Transcript
Excerpts from the Transcript of the Video “The age of inauthenticity; the hypocrisy of tech bros destroying creativity”
Hey, why hello there everyone. It’s Friday, it’s 11:00 a.m., which means this must be the Flow State Podcast, and I must be Stuart P Turner. Welcome back if you have joined me before, and welcome for the first time if this is your first time.
So today, I’m going to talk about two of my twin passions: of digital technology in all its horrible glory and music in general. Now the streams of those two industries have been crossing in fairly horrible fashion over the past few years, but there’s one story that keeps kind of cropping up over the past few months, which is our friend Daniel Ek, the founder and CEO of Spotify, and his recent, fairly unsavoury to my tastes, investments in hardcore military AI technology. Now you might be thinking, “Stu, what the hell does this have to do with work?”. And I’m not about to do a LinkedIn ‘Here’s what this taught me about B2B sales’ switcheroo here. What it has to do with work is incredibly important if you’re trying to grow a business or run a business.
We are allegedly, you know, living through still the age of authenticity in brands and trust being super important. We’re doing a lot of market research at the moment where those two things keep coming up, like building trust, trust, trust—who you’re buying from, needing comfort to know that the purchase decision you’re making is the right one. How do you know that? Well, it’s all down to trust in the individuals that you’re dealing with. And in order to build trust, you must be authentic and not be full of bullshit, and actually build proper relationships with people. So, thanks for asking, there’s the actual link to work and both professional and personal life.
And look, just as a forewarning—this isn’t a warning, this is leading into the warning—at the start of this year, I sort of made, not a resolution because those are a bit lame, aren’t they? I made a bit of a promise to myself to try and be more positive, turn over a bit of a positive leaf. And you know, it might surprise you to know that I’m not always the sunny, optimistic character that you might hear on these shows. Sometimes I’m actually quite miserable about stuff. So I was like, “Do you know what? Don’t turn into a bitter, miserable old man, just try and look on the bright side.” And I’ve been trying to do that all year. But the last week has been really just challenging my commitment to that promise that I made for various reasons, and this is one of them. So while this may seem like a bit of a negatively positioned discussion, and it is, I’m going to try and extract some positivity as we go through. So the warning is, look, this might be a little bit negative, but sometimes you have to be negative in order to uncover the positives, and also it might be a little bit swary because this whole situation just sucks in so many ways. And I think it’s indicative of the times we live in, the attitude of a lot of people to business, why a lot of us who just have worked in companies think that everything companies spew out is just nonsense. Like, there’s so much wrapped up in here, it’s like I could talk about it forever, but I’ll try and stay focused.
I just want to run through this specific example because one is something that I lived through myself and two is something that I am, as you can tell, very aggressively passionate about in a variety of ways. So first of all, what is happening? Well, look, this isn’t like a new piece of news; this all sort of broke in June, I think, this year. But as you know, if you’ve listened to the show before, this isn’t like a trend-chasing show. I’m kind of trying to stick to more evergreen overarching themes that are a bit more impactful, and just, you know, what celebrity is getting married to what other celebrity—see, I do follow the news as well, but we’re not going to talk about that because everyone else is talking about it.
So what’s been happening? Well, as you may or may not have heard, the CEO of Spotify, who is this sometimes fine-looking, sometimes very creepy-looking man, Daniel Ek, has suddenly decided—well, it’s not actually that sudden if you know him or follow his thinking—but he has been investing and decided to invest very controversially, if you are a bleeding heart creative type, in military AI technology. Now I’m not going to talk about that decision today beyond saying I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that we are investing in more automated scaled ways to kill each other, and I think as a species that’s just an incredibly reductive moronic way to invest our time and money. So if you’re listening, Daniel, look, that’s what I really think. And I think you could be investing your time and your money in something a lot more productive instead of ‘How do we analyse a battlefield and work out how we could kill more of other people and not kill as many of ours?’. Just fucking, just, you know, why would you? Anyway, rant for another time.
The point I wanted to share though is that on this news.com.au EU article, there’s a good clip from an interview with Old Mate Daniel here where he sort of explains a bit about his thinking and why he’s making these investments. And look, obviously, I disagree pretty stringently with his thinking, but I understand it. However, the challenge here is, like, this is the guy who also thinks that it’s fine to invest or continue to invest and lead in his ‘We’re saving the world of music’ brand, Spotify, and that’s what I want to talk about today. I’ll include these links under the podcast as usual. Watch this clip; it’s actually quite interesting, it’s only a short one, 43 seconds. Surely even in our currently attention deficit inducing environment, you can stretch to watching a video under a minute and see what you think.
