Spotify CEO Daniel Ek sparked an online backlash after a social media post in which he said the cost of creating “content” is “close to zero”.
The boss of the streaming giant said in a post on X: "Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content. This has sparked my curiosity about the concept of long shelf life versus short shelf life.
"While much of what we see and hear quickly becomes obsolete, there are timeless ideas or even pieces of music that can remain relevant for decades or even centuries.
“Also, what are we creating now that will still be valued and discussed hundreds or thousands of years from today?”
Music fans and musicians were quick to call Ek out, with one user, composer Tim Prebble, saying: “Music will still be valued in a hundred years. Spotify won’t. It will only be remembered as a bad example of a parasitic tool for extracting value from other peoples music. (or “content” as some grifters like to call it).”
Musicians weighed in too, with Primal Scream bassist Simone Marie Butler saying: “Fuck off you out of touch billionaire.”
Music costs nothing if you don’t pay musicians.
“Also, what are we creating now that will still be valued and discussed hundreds or thousands of years from today?”
Certainly not your vapid tweets, mate.
CEOs haven’t been a thing for hundreds of years, but many come to mind for most folks. In fact, I’d wager most can probably name more “CEOs” from the 19th century than they could musicians. Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Ford. Some say they were Captains of Industry, others may, more accurately say Robber Barons. Good or bad, we remember them.
That’s not really a fair comparison. Robber barons got to build statues and skyscrapers as testaments to their own vanity, meanwhile recorded music was still in the process of being invented. Even so, I’ll make the point that names like Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky are equally as recognizable.
I don’t like that all art is just “content.” I can believe that the cost of creating “content” really is near-zero, but “content” isn’t the kind of music I look for. I spend effort trying to appreciate the craft and understand it, so “content” kind of defeats the point.
I find the very term “content” fascinating, because the exact definition you choose puts it on a kind of spectrum with “useful” at one end and “measurable” at the other.
When Daniel Ek talks about “content,” he means any pile of bits he can package up, shove in front of people, and stuff with ads. From that definition, making “content” is super cheap. I can record myself literally screaming for 30 seconds into the microphone already in my laptop and upload it using the internet connection I already have. Is it worth consuming? No, but I’ll get to that. And content under that definition is very measurable in many senses, like file size, duration, and (important to him) number of hours people stream it (and can inject ads into). But from this view, all “content” is interchangable and equal, so it’s not a very useful definition, because some content is extremely popular and is consumed heavily, while other content is not consumed at all. From Daniel’s perspective, this difference is random, enigmatic, and awe inspiring, because he can’t measure it.
At the other end of the spectrum is the “useful” definition where the only “content” is good content. My 30 seconds of screaming isn’t content, it’s garbage. It’s good content that actually brings in the ad revenue, because it’s what people will put up with ads to get access to. But what I would consider good content is not what someone else would consider good content, which is what makes it much harder to measure. But we can all agree making good content is hard and thus almost always expensive (at least compared to garbage passing as content).
And that’s what makes Daniel Ek look like an out of touch billionaire. The people who make good content (that makes him money) use the more useful definition, which is difficult to make and expensive and actually worth talking about, while he uses the measurable definition that’s in all the graphs on his desk that summarize his revenue stream.
It’s a contronym at this point. “Content” is the cheapest thing to fill the screen or the sound waves. It would be like referring to the box of peanuts in ashipment as the “contents”.
The stuff in the pages of a book or in a TV show is supposed to be art. Content is engineered to be as cheap as possible and as lowest common denominator appealing as possible.
He’s not even correct by the “shovel bits at people” definition as the content that Spotify has that people care about does cost money to acquire. They paid Joe Rogan actual money (on the presumption that it was bits that would draw in enough people) for his content
Now if he was the CEO of YouTube he might have a point. But he’s so out of touch he doesn’t even realize he’s paying for things he’s paying for.
A tension that I find very interesting is how YouTube creators with a decent but not huge subscriber base (I’ve mainly seen it in video essayists, but that’s just what I watch more of) grapple with the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit dichotomy of “content” vs “art”, where “content” is what the algorithm wants and what will pay their bills, and “art” is the weird stuff they actually want to make.
This is the dilemma all artists of every variety have to face and have ever since art has been a concept. Ideally one can find a balance between the two. I was broke most of my adult life because I felt I had “too much integrity” to create things that made money. That’s selling out, right? If I was smart I would have sold out to fund the things I really wanted to do but I didn’t have that insight when I was young.
imo, it’s a semantic attack, and it’s been very effective. art, drawings, paintings, animations, movies, shows, music, poetry, books, code, games, any free human creative venture: it is all suddenly (and falsely) insinuated to only be possible when placed inside a “platform”. you and I may know this isn’t true, but most people could not defend against this hostile idea or simply could not identify it as such, and now falsely believe human expression is only “real” when it’s inside a company’s ad-filled self-reinforcing skinner box.
