The first comment gets it pretty much right: discovery. How'd you find the stuff you want to buy/stream?
The simple gravity of business leads to middlemen handling the discovery process also taking a cut of transactions - they're too well placed to offer brokerage services.
In a lot of situations (arguably, most) I'm very much able to buy things online directly from their makers rather than having to go through a retailer/middleman/etc. Not sure where this article's coming from in its implications that such a model is some fantastical pipe dream.
Yeah, a lot of folks opt to go through middlemen like Amazon or Apple or what have you because of convenience, but that doesn't make this heap of hogwash of an article any more logically coherent. "Something something Taylor Swift something something Apple something something computer scientists are stupid something something".
The simple gravity of business leads to middlemen handling the discovery process also taking a cut of transactions - they're too well placed to offer brokerage services.