"There's this whole world where people exist just to show up in the middle and take a big chunk of the money from something they had no part in creating."

This world is called "Silicon Valley"

Using a middleman, a so-called "tech" company, is not the same as trading music peer-to-peer

Historically, before the public internet, we traded music in-person or via postal mail

When I first accessed Oink I looked for the type of stuff that I liked to trade before the public internet existed: live, rare and unreleased material, e.g., outtakes. Old music

It passed the test. It was there

Today, there are bits and pieces of this stuff on YouTube but it's not the same

For this type of material, Spotify is a joke

This article should have discussed user-controlled peer-to-peer networking versus so-called "tech" company middleman