Netflix, Prime, Spotify, Are Subsriptions an Improvement? Bruce Econ PhC

Economics Index and Qualifications
By Richard Bruce BA, MA, and PhC in Economics
Former Instructor St. John's University, New York City

Subscriptions, One Giant Leap for Mankind

Subscriptions, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Paramont Plus, Spotify, and many others are meeting with considerable suspicion from the press. We are warned that the cost of all those subscriptions can add up.

Yes, they can, if you let them. But there is no reason why you have to let them. If money is short you can sign up for one subscription and binge watch it for a month or more, then cancel, and sign up for another.

If you have the money and want to spend it on entertainment you can sign up for more than one subscription so that you have more choice and do not have to binge. What you spend is up to you in a way that it is not with cable TV, and one subscription service is certainly a lot cheaper than cable.

Segmenting the Market

The reader might think that signing up for a month and bingeing is somehow bad for the creative community. However, what subscriptions do is segment the market, which is a very old tradition in the entertainment industry. The publishers first come out with expensive hardbacks. The hardback reader gets bigger print, a durable cover, and is able to read the novel first. The reader of cheap paperbacks must wait, read small print, and do with a less durable cover.

In the movie industry many decades ago there were first run movies at higher prices, and second run houses that frequently ran double features at lower prices. If you waited half a decade the movie was free on broadcast TV with commercials.

More recently movies were first in theaters, then available for rent in video stores, then on Home Box Office and other pay cable services, and finally free on broadcast TV with commercials.

Segmenting the market allows the creator to charge the wealthy more, without giving up on the poorer audiences. More money for the creators, means more and better entertainment for all of us. In 2022 we got just short of 600 scripted, fiction, prime time series in the US.

No Ads

A second huge advantage that the subscriptions usually have over broadcast and cable is the absence of ads. This is a very big deal because about one quarter of basic cable TV and broadcast radio and TV is advertising. Furthermore, media consumption is the number one activity in America. Sleep is number two. So ads take up a major portion of our lives.

A full time worker is likely to spend about half as much time watching or listening to ads as they do working. But only half of the population is being paid to work. Children and the elderly are usually not employed. (Those lazy infants.) This means that for the whole population advertising takes up about as much time as paid work.

For each individual over the course of a life time, from infancy through old age the average person will spend somewhere in the general neighborhood of as much time with ads as they spend doing paid work. It is as if we have two jobs, our paid work, and watching ads. Subscription services may help us go a long way to eliminating one of those jobs, the ads.

Some complain that we have not gotten the flying cars we were promised and we spend too much time stuck in traffic, getting rid of ads will save us more time than instant teleportation would, yet a subscription costs a few dollars a month and teleportation is probably physically impossible both now and in the future.

Work takes time but for many it gives life meaning and structure. It is widely believed to ennoble the individual. It also provides us with social contact. We want to reduce it up to a point, but worry about it being eliminated, or even reduced too much.

Ads do not give our lives meaning, or friendship, nor do they ennoble us. It is commonly believed that they make us more materialistic and are therefore bad for the soul. A radical reduction in ads is a major step forward.

Little or no money for sports

A third advantage of subscriptions is that they funnel money into art as opposed to sports. Too much of our cable money is going for professional sports.

All the money going into sports has not made sports better. It is at least arguable that it made sports worse because it encourages steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. This is terrible for the athletes and the enjoyment of the spectators is compromised knowing that the spectacle is to some degree fake.

Furthermore, the arts produce something permanent while sports are usually only enjoyed while they are happening. We listen to Bach's music and read Don Quixote hundreds of years after they were created, but few want to watch last week's game.

As mentioned above we are producing almost 600 scripted prime time shows for American television and if the reviews aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes are to be believed many are of excellent quality. These shows enrich our lives today, but are likely to enrich our lives and other lives in the future as well.

A Major Improvement in Our Lives

For all these reasons subscription services represent a major improvement in the life of the average person. As mentioned before, for Americans, and indeed the whole human race consuming media is the number one activity, above even sleep. It takes the majority of our waking hours, and the over whelming majority of our leisure hours. So a big improvement in media is a big improvement in our lives.

In recent years and even decades the standard of living of the average person in the USA has hardly improved according to some of the most commonly sited statistics. We are frequently told that we should be both disappointed and angry and vote for the speakers preferred party and candidates to correct the situation.

We are particularly told this by liberals. Have they forgotten that we are supposed to be in an era of limits, where we learn to live with less to protect the ecology. This is what the liberals themselves told us.

Well it turns out we have learned to live with less, media takes a little electricity, but compared to many of our activities has a rather low carbon footprint and is fairly eco-friendly. With fewer ads, more choices, and higher quality programming we are doing fairly well, and entertainment subscriptions are a major part of that success.

Like what is probably the majority of Americans I subscribe to Amazon Prime. I use some of the services, I don't use others, this is why I think I am getting my money's worth from Amazon Prime

Here is an index to my other pages on economics, and a short review of my qualifications in this field.

This page is one of many this site has on media. Here is the media index page.

Tell me what you think. Here is my contact information..

Last updated May 6, 2023