Everyone knows Spotify — the streaming behemoth that revolutionised the world’s listening habits. It’s a convenient, slick app that offers easy access to all kinds of music, with a sophisticated recommendation engine, an inbuilt social network that shows what our friends are listening to, and satisfying, shareable ‘Wrapped’ lists that recap the year that was.
When it first appeared, Spotify seemed to me like a tech-utopian vision. It was like some sci-fi dream — a vast digital archive of the world’s published sound and music, accessible from anywhere. It seemed to offer a way to be closer to music than ever before, like wandering the corridors of some unknowably vast digital archive, plucking recordings from the shelves, and hearing them instantly. It was an internet made of music, and nothing short of magic.
Crushingly obviously in retrospect, the framework beneath it was anything but. Spotify was started by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, a pair of rich Swedes who’d made their fortunes via ecommerce, and it was shady from the outset. The platform somehow got away with streaming the world’s music illegitimately for years, politicking hard and positioning itself as the solution to the rise of file sharing. The music industry was caught on tilt, and rudderless in response. In the absence of better ideas, most labels cut deals — at least this was some income from a disaster scenario that had tanked record sales, after all. And that was that.
Flipping Ek
This legitimisation was legal, but never ethical, and Spotify never managed to address criticism about the unfairness of its payment model. The conversation has rumbled on ever since. Artists from David Byrne to The Black Keys to Anthrax to Joanna Newsom have sharply criticised it as an “unprincipled concept” that “isn’t fair to artists”. Byrne said that “If artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they’ll be out of work within a year”. For Newsom, it’s “a cynical and musician-hating system” run by “a villainous cabal of major labels… built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying artists.”
Björk has also wrestled with the problem. She initially held Vulnicura back from Spotify, saying at the time that “It seems insane to work on something for years and then just, ‘Oh, here it is for free’. It’s not about the money; it’s about respect for the craft and the amount of work you put into it.” She added later that Spotify is “probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians”, and that its poverty-wage payment model has pushed young artists into constant touring, sapping time and space that’s invaluable for the creative process.
All of this boiled over in 2021, when 30,000 musicians in 31 U.S. cities publicly protested Spotify. Their demand? A paltry cent per stream — a request that was deemed “entitled” by Spotify systems architect Jim Anderson. By now a billionaire sitting on a continent-sized hoard of those very coins, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek poured more fuel on the fire by casually spitballing on Twitter that the cost of “creating content” is “close to zero” — a bizarre claim that illustrates a galling disregard for the musicians and podcasters his platform depends on, and earns from.
Killer robots, srsly?
It didn’t seem like this shitty status quo could get much worse, but in keeping with the general trajectory of world events in recent years, it soon did. After a spate of stories about Spotify contributing to Trump’s inauguration fund and hosting right-wing media brunches, news broke this month that Ek had cashed out hundreds of thousands of his shares to lead a €600 million investment in AI military tech company Helsing, a company that produces “autonomous military drones” — flying killer machines, with the potential to make life-or-death decisions. If you’ve witnessed Google’s execrable Gemini search summaries, or the frequent hallucinations of GPT, you’ll know why this is a terrible idea.
There is a pitch-black irony in music being the industry that was hollowed out to pay for a new wave of dystopian AI war tech. For me, the thing that stings most is that music is such a fundamentally positive outcome of humanity. Music is a bastion of pacifism, progressivism, community, and counterculture. And music itself is precious and intimate — the sharing of experience in sound in a kind of everyday transcendence. So to soak up the listening public’s subscription fees, strip the money away from the artists, and then invest it in the machinery of death is fuckin’ evil, pure and simple.
So that’s how Spotify graduated from a utopian music app to a parasitic, destructive cultural force. As you’re reading this, the response from artists, labels, and the listening public is still unfolding. Ek’s social media comments are a wall of vitriol. #BoycottSpotify is trending, subscribers are cancelling en masse, and independent artists and podcasters are removing their work from Spotify in increasing numbers. It has all happened before, and nothing changed. But who knows? If enough people pull their “content”, cancel their subs, and encourage others to do the same, maybe we’ll at least get the pale pleasure of seeing Spotify’s entire rotten business crumble into nothing before our new AI overlords kick in the back door.
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