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It's a category error to describe Spotify as a music company, or Daniel Ek as someone who has any interest in what music really is, how it works, what its cultural function is. Spotify is simply a tech platform, and its content might as well be smells, or food, or lasers.
As @matdryhurst points out, Spotify have an advantage in precisely understanding the inverse ratio between how many people want a kind of generic access to music but how few care more deeply about how it is generated, why, and to what financial/personal cost.
Ek never pretended to be a music fan, and in fact being one would likely have got in the way of Spotify's business plan. He's a tech entrepreneur who created a content delivery system.
He actually succeeded where many of his peers failed, in creating a content delivery system that people would actually pay for rather than bypass in favour of pirated/free content
Or rather, enough people would pay for. But Spotify’s success comes precisely at the cost of the continued ability for artists to provide content to its churning content mill
The same model is replicated throughout Silicon Valley. The platform is where the value lives, derived from data the user unwittingly pumps through it. Whatever content is being accessed isn’t of value on its own terms, rather as a unit of generating further use.
We’re at the logical place along Spotify’s trajectory, where the content has become too costly to realistically create at the rate it’s being consumed. More and more of the music on there will be automatically generated as time goes on.
But can any artist afford to divest from these platforms? Breaking up the tech monopolies is a necessary start, but won’t go far enough. We have to band together and build the alternatives ourselves, much as we’ll need to face off against totalitarian politics. It’s the only way.
There’s more of us than there are of them. This is what we have to remember.
There’s more of us than there are of them.
There’s more of us than there are of them.
