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.”
Music costs nothing if you don’t pay musicians.
exposure
People die from exposure.
😱
“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.
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.
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.
Thank you, I wish there were more of this type of…ahem…content in my feed
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.
Oh
Right he proves that every week
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? 👀🤞
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
commence enshittification, ludicrous speed GO
Today they announced another price hike.
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.
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. 🤷🏻♂️
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.
He’s not wrong, the cost of making content is near zero, the cost of making art is not.
