Spotify Exodus Is Inevitable

....and overdue.

There I was, ready spend today rhapsodizing over a few profoundly eye-opening compilations, when discussion about Neil Young, Joe Rogan and the #SpotifyExodus reached the level of simmering cacophony.

This has happened all over the Internet, but is especially hot in the comments on social media platforms like Facebook. The ones that riled me involved a specious form of armchair scorekeeping: Crazy Neil lost. Or maybe Joe Rogan did somehow?

Huh? Are we really at a point in our discourse where it’s possible to equate an artist whose contribution includes such world culture classics as Harvest and After the Gold Rush with a comedian and skillful interviewer? This question isn’t based on the supposition that Young is some sort of deity; rather, it’s aimed at the false equivalencies inherent in viewing this from a wins/losses perspective. There’s no helping a culture that reflexively applies the same lens to works of art and news-talk commentary.

Evidently Spotify has been doing so much winning that it can’t conceptualize why any unsatisfied customer would want to cancel a subscription. (Apparently it’s currently impossible to extract oneself from Spotify. This Twitter thread has helpful info.)

This dustup is not about Neil Young.

It’s not about Joe Rogan.

It’s not even about free speech vs. the explosion of misinformation.

This is about the questionable judgment of an international company, Spotify, whose primary business is supposedly music.

Over the last few years, as streaming has grown into the primary distribution lane for music, Spotify has attempted to “diversify” by becoming a media company. It’s made major investments on original content that it can control — most notably podcasting, which explains that $100 million deal with Rogan.

What Spotify has not done: Invest in music. It did not put $100 million toward anything a human would recognize as music discovery. It made cursory itty-bitty changes to its royalty structure rather than overhauling it in ways that would pay artists properly. It built algorithms rather than editorial departments. Its figurehead even had the gall to tell artists how often they should release new material.

Read a few press releases from Spotify corporate, and what emerges is a company that can barely hide its contempt for its core business. Having built a shaky media empire literally on the backs of recording artists, Spotify now asks the world to take it seriously as a purveyor of news, information and insight. Even though, as the Rogan Experience makes clear, it has established no journalistic guardrails or internal procedures that could help it address wildcat oubreaks of misinformation.

People of music already knew about this Spotify contempt, which many of us have lamented. It’s painfully evident every time you need to find out who’s playing bass on a track — and are forced to search outside of Spotify for this basic information. And on and on; here’s one of my harangues on the topic.)

Spotify arrived at a moment of great fluidity in music history. It won big. But it didn’t act like a winner. It didn’t share those winnings with the people who made the work that made the winning possible. It displayed little concern about the longterm health of the art it was brokering.

This week’s skirmish may blow over with just a few artists taking a principled stand and removing their work. It could be forgotten in a month. Or we could see #SpotifyExodus on a serious scale.

None of those outcomes are a win for music, however, because Spotify’s values and priorities are likely to stay the same. And the questions behind the question that Young raised will persist. That’s why so many music lovers hope that artists from megastars to unknowns will take a long look at Spotify’s business and its impact. This week it’s outrage over vaccine misinformation, in Year 3 of a global pandemic. Next week, it’ll be something else. And when the next controversy hits, Spotify will still be tone-deaf where it matters most: On the art. Eventually the center will not hold.

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