Every time technology makes distribution easier, the old intermediaries discover tragedy. Newspapers, record labels, TV networks, video stores, software distributors, cinema chains, and even once-dominant technologies like Flash all shared the same problem: they confused temporary control over distribution with permanent value.
What we call “traditional media” has been living through a long and painful identity crisis for decades. Television, radio, newspapers, print magazines, CDs, movie theaters, record labels, and many other legacy industries have spent years announcing that the world is ending, usually because consumers discovered they no longer needed to behave like obedient customers from 1987.
Some of these industries will disappear in their old form. Others will survive, but only after mutating into something that barely resembles what they used to be. Their original structure, licensing models, business incentives, distribution chains, and internal culture were built for a world where production and distribution were expensive. That world is gone.
If you work inside one of those industries, the useful question is not whether the past was beautiful. Of course it was, at least in parts. The useful question is whether your business still solves a real problem for people, or whether it mostly charges rent because it once controlled access.
That is the famous drama of intermediaries.
Intermediaries usually do not die quietly. They announce the end of civilization. They explain that culture will collapse, artists will starve, journalism will disappear, cinema will become barbaric, and society will never recover from the terrible freedom of people choosing something else.
I understand the fear. I do not wish disaster on traditional industries just because they are traditional. There is romance in old media, old formats, old habits, old magazines, old cinemas, old record stores, and old rituals. But romance is not a business model, and nostalgia does not pay rent unless you sell it properly.
Things change. Some changes are better. Some are worse. Some things deserve to survive. Some things deserve a museum plaque and a polite goodbye.
The crisis of intermediaries is not new, and it is not particular to the Internet. It is as old as commerce itself.
The difference today is that everyone can watch the collapse in real time. Two hundred years ago, someone in Argentina probably did not care very much if steam trains in England displaced horses used for cargo transportation. The disruption was local, slow, and far less mediated. Today, every industry crisis comes with interviews, documentaries, lawsuits, lobbying, opinion columns, and executives looking into cameras as if someone had just shot their childhood dog.
But there is no reason for theatrical mourning. Intermediaries have always appeared when distribution was hard, and they have always been threatened when distribution became easier.
That is the movement of history. A product appears. Distribution is difficult. Someone builds a business by standing between producers and consumers. That intermediary becomes powerful. Then technology improves, distribution gets cheaper, producers and consumers start bypassing the old channel, and the intermediary suddenly discovers a deep love for regulation, tradition, quality, jobs, and the moral fabric of society.
The speech changes. The pattern does not.
Traditional media often behaves like a slow machine that no longer oils itself properly. It moves carefully, protects old structures, defends old margins, and treats adaptation as something that should happen only after the market has sent six warnings, three funerals, and one consultant with a PowerPoint deck.
Many of these industries once contributed enormous value to society. Newspapers informed people. Record labels financed artists. Movie theaters created shared cultural experiences. Publishers distributed books. TV networks produced shows that families watched together. These things mattered.
The problem is that some of those same institutions later confused contribution with entitlement. Instead of asking how they could keep creating value in a new environment, they tried to control access to culture, information, and entertainment as if the public still needed permission to participate.
This is where the old model breaks. If your business depends on making access artificially difficult, then every improvement in access feels like an attack.
That is why you often see executives speaking with tragic seriousness about their industry disappearing. The tone is always the same: “If this continues, our world will disappear.”
Yes. It might.
That is not automatically a public tragedy.
The solution many old intermediaries want is not realistic. They want governments, laws, campaigns, fees, technical restrictions, platform rules, and cultural guilt to preserve a model that consumers already rejected.
But the consumer usually has the final word.
If people prefer MP3 files to cassettes, that is not the consumer’s problem. It is not the cassette factory’s moral emergency. If people prefer streaming to CDs, that is not a betrayal of music. If people prefer YouTube to waiting three hours for a music video on MTV, that is not a decline in civilization. It is a better interface winning.
The same thing happened again and again. People did not stop using video stores because they hated video stores. They stopped because the alternative was better. Renting a movie, returning it on time, paying late fees, and dealing with limited stock was not a sacred cultural experience. It was a logistical inconvenience wrapped in fluorescent lighting.
A lot of people remember video stores fondly, and I do too. But let us not exaggerate. The late fee was not a spiritual discipline.
The most contradictory thing about old intermediaries is that they often attack the very technologies they eventually use.
You saw this with music. For years, many successful musicians and record industry voices treated the Internet as a disease that would ruin “music.” Not the music business, not their contracts, not their distribution model, but music itself. Then, of course, you saw them using the same Internet to promote albums, announce tours, sell merchandise, publish videos, and argue with strangers.
