Rotten harvest

In the early 1990s, Prince started appearing in public with the word “slave” scrawled across his cheek. It was a protest against Warner Music, who had signed Prince when he was just 18, and could dictate the pace of his creative output as well as owning the rights to it. Prince escaped his original contract – partly by changing his recording name to an unpronounceable squiggle – but remained distrustful of the industry that had “enslaved” him until his death, hiding the master recordings of his songs in a secret vault beneath his Minnesota mansion.

In this provocative book, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow argue that, today, every working artist is a bond servant. Culture is the bait adverts are sold around, but artists see almost nothing of the billions Google, Facebook and Apple make off their backs. We have entered an era of “chokepoint capitalism”, in which businesses snake between

audiences and creatives to harvest money that should rightfully belong to the artist.

An early chapter sketches the growth of Amazon. First the company got publishers hooked on its site by offering them great rates. Once it became apparent they couldn’t survive without it, Amazon reduced their cut of the cover price. The image of the chokepoint that recurs throughout this book is an evocatively gruesome one. There is just one pipeline through which authors can access their readers, and Amazon is squeezing it, dictating which books make it to the other side, and at what price.

The authors remind us, repeatedly, that our own ignorance is being weaponised against us. If we don’t understand how big business established its chokehold over us, how will we ever be able to wriggle free of its grip? As such, the first half is devoted to explaining precisely how corporations gain the whip hand over

From publishing to music, Amazon to Apple, an insight into the way corporations cash in on creativity

artists in the main creative industries: publishing, screenwriting, news, radio and music.

The second half is where we get possible solutions: practical ways artists can get back a fair share of the money that is made from their work. Giblin and Doctorow are at their most intelligible, and most inspiring, when they write about the more tangible ways artists can band together to demand fair pay.

Chokepoints are not unique to the creative industries. Lots of companies try to create the conditions that will allow them to take a disproportionate share of the value of other people’s labour (Uber is a classic example). What makes artists uniquely vulnerable to this kind of exploitation is that they are liable to work for nothing.

One really heartening thing about this book is its insistence that no matter what your place is in the cultural ecosystem, you are entitled to get paid decently for what you do.