I literally just cancelled my membership with that shitty company yesterday! It sucks, I’ve used it daily for almost a decade, but I just can’t really deal with my money going to such publicly malicious and stupid executives any more. They can’t just not be arseholes for like two seconds.
Anyway, I need some alternative… Does anybody use anything else that they prefer? 👀🤞
I know I say this a lot but Bandcamp is very good for some usage patterns.
I buy about one album a month for $10. Over the past four years, I now have accumulated a pretty decent library of music that’s mine to keep forever.
They do recommendations and articles that are (or feel like they are) written by real people.
Renting music kind of sucks.
I like what Bandcamp does, but I don’t necessarily want to have to download every song/album I buy off there and store it on my phone, or open the app and manually select a song or album one at a time to listen to.
I wish there was a way to build playlists, or even a full featured streaming service similar to what Spotify offers that would pay artists a respectable cut for streaming but not necessarily purchasing albums.
It would be nice to have that option but I suppose there’s probably arguments against it, I’m not really that familiar with all the pros and cons from the artists’ perspective. Even just a song radio type option like Spotify has would be great, because I do find a fair bit of new music that way.
Also, in case people aren’t aware, Spotify was sold to Epic games a few years ago, and they sold it on to a music licensing company who then laid off 16% of Bandcamp’s employees. So I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to be a good place for indie musicians.I guess we’ll see though.
They do let you make a playlist now, but only in the app. I imagine it’s something they were working on that didn’t get finished because of the layoffs. I’m real nervous that their new owners are going to shit it all up.
They do have like radio programs, and I think you can have it just play stuff from the music feed. I’m a little more album focused and intentional (ie: I want to listen to X, never a shuffle) so I haven’t needed much more than what they have.
I just gave Bandcamp a look and was able to find some stuff that I wasn’t able to find anywhere else and got a chance to support the artist so that was pretty cool thanks.
What, the whole Joe Rogan bullshit didn’t tip you over but this did?
Tidal if you want to pay. YouTube Music with Revanced if you don’t.
No, this didn’t. I cancelled yesterday, after reading about them just bricking one of their peripherals without offering refunds until the legal system threatened them. It’s just a straw that broke the camel’s back situation, rather than one big thing - the Rogan situation certainly contributed, though.
Tidal sounds like a good idea, thank you!
Tidal turned me off by pushing that snake oil MQA format for years, although I believe they have been moving away from it in recent years.
Torrent if you don’t lawl. Flac forever.
Also I know lemmy is DAE HATE APPLE but Apple Music is the shit, they have ultra high quality lossless for the base price and a gigantic selection. They don’t pay artists WELL, but they’re near the highest paying per stream. (I think tidal might actually be the highest)
Apple Music worked well for me, but then it was worth the money as part of Apple One. If you’re not on iOS, you won’t have much use for Arcade or icloud storage though.
Whether Apple Music alone is worth it is up to OP though. IMO it is, but I now have YouTube Music instead, gets me access to a lot of music Spotify and Apple Music don’t have.
Just switched from Spotify to Tidal about 3 weeks ago. Their library is huge (even some tiny band project I once met at a festival in a german village back in 2018). They compensate the artist way better than Spotify and you can choose between different qualities up to 24 bit 192 kHz.
Prices are the same as Spotify.
Edit: If you have a paid subscription you can also import playlists from Spotify (or other common services)
Deezer seems like the most expensive compared to Spotify and Tidal, and pays artists the least according to this: https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-royalties-breakdown/
Just curious what’s the added benefit?
It’s nowhere near a full replacement to Spotify, but something that eased my switchover was Listenbrainz for open source music recommendations. It’s not as good as Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists (yet!), but the greater transparency is worth it imo. I have the app from fdroid and it tracks what songs I’m listening to (especially useful if you connect it to a streaming app) and gives recommendations based on that.
YouTube music has actually been pretty great, although I hear some people have issues with it’s algorithm. I got grandfathered in back when Google Music shut down and I honestly like it more than the old GM app at this point. Plus, you get YouTube Premium for free with it.
Apple Music fucking slaps, after getting some fancy headphones their Spatial Audio is insane. It’s a novelty, sure, but damn if it isn’t fucking dope in some songs.
I will keep repeating this over and over: Spotify hates artists. This douchebag CEO pays himself hundreds of millions for storing other’s music on a server, but thinks musicians are such losers they don’t deserved nothing. Fuck modern Internet, and fuck you especially Daniel. Your time is worth 15k a minute, but musicians should work for free so you have a “product” to sell? Fuck you loser, I will always be superior to you because unlike you, I can create things. You need me, I don’t need you.