The complaint was rarely about art. It was usually about control.
The language around these debates is always revealing. You hear words like “stealing,” “piracy,” “control,” “damage,” “illegal,” “protection,” “rights,” and “harm.” Some of those words are valid in specific contexts. Creators deserve to be paid, and nobody serious should pretend that all unauthorized distribution is morally neutral. But when every new technology is framed as an existential crime scene, the argument stops being about fairness and becomes a defense of a collapsing distribution model.
The tragedy is often exaggerated. We are told that thousands of people will never work again, that entire professions will vanish, and that culture itself will collapse. But when you inspect the argument, it becomes strangely narrow.
If recording studios shrink, does that mean the person who cleaned the studio can never clean another place? If a traditional publisher loses power, does that mean editors, designers, marketers, and writers have no other possible role in the world? If one distribution channel dies, does every skill attached to it die too?
Of course not.
Work changes. Skills move. Some roles vanish. Others appear. The transition can be painful, but pain does not automatically prove the old model deserves permanent protection.
History is full of intermediaries and formats that disappeared because better systems replaced them.
Nobody organized a national funeral for floppy disks. I do not remember angry panels where floppy disk executives warned that civilization would collapse because people had moved to CDs, USB drives, memory cards, and eventually cloud storage. Seeing someone cry on television over the death of the floppy would have been funny, but also a little sad.
The companies that made storage media adapted because the market moved. The product changed, and they had to move with it.
The same happened with physical encyclopedias. When Wikipedia and online knowledge bases became widely available, the idea of buying a heavy printed encyclopedia set became increasingly difficult to justify for most people. There will always be collectors, romantics, and people who love the smell of paper, and that is fine. But if your goal is current, searchable, cross-referenced information, the printed encyclopedia lost the practical argument.
This is not because printed encyclopedias were evil. They were magnificent for their era. The problem is that their era ended.
The same logic applies to video rental stores, printed software catalogs, shareware CDs, physical maps, travel agencies for simple bookings, classified ads, and many other businesses that existed because access was limited.
When access improves, the intermediary must evolve or become decorative.
The movie theater industry is another good example. The usual explanation for its struggle is piracy or streaming, but that explanation is too convenient. The deeper problem is that the home experience improved dramatically while the theater experience often became worse or more expensive.
Modern TVs have excellent image quality. Sound systems are cheaper and better than they used to be. Streaming gives people control over time, place, language, subtitles, pausing, snacks, and clothing standards. You can watch a movie at home at midnight, in sweatpants, without paying a small mortgage for popcorn, and without listening to someone explain the plot to their friend two seats away.
That matters.
Theater still has value, especially for spectacle, community, premium formats, dates, festivals, and films that benefit from a large screen. But the default assumption that everyone should go to the cinema because that is simply how movies work is dead.
Consumers compare experiences. If the theater gives them sticky floors, uncomfortable seats, 20 minutes of ads, expensive snacks, bad projection, noisy people, and a schedule that forces them to organize their life around a screening time, the theater cannot blame the Internet for everything.
At some point, the question becomes simple: what are you offering that is better than staying home?
If the answer is “tradition,” good luck.
Intermediaries are not always media companies. Sometimes they are technology companies that position themselves between creators and users by becoming de facto standards.
In the early days of professional web design, many agencies depended heavily on Adobe Flash, originally created by Macromedia. Flash was powerful, visual, interactive, and attractive at a time when HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were not yet mature enough to deliver the same level of experience across browsers.
For agencies, Flash was a gold mine. It allowed them to create beautiful interactive websites, animated interfaces, games, multimedia experiences, and branded digital environments. It also created dependency. Flash required specialized skills, proprietary tooling, plugins, and workflows that were often expensive and hard to maintain.
When HTML5, modern CSS, faster JavaScript engines, video tags, canvas, SVG, and browser APIs improved, Flash lost its reason to dominate the Web. Many agencies saw the change too late. Others saw it early but refused to move because their revenue, identity, and talent were tied to the old toolchain.
That is the same intermediary drama in technical form. If your business depends on a layer that the open Web can replace, you are standing on melting ice.
The lesson is not that Flash was useless. Flash was important. Flash pushed interaction forward. Flash inspired many things that later became native to the Web. But once open standards became good enough, the proprietary cage was no longer worth the cost.
One of the clearest symptoms of a dying intermediary model is the attempt to charge for absurd things.
