The genius of not letting you copy and paste

On Spotify and the New Media Enclosure (the NME)

I think I’ve finally worked out why Spotify is so successful: you can’t copy and paste anything from it, at least, not in the normal way.

You can’t lift a lyric, a title, or even a line of text. Nothing wants to leave. Every act of sharing – a playlist, a song link, a lyric quote – only drives people back in. You are driven to Spotify, never away from it.

That’s the quiet brilliance of the new media enclosures. They don’t fence you out; they fence you in. The experience feels open, frictionless, humane – but it’s enclosure dressed as generosity. The garden walls are made of convenience. You can wander endlessly, but only inside.

It’s a perfect form of containment: no force, no friction, no visible boundary. Just the illusion of freedom while every road loops back to the same centre. Spotify doesn’t just stream music, it streams behaviour. It teaches us to love access more than ownership, and to confuse availability with freedom.

You can’t copy and paste. But maybe you’ve stopped wanting to.

Notes from the Back Table