Now the reason, in case you were not already kind of clear on this, that people are pretty pissed off with his decision is that most people who are creatives, most people who are musicians, don’t tend to love the idea of going to war about stuff. And they certainly don’t love the idea of the people who own and control large swathes of the music distribution industry investing in things that are directly at odds with their own personal beliefs. Now that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. And quite frankly, I think it shows a marked lack of respect for the people that make him his millions of dollars that he’s made this decision.
So that’s the context, and the reason that I think this is such a ridiculous decision to make for him to think that he can still lead Spotify and make these investments is because if we look at the actual brand mission of Spotify itself, word for word: “Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity” (questionable at this point) “by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it” (yes, okay, the last bit, yes).
Now, breaking that down, and I’m going to go through a little bit of a history lesson here about the inception and foundation of Spotify and where it’s come from, in order to understand where it is now and why I think it sucks so much, as do most of the musicians that use it. So let’s take point number one: the mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity. In that aforementioned clip that I just showed you of Daniel Ek, he states that he has no intention of removing AI generated music from Spotify. Now, as he notes, a point I actually agree with, yes, the discussion is nuanced. You can’t just blanket say, ‘Use of AI in music is bad, we don’t want that’. However, on the other hand, you shouldn’t, I should say in my opinion, then allow the creation of a completely fake AI band that has been created, let’s not make any mistakes about it, using the hard work of all the musicians that Spotify claims to support. This fake music is completely artificially generated, creates millions and millions of streams and listens, which damages the ability of other artists to reach their audience and no doubt support advertising across the platform. So I don’t know how you can sit there with a straight face and say that you support human creativity and you’re trying to give artists the opportunity to live off their art, while at the same time shamelessly raping and pillaging their art to create fake watered-down wallpaper versions of their music. That just seems to be in direct opposition to that statement.
So that leads me nicely onto the second point: giving millions of creative artists the opportunity to live off their art. Now, Spotify does not allow you to live off your art unless you’re in the top like 0.01% of artists. And I don’t want to lay the blame for this completely at Spotify’s door, because this has been the state of the music industry for forever. Super famous bands get super famous, they make loads of money, the rest of the industry struggles along, trying to make ends meet and attempting to make enough money to just live and do what they love. That hasn’t changed significantly, right? What has changed, and what was good about Spotify, was the sort of democratization of getting your music to people, right, because that was hard before the internet. But Spotify is not the only place to do that, and there are much better places to do it if you want to support your artists, like Band Camp for example, which is one that you can stream music from as well as actually buying music direct or almost direct from the artist. So, the pittance that Spotify pays for streams is laughable in light of this mission statement that they give artists the opportunity to live off their art.
And look, the third part: yeah, look, they have given fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by more music than you ever could before. Like, that’s cool, but the scales are not balanced at all. So now you have a situation where artists still spend all their time and money trying to make money out of their art. And they’re forced onto platforms like Spotify because that’s one of the biggest distribution channels available to everyone now, but the money that you get back is nowhere near equal to the amount of effort you have to put in. So the point I’m making here is, taking them at their word, Spotify failed in my opinion to live up to their brand mission completely, or at least two out of three crosses.
And their CEO is now saying that he’s quite happy for AI slop to just explode across the platform and continue to damage them and just turn Spotify into what essentially sounds like will be a sort of spiral or drain of talent that just produces more and more generic rubbish to continue to fund itself. That doesn’t seem like a great future for the platform to be honest.
And tying that back to the things that we were just saying in terms of brand authenticity and trust: how can you trust a man who wants to invest in wholesale automated killing to run a creative platform? You just can’t, can you? Which is how in my opinion Spotify currently has sort of become a ‘lived long enough to become the villain’ instead of ‘dying the hero,’ which obviously coined the phrase made famous by Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but I don’t think he came up with it.
So why is this so personally frustrating to me? Well, winding back to the early 2000s, which you may or may not remember, and if you’re younger, this is the era that everyone is now trying to ape as we see the welcome resurgence of like just looking like a bit of a grunge and baggy jeans and stuff which was exactly what we all used to look like back in the day.
But look, where did Spotify come from? Well, Napster nearly killed the music industry. It wasn’t only Napster, but in the early 2000s, peer-to-peer was huge. If you don’t know, peer-to-peer is where we directly connect to machines to share information as opposed to a cloud-based network that is distributed across many different servers and machines. And at the time, back in the day when the internet was really slow and pretty crap, peer-to-peer was the way to share. So your mate who spent all their money on like a super amazing computer and had like the fastest internet connection in the world was everyone’s best friend, because you would be trying to get them to share all the files that they had (for legal reasons acquired). And that’s how you could get free stuff. Only it wasn’t really free because this was illegal.