Legacy industries often try to preserve revenue by expanding the definition of what should be paid, licensed, restricted, reported, blocked, metered, or taxed. They want fees for devices, restrictions on playback, penalties for copying, limitations by region, and sometimes even money for linking to them.
At that point, the model stops looking like commerce and starts looking like a toll booth built in the middle of oxygen.
The problem is not that creators should not be paid. They should be paid. Journalism costs money. Music costs money. Film costs money. Books cost money. Good work has value.
The problem is when intermediaries try to charge for friction instead of value.
DRM is a classic example. People buy something, then discover they cannot use it freely across their own devices. They paid, but they are still treated like suspects. That is a terrible customer experience. It teaches honest customers that paying gives them restrictions, while not paying often gives them convenience.
That is not a great moral lesson to teach the market.
Region locks created similar incentives. If a movie, album, game, or show is available in one country but not another, the consumer does not experience that as a sophisticated licensing strategy. The consumer experiences it as stupidity. The Internet made geography feel artificial for digital goods, while old licensing systems kept pretending borders were technically meaningful.
Once people know something exists, telling them they cannot access it because of a distribution calendar becomes a business invitation for piracy.
Online newspapers provide one of the strangest examples of this confusion.
Many newspapers tried to bring their physical business model directly into the digital world. In print, charging made obvious sense. Paper, ink, printing, logistics, trucks, kiosks, and physical distribution all had visible costs. The newspaper was a physical artifact.
Online, the logic changed. Costs did not disappear, because journalism is expensive, but the distribution model changed completely. The Internet rewards reach, linking, sharing, searchability, speed, archives, and participation. Instead of embracing that nature, many publishers treated links as suspicious, aggregators as enemies, readers as thieves, and registration walls as a substitute for loyalty.
Some even wanted payment for links or snippets, which is one of those ideas that can only be invented in a meeting room where nobody has opened the Internet since 2004.
Links are not an insult. Links are the bloodstream of the Web.
A newspaper can absolutely charge for quality journalism. Some do it well. But if the entire strategy is to imitate the old newspaper model online while fighting the native behavior of the medium, the result is usually a bad digital product with the emotional energy of a fax machine.
The Internet is not paper with electricity.
When the Internet arrived, many businesses disappeared or shrank. That part is true. But it also created far more possibilities than it destroyed.
Before the Internet, distributing your own software was difficult. You often needed magazines, CD-ROMs, retail stores, distributors, or shareware catalogs. Some people even paid for trial software distributed on disks or CDs. Younger readers may find this absurd, but yes, at one point people paid money to receive limited versions of software in physical form.
Browsers were once paid products too. Magazines distributed CDs full of programs and sometimes even collections of websites for offline browsing, which now sounds like someone printed the ocean and called it innovation.
The important point is that distribution used to be the bottleneck. If you were not inside the channel, you barely existed.
The Internet changed that. Developers could publish directly. Writers could publish directly. Musicians could publish directly. Filmmakers could publish directly. Companies could sell directly. Customers could compare options directly. People could book flights without travel agents, buy products without local stores, learn without buying a physical encyclopedia, and distribute work without begging old gatekeepers for permission.
This was not only a technical shift. It was a power shift.
Internet gave people agency.
That is why old intermediaries reacted so strongly. They were not only losing revenue. They were losing the power to decide who could participate.
There is an uncomfortable twist in this story: when old intermediaries disappear, new ones usually take their place.
Human beings are very good at getting in the middle of things and charging rent. It is practically a species-level hobby.
The Internet removed many old gatekeepers, but it also created new ones: search engines, social networks, app stores, payment platforms, streaming services, cloud providers, marketplaces, ad networks, recommendation algorithms, and now AI platforms.
This does not invalidate the argument. It makes it more important.
The lesson is not “all intermediaries are bad.” Some intermediaries create enormous value. A good marketplace reduces trust problems. A good app store simplifies distribution. A good search engine helps people find information. A good payment provider reduces complexity. A good streaming platform makes content easier to access.
The question is whether the intermediary creates more value than friction.
When it does, people accept it. When it stops doing that, people eventually route around it.
That is the law.
When I first wrote about this problem years ago, I thought the solution was to give traditional intermediaries a list of things they should do. Over time, that feels too arrogant and probably not very useful. Every industry has its own constraints, economics, and timing.
But there are principles that keep appearing.
The first is simple: evolve before the market forces you to evolve under panic.
Do not replicate old models in new media and call it innovation. A newspaper website is not a newspaper with a login form. A streaming service is not a DVD shelf with thumbnails. An online course is not a classroom video dumped behind a paywall. A digital product needs to respect the medium it lives in.
