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.”
While I get the desire for outrage and backlash, a generous reading of what he said would be something like “In the past, making music meant needing access to numerous instruments and equipment. Today, you can create the same kind of music with a cheap PC and some programs.”
He’s not attacking creativity or saying your time isn’t valuable. He’s saying the barrier to entry has dropped dramatically to the point that almost anyone that wants to create content, can.
Look at any medium and notice the wide array of tools now available to the average person. You can do Photoshop and video effects using entirely free programs for the most part. Or paying a fraction of what you’d have paid in the past for less features.
Under that reading, he’s absolutely correct.
But yeah, Spotify sucks, I get that. They don’t pay creators fairly. Absolutely. Don’t disagree with that.
Music costs nothing if you don’t pay musicians.
exposure
People die from exposure.
😱
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.
Look, he’s right, but he’s also full of shit.
Music Production used to require expensive equipment and a dedicated studio. Now anyone with a few hundred dollars can make quality musical recordings in their living room. The monetary cost of creating musical content is extremely low compared to all previous eras of the music industry.
The issue here is that he is making an argument for raising costs while cutting artist revenue by making music appear to have little to no value. This is an extremely poor decision, since most people who enjoy music don’t equate the value of the music they are listening to with the monetary cost it took to make it. It’s also a crazy argument to devalue your product while raising prices.
Given that Spotify lines its pockets by shoving music from the highest bidder down their customer’s throats (As everyone unwittingly listening to “Espresso” has surely learned over the past month), they clearly don’t care about the small players getting exposure.
If you care about small artists, quit Spotify and start using Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Actually discover small artists instead of relying on the largest corporate music algorithm on the planet to spoon-feed you.
As a bedroom producer who spent his children’s college money on analogue synths: go fuck yourself asshole.
Your kids are not going to college but at least you got some sweet synths.
“… what are we creating now that will still be valued and discussed hundreds or thousands of years from today?”
Well, there’s very little chance of memorable art to come into existence if artists are not paid fairly. Art takes time and effort, even for geniuses. If someone’s worried about becoming homeless or whatever, they’re not going to focus on their craft at the expense of health and safety, and even if they do what they produce will be suboptimal or unfocused.
So what’s the fair value of such things? I suppose there’s a number of ways to determine to determine that, but it doesn’t matter if the platform that’s hosting an artist is not acting in good faith or practicing fairness. Really, there should be an open source version of Spotify.
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.
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 hadn’t thought about it from that angle, thanks for sharing your perspective, it’s really interesting
“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.
Musicians are remembered for hundreds of years.
CEOs are not.
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.
He’s not wrong, the cost of making content is near zero, the cost of making art is not.
“Will this be on Quibi?” - Philomena Cunk
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? 👀🤞
Apple Music - great audio quality, pay artists better than spotify.
Brave man recommending anything Apple around these parts.
Apple Music is great.
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 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.
Bandcamp ftw. Love the platform. And I can get my music in flac!