If you’re like my age or a bit older, you’ll remember those mad anti-piracy ads that were on the start of movies. They were labeled everywhere. It was literally that extreme at the time: ‘You wouldn’t stab a dog, would you? No, obviously. So why are you downloading music? You wouldn’t punch your grand in the face, so why are you downloading this film?’.
Now the reason this is important is because Napster and other similar peer-to-peer platforms like eDonkey, LimeWire—there’s tons of them—Napster was just the most famous. And the reason Napster is relevant is because one of the founders of Napster was also involved in the founding of Spotify. Napster basically caused the apocalypse of peer-to-peer downloading because at its peak there were over 80 million users downloading music and various other things across the application. And they were sued out of existence because they became so high-profile that Metallica sued them amongst a bunch of other bands. If you are interested in seeing this, there is an amazing documentary called Downloaded that you should watch.
Napster was just the tip of the iceberg. People were downloading music free, they were like, everything was getting uploaded onto the internet. It was amazing and obviously terrible if you’re trying to make money out of it. And this is where the nuance comes in, because this isn’t the first time that people were breaking the law and sharing music. Technically speaking, prior to this happening, you’d make mixtapes or whatever. You have those old school tape decks with two decks in so you could record one tape to another. That was illegal. The challenge here or the reason Napster became a focal point for this is because this was the start of scaling the illegality. Before, you would have to spend a load of your spare time recording stuff, making mixtapes. That was a sort of cottage piracy industry.
Napster and peer-to-peer sharing changed the game because suddenly everybody could share it—well, everyone with a computer and a decent internet connection could share everything super fast. So the scale of this issue became huge. And it stopped being like bootleg tapes and bootleg records or whatever, and it started being like super scaled pretty extreme levels of albums being leaked before they’re released, like really damaging stuff happening. That is horrible.
That is the environment from which Spotify was born. Spotify came and said, “Look, that behaviour is not going to change now”. People expect to be able to listen to music almost instantaneously, they want to be able to share stuff. They want access over ownership. That was one of the big paradigm shifts at the time, access over ownership, and that’s still happening in different areas. But that was what birthed the streaming movement, if you like. It was the same with Netflix. Spotify at the time was then lorded as the sort of saviour of the music industry because you were like, “Oh, you can put your music onto this platform and you can actually get paid when people listen to it instead of people downloading it for free,” and people are happy to do it.
Spotify kind of came in and was like, “Look, we’re going to, we can address this problem, we can stop piracy”. Whereas if you fast forward to now, over 20 years later, people are now turning back to piracy because we have come full circle. And all these brands, coming back to this mission right of unlocking human creativity—a lofty and somewhat naval gazing statement—giving millions of artists the opportunity to live off their art. You’re not, though, are you?
And major bands are on here because the distribution of their music—this is where the audience is now. We’re like, we’re trapped in this system. And this is the secondary point that I wanted to make today: just because you have to participate in a system or structure or way of living, does not mean that you have to like it.
And this is enough for me to say, “Look, I’ve got years worth of creepy Spotify data probably around my profile now because I’ve been using it for ages, but this is enough for me to be like, ‘Do you know what? I will put up with the crap UI of Apple Music or I will go and try and use Band Camp to stream music instead,'” because the decision coming back to where we started by Daniel Ek to put his money and effort behind something that I fundamentally disagree with so much is… that’s a luxury I have; I know it’s a symbolic gesture. My $25 a month or whatever is not going to burn the company to the ground, but this is what’s important to me.
Coming back to what I was saying about brand and authenticity and all that stuff, this is how you bring it to life: your everyday decisions. And this is an easy one, right, because there’s competition now, there’s loads of different streaming services and they’re all just as sort of shit as each other in terms of how much they pay back to artists, with the possible exception of Tidal. So look, I think that’s just how you can make a difference here. All I need to do is just migrate all my millions of playlists over somewhere else and I just kick this to the curb.
Winding all this back, if you want to see a bit of the real discussion around this decision, as always, Reddit is a great place to dig into that. When this story first broke, I’ll just give you a bit of a smattering of feedback. Someone posted this into a sub called The Overload. A few of the comments on the decision, so this was “Spotify CEO Daniel Ek becomes chairman of AI military startup following a 600 million euro investment”. First comment: “Fucking gross on all levels,” brilliant. “Yep, yet another reason to cancel their subscriptions,” “Don’t forget their unrelenting use of AI generated music peppered throughout their playlists,” “Get Spotify to fuck”. It goes on and on like this, to be honest. It’s amazing that they haven’t seen this, but obviously they’re making so much money that they don’t care.
