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.”
I guess I don’t understand his point. Is he saying that making content is cheap (it’s not) so artists don’t need to be paid a lot? If content creation is cheap, why are they not the ones producing the music? It should be cheap for them to be their own label, right?
But shit, you would think the CEO of a company whose main product is streaming content would have some idea of the cost to produce that content. Recording studios do not exactly grow on trees and it’s not like audio engineers are working for free. I guess I don’t understand why he is paid so much since being an executive at a company does not require much expense.
I think its one of two things. An out of touch way of saying that anyone could make a video or a song that becomes a hit and just out it online, visible for the world. Everyone has a phone and can record stuff themselves.
On the other hand it also sounds like he might mean, they (as in Spotify) don’t pay much for the content they show people. Not sure what the angle on that is though.
But shit, you would think the CEO of a company whose main product is streaming content would have some idea of the cost to produce that content
That’s just it, he is so fucking out of touch and high on his own jizz that he believes Spotify takes in billions in revenue because of the platform and not the music
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.
I wonder how this pest values his own labor
Seems like every time I look at internet companies the first thing that comes to mind is why is the labor not forming a collective?
If the artists owned the distribution via a artists collective at least the profits would be split up in some more fair fashion.
Same with food delivery.
Same with Video production and delivery (peer to peer with each creator adding a node if you want to go that route).
Same with car driving services
and so on.
Edit: i never thought that I would get a downvote on lemmy for suggesting maximum money and ownership in a product by the authors but here we are, lol!
Idk how to tell you that lemmy proooobably isn’t all humans who have reasonable opinions at this point
“… 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 that, but it doesn’t matter if the platform that’s hosting an artist is not acting in good faith nor practicing fairness. Really, there should be an open source version of Spotify.
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.
I think it’s also pretty ironic to question how much current music will be valued after 100 years as Spotify is pivoting towards podcasts. Podcasts are easier to make than music and even quality podcast episodes are significantly less memorable than music.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
For rich tech billionaire bros it’s all the same.
Get excited for personalized AI muzak!
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.
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.
Thank you, I wish there were more of this type of…ahem…content in my feed
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.
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
Well don’t just tweet. Put those fingers to frets and show us how little it really costs you fucken igit.
“Will this be on Quibi?” - Philomena Cunk
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.
