Give me convenience or give me death
By using Spotify you're lining the pockets of AI warfare-investing venture capitalists who's trying to make their platform a monopsony for music. That doesn't sound compatible with punk, does it?
Almost all of my friends use Spotify. A lot of the bands I listen to are on Spotify. It's already engrained in the scene in such a way that it rivals the use of Facebook in terms of trading integrity for convenience. "But there's no alternative if one wants to be available to as many people as on Spotify" I've been told. So, let's take a look at this platform and try to figure out if that's really worth it.
The incredibly low revenue gained from streams (in general, not just Spotify) isn't what drives punk bands to get on the platform (I mean, we're talking about punks after all) – it's the amount of potential listeners they can reach. And a lot of punks all over the world use Spotify. A lot. But just because a lot of people are doing something doesn't make it a good idea. There's a myriad of reasons to stay away from Spotify, especially as punks. For example, the platform suffers from weak security, raises various privacy concerns, it's owned and operated by capitalist scumbags and its algorithms are killing creativity in music as a whole. I'm going to spend some time on each of these topics, while trying to keep it as short as possible as not to bore you with technicalities (which, if you're a Spotify user, you don't really care that much about).
AI warfare
I might as well start off with the AI warfare investment stuff, since it's the most eye-catching and you probably would've scrolled to it right away, skipping the other points. In November 2021 the owner of Spotify Daniel Ek invested 114 million dollars in Prima Materia [1], which is an AI company that assists in military tech. He wasn't trying to hide it either, he was proud. Military connections are "regularly defended" by the companies that support them (which we've seen with Amazon and Microsoft) and I don't know about you, but music and war isn't things that I'd like to go hand in hand.
Capitalist assholes and monopsonies
Investments such as these are what venture capitalists do – they try to expand their wealth in just about any way they can. And Ek is one of them. Another lucrative approach in tech is to create monopsonies, which means a platform through which all other sales happens. This is already in effect in many areas and Spotify tries to be the monopsony of music [2]. Imagine the creative market in the shape of an hourglass. On one end we have the creators and on the other we have the consumers. In the middle we have the "chokepoint capitalists". Spotify. Amazon. Apple. Google. The thing that makes them different from traditional middle-men (which we already have a gripe with) is that they completely control "the channels through which culture reaches its audiences" [3].
To my great disdain, streaming absolutely seems to be the future of music and if that's the case then we should treat it as such, and not just an already written truth about how things should work. As it stands right now there are clear winners and losers in that game. Shit pay for the artists, huge profits for the streaming services. Did you know Ek is wealthier than any musician out there full stop [4]? The results of monopsonies such as Spotify (apart from the fact that the entity itself is cashing in like hell on everybody elses work) is that only big artists get bigger while the smaller artists disappear. We can already see this in the numbers, the top 1% of the artists on Spotify account for 80% of all streams [2]. They want the only way for artists to reach their audience to be through them, and only the most popular artists are making any worthwhile money [5]. While punks usually don't care about profit, it's wreaking havoc on the creative landscape and its diversity as a whole. It's a broken system with shit algorithms catering to the already successful [6]. It also has very questionable security measures...
Weak security
The free version of Spotify has infected users with malware in at least two separate incidents [7], through their ads (how's that for quality control?) where the malware was injected in the users' devices even without the need of interaction with said ads. Add to this that they've been hacked countless times over the years [8][9][10] and you've got what I would classify as "weak security". Things slip by them all the time and hundreds of thousands of accounts and passwords have been leaked and continue to leak regularly. What they can leak? Well, apart from the obvious things like your email, password and personal information, they also leak their busily gathered data. Yeah, you know about your data being collected non-stop right?
Privacy issues and user data abuse
Spotify is always listening. They know what you listen to, they know when, where and how you listen to it. They use the billions of data points gathered every single day to create a map of every user. Where the user lives, where the user work, what mood the user is in, their taste, interests and even opinions. According to Spotify's privacy policies they even store information gathered about other devices that's on your network [11]. This data is then combined with other data Spotify gets access to through other sites (such as… *shivers* Facebook) and paints a pretty complete picture of every single user. That they can sell, of course, but also use to manipulate you. One of the sites you use might serve an ad that makes you react in a certain way, while another site then push content that plants certain ideas in your head, then Spotify recommends music that would further strengthen the mood you're in and that's manipulation right there [12]. This is, of course, when they use the data as intended. We also have the cases where this information ends up in far more incidious hands through various data breaches and leaks.
Readers from the EU might think "at least we have laws against this sort of thing, there's no way it's really this bad and we would know if they did anything fishy", and they would probably be thinking of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Well, they do their fishy things anyway, and they don't always confess to it. Sometimes risking multimillion-dollar fines [13].
Conclusion
Spotify is run by venture capitalists trying to maximize profit by any means necessary, while shitting on music creators, killing creativity and harvesting huge amounts of user data. On Spotify, you are the product. So, why are so many punks still using this platform? I guess the answer is, as I said initially in this article – convenience. It's just... easier. Because of this, and the title of this article, I found it pertinent to also end things by quoting Dead Kennedys; "What are you rebelling against? You're fitting in."
Sources
1 https://inthesetimes.com/article/spotify-military-industrial-complex-daniel-ek-prima-materia-helsing
2 https://kirti-shah112.medium.com/spotify-music-miracle-or-destroyer-of-new-music-2b00667541e4
3 https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/books-music-amazon-spotify-chokepoint-capitalism-review/672372/
4 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spotify-ceo-wealthier/
5 https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-04-19/spotify-artists-royalty-rate-apple-music
6 https://www.ft.com/content/dca07c32-6844-11e9-b809-6f0d2f5705f6
7 https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/spotify-malware/7755/
8 https://www.tomsguide.com/news/spotify-credential-stuffing-attack
9 https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/spotify-hit-with-another-credential-stuffing-attack
10 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tech/spotify-accounts-hacked-cyberattack-hijackers-b1152143.html
11 https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-tracking-how-to-stop-it/
12 https://mashable.com/article/spotify-user-privacy-settings
13 https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/13/spotify-gdpr-data-access-fine/
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