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Untangling the rise of platforms from the reconfigured economies of cultural production requires a historically informed, macroeconomic approach. We take such a comparative approach because of the institutional entanglement and dependencies of companies active in different industry sectors. Most relevant to cultural production is competition between legacy media corporations and platform companies, which directly impacts the way in which the latter operate their internal markets. Competition among any of these businesses concerns vying not only for market share or customers, but also for the quest for “talent” (i.e., high-skilled workers) and access to finance capital. Broadening the institutional scope, the ascendance of both platform companies and the transformation of the cultural industries should be considered alongside “neighboring” industries: consumer electronics and telecommunications (Hesmondhalgh, 2019, 2020; see also Winseck, 2011).

To illustrate the latter point, consider the transformation of the music industry. For much of the twentieth century, the consumption of music was tied to technological innovations in consumer electronics – from radio, to vinyl records, to audio cassettes, to CDs (Hesmondhalgh & Meier, 2018). Consumer electronics behemoths, such as Sony and Philips, together with record labels that were often subsidiaries of these larger conglomerates, pushed these new technologies in earnest – often through concerted efforts to render their precursors obsolete. More recently, telecom companies and streaming platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music, have taken a more central role in the distribution and monetization of music (Morris, 2020; Prey, 2020). The impact of streaming platforms on the political economy of the music industry, however, should not be overestimated; legacy actors and industry practices have not altogether disappeared, and in fact they continue to exert influence on systems of revenue, labor, and, ultimately, power (Hesmondhalgh, 2020).

Thus, a comparative institutional perspective is warranted because the cultural producers that decide to partner with platforms are typically active across the wider media economy and in various platform markets. It is precisely because cultural producers are not inherently dependent on platform companies for every aspect of cultural creation, distribution, marketing, or monetization that analyses of platformization should account for inter-industry relationships as well. Cultural producers may decide not to join a platform; they may “multi-home” (i.e., join several different platforms to reduce platform dependency); and/or they may seek out partnerships or arrangements with legacy (media) companies. At times, this bifurcation leads to a clash of different economic and regulatory paradigms; cultural producers who draw on a history of legacy business models and legal protections, for instance, may find themselves at odds with platform companies more than willing to “disrupt” entrenched institutions and longstanding economic routines. As we will see throughout this book, these institutional culture clashes can be a source of boundless creativity and technological innovation, but also of fierce competition, stark economic asymmetries, and of strong socioeconomic and political-cultural tensions.

All of this is to say that the transformation of the cultural industries has been markedly uneven. And, accordingly, one of the recurring arguments in this book is that continuities and changes in the cultural industries differ – at times, quite profoundly – across regions and industry segments (Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Havens & Lotz, 2017; Miège, 2011; Winseck, 2011). As well as each country being in a different state of economic development, changes in cultural production have shown stark regional variations in terms of “traditions, technological developments, regulations and industrial structure” (Bustamante, 2004: 805). How, then, do we make sense of these variations in institutional dependencies – be they historical, between companies (i.e., inter-industry relationships), or within markets (i.e., intra-industry relationships)? Drawing from (media) economics, critical political economy, and media industry studies, we argue that the consumer electronics industries, the telecommunications industries, platform companies, and legacy media companies are subject to and drivers of concentration and digitalization. Being attentive to these two processes allow us to draw out important political economic continuities by acknowledging that both processes easily predate the platform economy.