The second principle is that any business practice that attacks the basic nature of the Internet will eventually fail or damage the brand. If your model depends on preventing sharing, blocking links, punishing customers, restricting devices, delaying access by region, or making legal access worse than illegal access, you are not defending culture. You are training users to hate you.
The third principle is that persuasion through guilt rarely works. Campaigns that compare downloading a song to stealing a car may satisfy industry lawyers, but normal people look at them and laugh. Worse, they may start doing the opposite just because the campaign insulted their intelligence.
Do not treat customers like criminals and then act shocked when they stop loving you.
Closed systems can win for a while when they offer a better experience. That part matters. People do not choose openness in the abstract if the open option is terrible. They choose what works.
But once open systems become good enough, they usually put enormous pressure on closed intermediaries.
The Web beat many closed information systems because it was open, linkable, searchable, and easy to publish on. HTML5 and open browser technologies helped replace Flash because they eventually offered enough capability without requiring a proprietary plugin. Digital distribution beat physical distribution because it was faster, cheaper, and more convenient.
Open does not automatically win because it is morally superior. Open wins when it combines freedom with practical value.
That is the part traditional intermediaries often miss. They think people are being ideological. Usually they are being practical. They want the thing that is easier, cheaper, faster, better, or less annoying.
If your closed model delivers that, it can survive. If it mostly delivers restrictions, it will become a museum exhibit with a licensing department.
One of the best ways to survive technological change is to produce real quality.
Quantity can generate traffic, but quality builds trust. This is even more important in a world where content is infinite, cheap, copied, summarized, automated, and repackaged.
A media company can produce shallow articles that summarize other articles, chase trends, fill pages with ads, and hope the volume works. Many do that. Some survive for a while. But quality creates a different kind of relationship with readers, viewers, listeners, and customers.
Quality means original reporting. Better analysis. Clearer writing. Stronger taste. Deeper expertise. Better editing. Better product experience. Better distribution. Better community. Better trust.
It is not enough to say “we are traditional, therefore we are valuable.” Tradition may get you attention once. Quality keeps people coming back.
Trying to stop people from doing what the technology naturally allows is usually a waste of money, time, and reputation.
Every protection system is eventually challenged. Every restriction creates an incentive to remove it. Every artificial limitation becomes a product requirement for someone else’s competing solution.
Apple eventually moved toward DRM-free music in the iTunes Store because customers wanted flexibility, labels needed digital sales, and the old restrictions made less sense over time. The broader lesson is obvious: people want to pay for things they can actually use.
Kim Dotcom once summarized the anti-piracy recipe in a way that was blunt but directionally correct:
You do not need to like the messenger to see the wisdom in the message.
Most piracy debates avoid this because it is easier to moralize than to compete. But if the legal product is expensive, delayed, restricted, fragmented, and annoying, while the illegal option is immediate, global, flexible, and easy, the industry has created its own enemy.
Convenience is not a detail. Convenience is the product.
The future does not belong to intermediaries that merely stand in the way. It belongs to intermediaries that reduce complexity, create trust, improve discovery, finance production, protect quality, solve logistics, and make life easier for both creators and consumers.
That is the difference between rent extraction and value creation.
A good intermediary helps a musician reach an audience they could not reach alone. A bad one locks the musician into a terrible contract and blames the audience for leaving.
A good publisher improves the work, invests in distribution, builds reputation, and helps readers find quality. A bad one hides mediocre content behind a registration wall and complains that links are theft.
A good platform makes transactions safer, faster, and easier. A bad one taxes every interaction because it owns the gate.
The role is not obsolete by default. The lazy version of the role is obsolete.
It is time for every old intermediary to ask a brutal question: if we disappeared tomorrow, what would people genuinely miss?
Not what would be temporarily inconvenient. Not what lawyers could protect. Not what regulators could preserve. What would people miss because it is actually valuable?
If the answer is “our catalog,” then make the catalog easier to access.
If the answer is “our journalism,” then make the journalism better, more trustworthy, and worth paying for.
If the answer is “our theater experience,” then make the theater experience excellent enough to beat the couch.
If the answer is “our expertise,” then expose that expertise in the formats people now use.
If the answer is “our control over distribution,” then the business is already dead. It just has not finished the paperwork.
The old world was not destroyed by the Internet. It was audited by it.
Some passed. Many failed. More will fail.
The intermediary drama will continue because every generation builds a new gate, charges admission, and eventually acts surprised when someone builds a road around it.
That is not tragedy.
That is movement.
And movement does not ask permission.
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