“The Playlist,” limited series by Per-Olav Sørensen, 2022
This is the mostly giddy success story of Spotify, the
audio streaming service that still dominates music downloads, even over iTunes. It has the mood of a typical Techno-Utopian
juggernaut movie at first. Spotify was developed in Sweden by what
is portrayed as a crew of risk-taking geniuses. A too-happy investor, a visionary founder, a quiet
techie, a bored lawyer, an old-school industry boss, a perky marketing guru and
a rag-tag bunch of excellent coders.
Most have their stories told in 1 of 6 episodes – including ‘the
artist,’ who comes last.
They start out
trying to build a faster, more beautiful, user-friendly version of the crude, anarchist
Pirate Bay online audio player, which
is eventually shut down by the courts and the state for music piracy. Pirate
Bay’s ‘business plan’ was to sell porn advertising while hosting music for
free to offer to listeners. In a
capitalist society, this is illegal due to intellectual property rights. Spotify’s
founder Daniel Ek starts with the same advertising plan – though without
the porn. He thinks this is going to work...
Only a budding
naïve would believe that they could get music for free from record companies
and musicians based on giving them part of the advertising proceeds or just
‘free exposure.’ The progression from
libertarian entrepreneurs to the reality of the marketplace is the story arc. We witness them going from pounding the table
for ‘free music’ to suggestions of a paywall, then a ‘premium service’ that
holds playlists, then allowing the record companies to own 20% of Spotify shares, then the admission –
only mentioned once – that the record companies now make 70% of the profit off
streaming. Prior to that, CDs and LPs
were dying as piracy was killing the music corporations. Spotify became the front-end of the record labels.
Spotify needed
early outside investors and in one ridiculous scene Peter Thiel, the Trumpist
billionaire owner of Paypal,
dispenses diagnoses and money to the trippy investor wrangler for Spotify.
The lead
anarchist coder eventually grows dissatisfied with the bourgeois direction the
company is taking. He has built an easy,
fast interface that downloads in 24 nanoseconds or something – first made
possible by combining peer to peer and server music sources. This is faster than other downloads which have
to ‘buffer.’ This speed is finally accomplished
by stripping the music of some of its data to speed up the download – the .mp3
method that musicians like Neil Young have complained about for years.
Ek is a tough perfectionist
and a dick. The lawyer is a
realist. The industry boss has to be
pushed out of his archaic ideas about music delivery. The investor is ‘on the spectrum’ and just
wants to have fun with his kroner millions, snubbing ‘the grey socialists.’ The coder is creative, and we see how he
comes up with some ideas. The artist,
Bobbi T, is a black woman who sings soulful bluesy tunes and gets signed
eventually. She becomes a personal thorn
in Ek’s side, as she knew him in high school.
Ek the
stubborn libertarian eventually becomes wealthy, renovating a mansion on the
shore of some Swedish lake, while throwing an expensive wedding bash in Italy
where Silicon Valley greats mingle. It
is apparent that behind Ek’s anti-system verbiage was the stale and ordinary desire
to get rich. He fires the ‘neuro-diverse’ funder, who is too erratic for his
new tastes. His lawyer suggests he sell Spotify and he refuses. This is ‘his art’ and he still owns it.
 |
| Neil can leave - most can't yet |
THE CATCH
The catch, of
course, is that Spotify pays most
artists pennies on the dollar. At one
point in 2014 its biggest star Taylor Swift deserted the platform due to its exploitation of artists. (She rejoined in 2018). Bobbi T, the formerly non-political artist,
eventually joins a musicians’ campaign in Sweden called “Scratch the Record” to
demand Spotify pay more royalties to
musicians. Oddly Ek doesn’t point the
finger at the music companies except in private, as they are getting the lion’s
share of the proceeds. Bobbi eventually
testifies against Spotify at a
Congressional hearing in 2026… where Ek is grilled about being a cartel
and a monopoly. Of course, when was the last time the U.S. Congress did anything about monopolies or oligopolies?
In the real
world Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren left in 2020 when Spotify bought Joe Rogan’s babbling bullshit podcast. A German label recently
pulled its catalog. A whole raft of international stars are leaving or would
like to leave, but leaving is tricky due to record company contracts. Ek has announced in 2021 that Spotify would invest 100M Euros in an AI
defense firm that works with various militaries, so his transition to corporate
normality is complete. They even dropped controversial leftist podcasts like comedian Lee Camp. Profits for music
corporations Universal, Sony and Warner were up 20+% to 30+% in 2021, mostly on
the backs of music streaming.
Intellectual
property has grown in importance in capitalist wealth. No one in this limited series advocates the
‘socialization of art’ – where musicians, writers, painters, film-makers, actors, etc.
- get a modest stipend to support their work. They would work for the state or a community,
a firm or a union or some other entity.
Instead the vast, democratic majority of artists of all kinds work for
very little, eking out a living while trying to do gigs or other work to fund
their art. Art has become democratic,
but wealth has not - as this series makes clear if you stay to the end.
Note: May Day carries many books about music.
The author does not stream. Instead he listens to a large collection of new and used LPs and CDs using 6 speakers and 2 amps, not some tiny ear buds. Boom!
Prior reviews
on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year
archive, using these terms: “In Search of
the Blues,” “Cool Town,” Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,”
“Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,”
“We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute,"
"Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual
History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “The
Music Sell-Outs,” “Palmer’s Bar,” “Treme,” “Subculture,” “The Long Strange
Trip, “If it Sounds Good, It Is Good, “Really the Blues, “Music is Power.”
The Kultur Kommissar
December 13, 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment