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 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.
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.
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.
