Spotify CEO sparks backlash after social media post that claimed the cost of making "content" is "close to zero"

CarCdrCons@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 602 points – Spotify CEO sparks backlash after social media post that claimed the cost of making "content" is "close to zero"
loudersound.com

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."

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"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 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.

Thank you, I wish there were more of this type of...ahem....content in my feed

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

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.

Oh, that's cool then. I'll have to go back and take a look as I hardly use the app.

I guess if the new company fucks it up (which lets face it, is a given) at least you get to keep the music you've already bought which is more than you can say for Spotify.

If you are on any level tech savvy, you cam self-host your library on an app on your computer and use a client like symphoniam to play it.

It's not hard to find a client that let's you do all the same things as Spotify

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!

Even though I don't buy that many bandcamp albums, I do feel better about giving some obscure artist 10+ USD instead of pennies being spread amongst 1000s of artists (and much of that being sucked up by Spotify et al and major record companies).

Today, 1000 times Tidal, they give more money to the artists and they lowered their prices while everyone else raised them.

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.

I absolutely cancelled after that Joe Rogan drama. I was already questioning why I needed Spotify. And seeing my subscription money go there, I bounced.

Now I'm watching more boneheaded moves and shaking my head.

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.

I’ve never heard of that format, that’s hilarious.

Laugh quietly please. I still have a Meridian DAC that transcodes MQA. Among the gullible audiophile set there are tens of us. FML.

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!

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.

Interesting! I have an iPhone but I don’t use iCloud for anything because I don’t want my nudes online, and I don’t play games on my phone so I don’t have any use for Apple one hahaha

I’ve only failed to find one artist on Apple Music so far (DZK, an edgy YTMND/SA rapper from the mid-2000s) so I just torrented his music.

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)

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.

I really like Deezer personally.

Deezer nuts!

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?

I wasn't aware of that to be honest I knew they were all pretty low but I didn't know Deezer was the lowest.

I just like their app. Going to have to look into tidal I guess, although considering I haven't really changed my music taste for a while, I might consider band camp at this point.

Actually you know what I've talked to myself into it. I'm just going to download my music with Bandcamp and use syncthing to have it wherever I need it. Thanks for the inspiration stranger

No worries! I’m looking to move away from Spotify and so comparing was on my radar :). Think Tidal family with playlist import might keep the moaning from the rest of the clan down. But will check out bandcamp too.

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.

Thanks for the suggestion! I remember GM back in the day, had loads of stuff on there :o I ended up going with Tidal for now, mostly because I also just can't stand YouTube and don't wanna give em money 😂

Apple Music is great.

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.

Apple Music also has music videos and their sound quality is high res. I used Tidal for a while but switched to Apple Music years ago and wouldn’t go back.

I've been using a revanced version of YouTube music that works pretty damn well

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.

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

He's not wrong, the cost of making content is near zero, the cost of making art is not.

Content: I strapped a camera on my face and got drunk and harassed randos in a country I’m not native to

Art: I wrote a song and played almost every instrument and also directed, shot, and edited the music video over the course of years*

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.

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.

This feels like an out of touch comment about AI tbh. I could be wrong but it'd make all of that make slightly more sense

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.

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 mean, sure... I can pump out music all day every day and it cost me nothing to make.

It's not gonna be good music though. It's literally just going to be random notes and loops with no lyrics or actual instruments being recorded, strung together in a way that doesn't cause your ears to bleed. Hopefully.

But hey, if that's what Ek wants, he should make me an offer. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Not even. You still need to afford to eat, a place to sleep, the music has to be made, recorded and served to people on something, a laptop or tablet at least which are not zero cost. You have to pay for the electricity and internet connection. Nothing has a cost of zero, especially nothing done by a human being. It's just CEOs are used to discounting other people's unpaid labor from their costs, so they think that labor is free and they're entitled to it.

The value you provide to the world of music is less than zero, in fact it's a debt to society you will never repay, congratulations on the proof of concept that stealing can be both legal and profitable though.

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.

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.

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.

Well don't just tweet. Put those fingers to frets and show us how little it really costs you fucken igit.

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.

“… 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.

Oshit TIL I only spent money on my album because I'm a dumbass. If I were smart and produced it for free, I could have a whole $10 of net Spotify revenue.

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?

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

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.