Music/media labor is a new type of ‘reproductive labor’ in the era of finance capital and AI

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In July 2026 the sports-leaning internet publication DEADSPIN published a how-to explaining the various ways one could use prediction markets to bet on music charts. “Events that you can trade on include Spotify and Billboard Hot #1 Songs, album sales, artist Spotify streams, and even monthly vinyl sales. There are also other music and culture prediction markets available, related to live performances, new music releases, and more.” For example, gamblers can bet on what song will be #1 on a particular chart in a given week, the chart position of a particular song, how many streams a song will have in a defined period of time, and they can also bet against those sorts of things; gamblers can also sell their bets or “event contracts” to other market users. Beyond Jacques Attali’s 1977 claim that “hit parades” function like stock markets do to represent value as “velocity of exchange” (Noise 107) – or in more Marxian terms, as M-M1 rather that M-C-M – the sports-bettification of pop charts turns the music industry into one that makes money not by selling records, but by serving as a medium for external speculation. The money isn’t in extracting surplus value from the labor that goes into creating, distributing, and marketing music; it’s in that M-M1 intensification that happens through betting and other forms of financial speculation.

Insofar as demonetized musical labor produces the medium for financial speculation, where the real money is made, then musical labor has effectively become a new kind of feminized reproductive labor. Marxist feminists traditionally understand reproductive labor like cooking, cleaning, and childrearing as unwaged work from which surplus value is not directly extracted, but which produces the conditions for such extraction. This work isn’t “labor” per se, but it reproduces the laborer daily and generationally by taking care of the work of social reproduction so that his time can be spent producing surplus value. Just as wives’ and mothers’ reproductive labor produced the laborer’s means of living, music industry workers produce the means of prediction market users’ speculation.

Structurally, the position of the reproductive laborer is feminized: she works in the domestic sphere performing unwaged work covered by the marriage contract rather than an employment contract. It is not just that the work that she does is stereotypically women’s work, but that she is subordinated within patriarchal racial capitalism in a way that’s different than an employee: only (white) women become wives, so the nature of wives’ subordination as laborers is gendered. As Carole Pateman writes, “the provision of ‘domestic service’ is part of the patriarchal meaning of femininity” (126); as shitposter supreme dril would say, “this whole thing smacks of gender.” According to Pateman,

being a woman (wife) MEANS to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In sot, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) laborer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres” (128).

The unwaged labor of social reproduction situates one as a feminized subordinate to a patriarch, not a civil subordinate to a boss. That relationship produces both the subordinate and the master as respectively feminine and masculine. To extract this kind of feminized unwaged labor from someone situates one as (white) patriarch, as masculine, as the gendered master over feminine subordinates. 

In the second half of the 2020s, popular music has come to be dominated by women. For example, I’m writing this on July 5, 2026, and the Billboard Hot 100’s top ten includes one all-male act: Drake, at #6. “Pop” as a style, genre, or category is traditionally feminine, but I’m talking about popular music broadly as the commercial record industry, which includes pop along with rock, hip hop, EDM, indie, etc. As a space of demonetized labor, men have largely left it both as participants and audiences. There’s more money in influencing or crypto/sportsbetting/etc.

I’ve argued earlier that the traditional gendered rock/pop hierarchy is getting reshuffled as the public/private split collapses amid political privatization and technological personalization. This structure of masculinized mastery and feminized subordination is what it’s getting reshuffled into. And it’s happening across the culture more broadly, assisted largely by AI. The DOGE-assisted mass firings in the federal workforce has put large numbers of professional Black women out of the workforce entirely, removing them from the sphere of waged labor even though their work was largely corporate and administrative rather than creative.

From music to writing to being a college professor, humanistic labor as a whole is getting demonetized. Collapsing media and higher ed sectors makes it nearly impossible to make a living off of things like research and writing, just as huge AI corporations are vacuuming up anything anyone ever wrote, drew, or composed without compensating them. Even the rulings that consider AI training sufficiently transformative to be ‘fair use’ tend to demonetize the humanistic labor that goes into creating the original IP. Just as music industry workers don’t get paid to produce the medium through which investors earn money on betting platforms, creatives/humanities workers generally create more-or-less unwaged content that tech then uses to build an AI narrative that props up their stock price. The fact that AI turns every user into a little boss reflects the broader dynamic at work in mid-21st century late capitalism: the figure of the white patriarch as master of feminized subordinates has jumped from the private-as-domestic over into the private-as-private-sector-business. In 2017 (nearly 10 years ago, yeesh), Melinda Cooper wrote about how neoliberals and neoconservatives both agreed that society should be run according to so-called “family values,” i.e., private family responsibility. In what is nearly 2027, the political economy writ large is being transformed into one big white patriarchal family where everyone’s status is determined by whether they perform “reproductive” labor that builds the media others use for financial speculation (at this point the whole AI industry is just one big sportsbet on stock prices, the whole thing smacks of vibes), or whether one is benefitting and profiting from that speculation. We’ve gone from “family values” to value-as-family.