of us are able to borrow it. With the cost of living higher than ever, why should we need to spend so much on things that don’t belong to us? Why does the fault always fall to the consumer, and not the corporation who overcharges and withholds from us in the first place?
“Streaming is just so convenient though,” you say. “I don’t really want to switch because it sounds like so much work.”
To that I say this: convenience is the killer of creativity. Today’s society is so addicted to convenience that we’ve forgotten how good it can feel to think for yourself. Think about music in particular. Having your music on your phone is convenient, but does it feel good? Phones do so much, but they do it all so mediocrely. They play music, take photos, play games, and more, but it doesn’t evoke the same joy as a dedicated music player, or camera, or gaming system. We’ve forgotten how to slow down and enjoy the media we interact with, to the point that we only interact at all because it’s a habit.
The phrase ‘media consumption’ sums this idea up perfectly. We’ve shifted from interaction to consumption. We no longer aim to think critically about the ideas presented to us in art, but mindlessly consume until there’s nothing left.
Art isn’t a one-way street. It isn’t consumption. There is something uniquely beautiful in seeing and truly valuing a piece of media, and it’s something that we as a society have forgotten how to do. The viewing of a performance is just as crucial as the creation itself, as it forges real, human connection between artist and viewer. We’ve become so focused on the creation, that we’ve forgotten the whole point is to see and understand the creator. We’ve lost our sense of connection to the people around us. You can look at the state of the world, and see it everywhere. People are incapable of understanding one another, if only because they refuse to try. I think it may be time to relearn how to try, if the only trying we do is a more mindful approach to our interactions with the art all around us.
Weight - Nov. 4, 2025