So let’s think about the positives here for a moment. So what has Spotify done that has been good? Well, speaking of paradigm shifts and the whole access over ownership shift and where the internet is at, what I am seeing at the moment and the plus side of this current age of inauthenticity that we’re living through, is that AI at present is going through that phase of everyone’s playing around with it. People don’t really know what to do with it. It is allowing people to just spew out huge amounts of garbage at an incredible rate that you couldn’t before, and that to me is a big downside. However, the upside is if you behave like a normal human person and ignore all of that nonsense, you can actually see a few silver linings here.
Now the first is that democratization of the distribution of music is awesome. And it’s never been easier in some respects for you as a musician to reach people and get your music in front of people and actually be able to monetize your presence in a more meaningful manner. Do you do that through Spotify? No, of course you don’t. The most successful people I’ve seen are just building their own presence. They pick a channel they know can work, like there’s loads of great stuff on YouTube for example. There’s a lot of specific music spaces like Band Camp you can do it.
The appeal, or the on paper appeal, of places like Spotify is like, “Oh, the audience is all here, it’s a massive audience, you can get in front of so many people”. But that’s the unfulfilled promise that they sell you, right, because you’re not going to get in front of all those people because their algorithm doesn’t let you. It just spews out the most popular whatever that is, and that’s what gets most of the plays. Like that hasn’t changed from the previous iteration of the music industry. The publishers held all the control there. What has changed is that there are more direct routes and you can in fact make that work much more easily.
So look, that’s positive number one. Positive number two, as I mentioned, is that there’s tons more options now. Spotify has built itself as a brand because it was one of the forerunners; it’s had the advantage of being first to market. Their app is better than all the others. It just amazes me that Apple are so good at design in some areas and yet Apple Music is so bad, and iTunes was horrible before as well.
And the most important thing, I think, which is a combination of both of those, is that it has never been easier just to buy direct from the artists that you like and want to support. Because they all have an online presence. People are printing records again, you can buy records from them. You can buy CDs directly from them, you can buy digital downloads directly from them, you can buy merch directly from them. So don’t be fooled into all these crap self-serving ecosystems and like they’re the only places to buy stuff.
One of the most annoying things I’ve seen recently is like Spotify are branching out into selling merch and tickets and all this other crap. And you’re like, “Yeah, great, that’s just adding layers and layers of cost on to me as an end user”. I want to support live music. Like virtual stuff, yeah, it’s not as good as seeing people in real life, but it’s also never been easier to sort of virtually support your favourite bands in a more meaningful fashion.
I think where I’m seeing technology working, and this is coming back to sort of my roots as a more indie-minded person, is ignore all the giant corporate crap that is just sitting across the industry at the moment and people like Daniel Ek who are raking in millions of dollars. If you truly believed that you were a supporter of the arts and creativity, you would not be investing in military anything, in my opinion.
The positive I’m struggling to find there, I think the positive is like, you and me as individuals, we’ve never been more empowered to make decisions that can make us feel better about what we’re doing, I guess. There’s so many options out there to choose from, and if you’re not aligned with someone like Daniel Ek and Spotify, just don’t use it, don’t pay for it, you don’t have to. And this is where coming back to it, this is the positive I was looking for, right: digital technology and where AI has become even more useful. It’s actually never been easier to just even build your own solutions now if you’re struggling.
Just want to kind of wrap this all up with a quote from my friends The Who, from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” as they said in that song: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. We have come full circle. These supposed saviours of the arts and creativity are just as money-hungry and misaligned with their actual core kind of customer base as everyone else. So I feel like there’s a strong, very reasonable and tangible way that those big platforms can just be ditched. You don’t need to push people there, you don’t need to promote those things. You can bring all that back to you, and it’s never been easier to build a kind of direct presence online as it is now. The challenge we’re facing though is, how do you stop these armies of scrapers and tools just hoovering everything in that you make and turning it into whatever garbage is going to come out from this imaginary band on Spotify next month?
Look, it wasn’t entirely positive, I did my best, I do my best. If you have thoughts on that rant/discussion, would love to hear them. If you are in the music industry and you want to talk about this, I would also love to speak to you. If you disagree and think, “Geez, Spotify are doing a great job, like what are you even talking about?” then come and disagree, I’d love to have a chat with you.
But I think, you know, in an age where everything seems a bit fake and nobody across the worlds of politics, business, government seems to really do what they say, it’s frustrating to continue to see these things happening. But ending on a positive note, it is also just as easy to ignore all that stuff and remember that a lot of the power resides in our own hands and we also have a voice and we can make those voices just as loud as all these other idiots if we want to.
On that note, I will leave you. That has been the Flow State Podcast, I’ve been Stuart P Turner. I hope that’s been interesting or at least thought-provoking. Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll hopefully have your ears or eyes with me again next time.