Neil Young — and many artists, as well as several scientists — has been challenging Spotify’s broadcast of host Joe Rogan’s podcasts for several weeks. The latter is accused of participating in misinformation about COVID-19. Spotify did a quick math: After investing more than $100 million to buy Rogan’s show, Rogan is fulfilling its promise by securing itself the most-listened to podcast track on the platform — including in Canada. – and de facto attracts more listeners than Neil Young. Also, Spotify can do without songs from the latter.
Other artists then followed the movement, notably Joni Mitchell, or Gilles Vigneault in Quebec. This meant that Spotify had to review its policy regarding the content it broadcasts. So did Neil Young win against Spotify? Nothing is less sure…
Spotify is indeed regularly in the news. We will of course remember Pierre Lapointe’s brilliance at the ADISQ Gala regarding the very low remuneration of artists. Less publicized was the investment of 100 million dollars, revealed on November 9, 2021, by Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, in a young artificial intelligence (AI) shoot for military purposes. Without going into details, this military cybersecurity company (Helsing) performs real-time analysis of data from sensors placed in various connected objects.
This young shoot is what is commonly called a unicorn: a company valued at more than 1 billion dollars. The latter do not necessarily have customers or income, and are often highly loss-making. They are part of an economy of promises, that is to say they are based on a promise of technological innovation which would justify this valuation by an expectation of a very high return on investment.
The Spotify Unicorn
The world of unicorns is a small world far from being magical. Their promises in the field of AI are quite simple: their algorithmic technologies for collecting and processing data from users will make it possible to perform behavioral analyzes of users and, in doing so, will make it possible to resell these analyzes to advertising companies and thus generate exponential profits. We can thus qualify Spotify as a unicorn: valued at nearly 47 billion Canadian dollars and still in deficit, the company is valued less for its cultural activity than for its specialization in the collection and algorithmic processing of listener behavioral data, in particular via connected objects (car, speaker, telephone, watch, etc.).
We then better understand this investment by Daniel Ek: music like podcasts (regardless of their quality) are only loss leaders to access users and suck up much more valuable personal data.
And Neil Young is, paradoxically, a player in this transformation of artists, music and cultural industries into data vacuums. Having sold part of its catalog last year to the firm Hipgnosis, another unicorn based in a tax haven (Guernsey), specializing in the acquisition and (financial) valuation of artists’ catalogs, Neil Young and d ‘other renowned artists are fully playing the game of Spotify and others. Because by selling their catalogs at exorbitant prices in order to no longer depend on the starving incomes of the streaming, these artists also lost the right to say what could be done with their music. If Neil Young was able to negotiate to have a right of inspection on the use of his music, the other artists were not able to obtain such clauses, like his acolyte David Crosby. Because music, from the point of view of Hipgnosis and Spotify, is not an end in itself, but an intermediate resource: the catalog of an artist (or a podcast host) makes it possible to attract listeners on platforms and to extract data from them, which will be analysed, etc.
Thus, behind the platform boycott controversy lies a deeper transformation of the music industry in which Neil Young and others participate, probably without realizing it, by playing with these unicorns: the transformation of music and artists into simple data suckers.
Also, it is time for the various governments to take seriously the issue of these cultural platforms so that they are not simply a means of financial valuation – and therefore without interest for the “content”, but that ‘they contribute actively and positively to the development and dissemination of culture.