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.”
“Will this be on Quibi?” - Philomena Cunk
“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.
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 disagree it’s an unfair comparison, but don’t care to argue about it. That said, I’m glad we can agree 19th century musicians and titans of business are equally recognizable.
If he doesn’t believe current music will stand the test of time, he’s in the wrong industry
I do understand the critics backlash.
But to be fair, with all the no quality garbage published on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, the possibility to generate music with suno – the cost is close to zero.
Quality content in the other hand, do cost money and the creators should be better compensated.
The problem all around, IMO, is just how extremely broad the term content is. Content can be a complex hour-long video on a subject with amazing editing, or a beautiful piece of artwork, but it can also be a quick selfie at a club or any given platform’s equivalent of shitposting.
Also, nice Primal Scream spotlight.
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.
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.
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.
For rich tech billionaire bros it’s all the same.
Get excited for personalized AI muzak!
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
Maybe he’s thinking about their darling, Joe Rogan, whose main cost at this point is probably enough weed for him and his staff and his guests on the regular while he just talks about stupid shit that he thinks makes him sound smart but really doesn’t.
So the cost of making that content is close to zero. Unless, of course, you count the $250 million they paid him already…
Joe Rogan, whose main cost at this point is probably
Oh I thought you were going to say “fact checking” :p
No, he spends far more on weed than he does on fact checking.
I want to pile on Joe Rogan here but like, can I really say differently for myself?
Oh
Right he proves that every week
Apparently time is worthless now. Who knew?
I’m sure the CEO doesn’t pay himself extremely well for the time he spends at spotify.
commence enshittification, ludicrous speed GO
The problem all around, IMO, is just how extremely broad the term content is. Content can be a complex hour-long video on a subject with amazing editing, or a beautiful piece of artwork, but it can also be a quick selfie at a club or any given platform’s equivalent of shitposting.
Today they announced another price hike.
Content can cost nothing, if you’re talking a podcast made in your bedroom. You get fleeced when putting it on streaming services though, as far as I know there is no free way of getting your stuff on Spotify, as you need to pay an aggregator (a middleman rent seeker that we don’t complain about enough) to do so.
From a certain angle even that perspective is a little bit unfair because you can invest a massive amount of your very valuable time into a project that only technically has a zero dollar production cost on paper.
If you chose to produce a podcast instead of working towards a promotion at your job, your opportunity cost could be quite high even though it’s not reflected anywhere. Nowhere besides the high quality of your show.
Absolutely, I’ve got music on Spotify and well aware of the costs of mixing and mastering, as well as the sacrifice you make in terms of playing poorly paid gigs, and the opportunity cost just by creating music.
The Spotify CEOs take is so far out when you consider that if just super budget content was on the platform, people wouldn’t use it or at least wouldn’t pay for it.
Good on you for putting goodness out in the world!
Thank you!
Every picture of Daniel Ek looks like an evil henchman thinking he’s about to deliver good news to his boss, with the stinger being the boss is about tell him that he has completely fucked up.
Well don’t just tweet. Put those fingers to frets and show us how little it really costs you fucken igit.
And CEOs are useless and not needed, a long with their big salaries.
I saw a comment yesterday that has stuck with me and it was that CEOs jobs are ripe for replacement by AI and I really can’t fault it. It won’t happen but I kind of wish it would.
I’m starting to look for alternatives. Do y’all have any recommendations? I’m looking into Deezer, but was wondering if there were better more artist friendly services?
bandcamp is one of the better ones for artists.
