Picture this: after a long day on campus, you treat yourself to an Uber ride home and an evening unwinding by watching something on Netflix. All those hours running from King’s College Circle to Victoria College to catch your next class has made you hungry, but you’re too tired to cook a meal, so you order some food from DoorDash. While you wait for your delivery, you listen to some music on Spotify and scroll through your latest LinkedIn notifications. Later, before falling into long-awaited slumber, you lay in bed emptying your storage space of photos and files from your iPhone. Even after your iCloud upgrade, there’s not enough space to keep everything.
For some of you, this scenario will resonate. What may not be obvious is the collection of expenses that hide behind your scrolling time: depending on time and distance, your Uber home may cost $40 or as much as $60; Netflix subscriptions range from $5.99 to $20.99 a month; HelloFresh costs about $9.99 a meal; an extra 200 GB on your iPhone requires $3.99 monthly; Spotify Premium has increased its prices for students from $5.99 to $6.40.
It wasn’t that long ago when physical media or even software was a one-time purchase. Until 2012, you could purchase software like Photoshop for a one-time fee of 700 USD. Though expensive, the service, once paid for, belongs to you — unlike rentals and subscriptions.
Think about how often you are recommended a movie by friends and family, only to find out you do not have the relevant subscription needed to view it. How often have you wanted to read an article only to see that you need to pay $0.99 a week to access it? It seems that nowadays, almost every website and software requires a subscription for you to use. How did we end up here?
Promise of a one-stop solution
Like most business decisions, the shift to subscription-only methods was purely profit-driven. Adobe Systems is an example. Ever since they switched to a fully subscription-based model, Creative Cloud, Adobe’s annual revenue increased from around 4 billion USD to 22 billion USD between 2014–2024. Even Apple — a company which originally only sold physical products like cell phones and computers — has reported over USD 100 billion in revenue as of 2024, from just their subscriptions, such as iCloud and AppleTV, alone.
The kicker is that thanks to the low production costs of this subscription-based business model, it does not economically make sense for companies to shift to non-subscription models. However, the business profit is ultimately paid by us, the consumers.
Most subscription models are referred to as ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS), which first saw its potential for profit in 2004 with a company called SalesForce. The company offered software that businesses could use to track metrics such as information related to clients, sales, and marketing, making it easier for businesses to grow as they did not need to use their own internal resources for consumer research. Salesforce offered this service for a monthly fee and soon saw a meteoric rise in its revenue. It was 2004’s most successful ‘initial public offering’ — when a stock is first offered to the public on the stock market — raising USD 110 million.
Many businesses followed suit with the SaaS model. Take Netflix, for example: it started as an online DVD rental service, and it announced its fully online streaming service option in 2011, starting at eight US dollars per month. The decision to offer an online streaming service alongside the DVD option was a result of the growing popularity of smartphones and a jump in internet usage.
Despite the numbers, Netflix’s switch to fully online streaming was still a gamble given how no company had similar financial success with an online streaming model at the time. It paid off: only 16 percent of Americans were streaming movies and television shows online in 2010 but that number would almost double by the end of 2011. Alternatively, US DVD sales plummeted by 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2011.
Netflix’s online streaming subscription was also a cheaper option to cable TV — eight USD per month compared to an average of 57.48 USD per month in 2011. However, the cheap price would not be enough to lure new customers if the content offered was sparse compared to cable channels. So, Netflix started licensing TV shows from different networks, allowing viewers to watch full seasons of shows, without recording them while they aired. Viewers no longer had to wait for the show’s time slot or buy a separate digital storage system.
Shortly before the final season of entertainment network AMC’s hit show Breaking Bad, the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, said he believed that Netflix helped generate an audience for the show. “Under the old paradigm — using the old technology of simply having first runs and then reruns on networks — I don’t know that we would’ve reached the critical mass that we reached,” Gilligan told Wired magazine.
Evidently, SaaS services like Netflix gave consumers more for less money compared to cable TV. These were the blissful early days of subscription services — a one-stop inexpensive solution compared to the older business model.
Reverting to the old guard
But nothing good lasts forever. By December 2015, Netflix accounted for 37.1 per cent of traffic in North America’s fixed networks. Netflix’s success with SaaS compelled other companies to adopt subscription-based business models. There is now a plethora of subscription-based networks such as Crave TV, HBO Max, Prime Video, and Hulu TV, just to name a few. As of 2024, Talker Research, an American survey and polling organization, indicated that the American Gen Z spends 39.20 USD monthly on video streaming services alone.
Suddenly, this is not too different from how it was during cable TV’s dominance. To get specific content, you had to pay for different services.
This can be attributed to the fact that, due to increased competition, popular shows are exclusive to certain streaming applications. Suits — the most-watched series of 2023 — was only available on Netflix and Peacock. In the same year, Ted Lasso was the most-watched original streaming service show in 2023, exclusive to Apple TV. So if you wanted to watch both these popular shows, you would need to pay for two services.
Talker Research also found that Gen Z spends close to another 100 USD per month on media subscriptions, including social media and music applications. The present reality is that SaaS as a business model has seeped into other aspects of life.
