A Modest Proposal

Paging Carl Icahn....

The modest proposal below was inspired by a Facebook post from the gifted Miami-based guitarist Lindsey Blair a few months back. (It might have been a repost, might have gone mildly viral simply because it concerns Spotify. That’s where I saw it, at any rate.)

It begins: “Musicians, this is pathetic. By far the best way to make money with Spotify is to buy their stock, not upload your music.”

If you happened to do that at the end of 2023 and purchased one lone share, it would have cost you $187.91. Today it is trading at $376.70. Doubled. Here’s the page where Spotify tracks investment information.

If you put up a song on Spotify in early 2024 – as that notorious “Spotify monetization threshold” was taking effect --  you would have needed to generate 1000 plays just to qualify for any royalty payments. Then after that, you would of course need a boatload of spins to net anything close to the stock price. That’s apart from the costs involved in creating and recording the track. Or the time and money needed for marketing that may (or may not) ramp those spins up to “scale.” The possibility of doubling the royalty in a year does exist, but it’s remote.

One far-future, far-flung, terrifically whimsical idea that’s just as remote: A subversive, artist-oriented activist shareholder revolt. Like a Carl Icahn maneuver without quite that level of raw greed.

You may say I’m a dreamer. Guilty as charged! Full disclosure: I’ve not done any research on this and have to assume that Daniel Ek, the Spotify czar, has insulated his company from such rogue attacks.

But this has been a season marked by wildly ambitious (or, depending on who’s speaking, dystopian) proposals, so just for 30 seconds consider this. The community of people affected by Spotify’s policies include tiny start-up artists and mega celebrities. Artists who got billion-dollar publishing payouts in the last five years and multinational corporations that have been forced to play in Spotify’s ill-kept AI-junked-up sandbox.

A coalition of these people of music – the deep-pocketed and the millions of creators who’ll never see a Spotify royalty and everyone in between – can become Spotify owners right now. Eventually, they could become a powerful bloc, capable of (at the minimum) creating the good kind of trouble at an annual meeting. There are plenty of musicians and music-adjacent household names who have no love for the streaming service. And would welcome the opportunity to be part of agitating for huge systemic change. Already there’s a template for how such a large coalition could organize its efforts – the non-profit American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

The Spotify stock is performing well. The company is doing what it’s supposed to do to create wealth for stakeholders. At the same time, in word and deed Spotify shows boundless arrogance toward the people who create the music that is at the center of its business. That can’t last forever. One way to disrupt this corrosive dynamic is by speaking the only language Spotify knows: The language of Money.