Pay to win
Even the job market is not immune to having a SaaS application, which can serve the user’s advantage. LinkedIn is free to use, but there is also a paid premium subscription option.
LinkedIn claims that its premium subscribers who apply using its ‘Top Choice Jobs’ feature are 43 per cent more likely to receive a message back from a recruiter. Given how a 2024 Deloitte report found that Canadian youth unemployment was at 14.5 per cent as of August 2024, such lofty claims can become quite enticing.
Between 2022 and 2023, LinkedIn premium users have increased by 20 million worldwide, with a total of approximately 174.5 million users in December 2023, according to Statista. One would sure hope, then, that users are deriving some benefit from the subscription in their professional lives.
Nipun Rustagi — a fourth-year computer science student at UTM — spoke about his experience using LinkedIn Premium Business, which costs $59.00 per month.
Rustagi admitted that LinkedIn gets users addicted to its premium service. “It becomes a habitual thing to check for updates, to see who’s viewing your profile, to see whether recruiters are going through it, or just to get better job recommendations.”
The strategy is simple: companies entice you with attractive features, only to swiftly place those features behind a subscription paywall. Student discounts and free trials are often part of this approach. While these offers may seem harmless, a major red flag arises when free trials require credit card information.
One could argue that it is an ‘identity check’, preventing users from exploiting the system by creating multiple accounts for repeated free trials. However, there are ways to verify identities without immediately charging users after free trials, such as using government-approved IDs like driver’s licences. With this system, once their free trial expires, users would then have the option to provide their credit card information and purchase a subscription.
The truth is rather straightforward: companies rely on users forgetting to cancel their free trials, allowing them to sneak in extra charges. I must admit, I’ve fallen victim to this myself. A few months ago, I forgot to cancel my LinkedIn subscription and was unexpectedly charged for it. According to a 2024 survey by media network company CNET, 59 per cent of Gen Z participants admitted to forgetting to cancel a subscription after a free trial at least once, while four per cent of adults over 18 reported forgetting to cancel more than five times a year.
The ultimate price: losing ownership
SaaS business models began as a one-stop solution, offering a break from the traditional market structure. Today, most companies have adopted the same model while steadily increasing prices. Deloitte’s 2021 digital media trends survey revealed that more than half of the 2,009 respondents expressed frustration with subscribing to multiple services to access the content they want.
The ubiquity of subscriptions today reflects a generation struggling with profound economic and social challenges. Canadians under 35 are increasingly priced out of homeownership, a traditional symbol of stability and independence. Yet many allocate significant portions of their income to an expanding array of subscriptions, prioritizing access and convenience over ownership. This shift underscores a deeper issue: the subscription economy flourishes in an era of economic precarity, offering minor and ultimately ineffective solutions to affordability while perpetuating a cycle of dependency.
This dynamic extends beyond economic strain; it’s also about control. The shift from ownership to access means a transfer of power from individuals to corporations, which now dictate the terms of engagement. From determining how many pages your printer can produce to which memories are stored in the cloud — control over basic utilities, creativity, and personal history has shifted away from consumers.
This loss of control profoundly impacts how Gen Z navigates their lives, confining them to systems that prioritize corporate profits over their agency as an individual. Ultimately, this trend is not just about what we pay for — it’s about how our relationship with technology and goods is reshaping societal power dynamics.
This erosion of ownership reflects a broader cultural shift toward impermanence, where nothing feels fully ours, and everything depends on monthly payments. The growing reliance on corporations to safeguard essential aspects of life commodifies trust, concentrating immense power in profit-driven companies and leaving individuals vulnerable to exploitation and insecurity. Additionally, the subscription economy exacerbates social inequities, deepening the divide between those who can afford access and those excluded from these conveniences.
All hope is not lost
In October 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission introduced a “Click-to-Cancel” rule, mandating that businesses make cancelling a subscription as straightforward as signing up for one. Often, subscribing is far easier than cancelling, which creates frustration for consumers. The new rule requires that the number of clicks to cancel a service must match the number of clicks needed to subscribe.
Gen Z has optimistically decided to fight against the loss of ownership in fascinating ways. For instance, 2022 was the first year vinyl sales surpassed CD sales since 1987. CBC also reports a resurgence in film and early digital photography, particularly among younger generations, which might reflect a yearning to reclaim control over their media.
Gen Z’s desire for control goes beyond owning photos, videos, or notes; it’s a symbolic response to an era where so much of life feels dictated by external, corporate forces. It underscores a generational struggle for security and self-determination in a world increasingly shaped by corporate control.
To sum up the current situation, I must echo the famous sentiment spread by Danish politician Ida Auken’s World Economic Forum speech: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
Industries and corporations lure in consumers with subscription-based models that make it easier for them to enjoy entertainment and online media. However, the question is whether or not this ease of access is sufficient when none of the products behind the paywall actually belong to us. It seems as though an element of autonomy is lost alongside our loss of ownership, and this loss of autonomy is causing discontent.
Ironically, the article explaining this quote required me to pay $5 per month.
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