The Problem with Daniel Ek

This is a touchy subject. First, let me state a few things that I believe.

There shouldn't be a few people in society who have 15,000x as much money as most people. (Billionaires shouldn't exist. I mean billionaires, as a concept, aren't the problem. It's the inequality that is the problem.) We should not allow the productivity of workers to be commoditized into shares & auctioned off to the highest bidder. We shouldn't even be forcing artists to commoditize their own work in exchange for wages. If I had my druthers, a country as wealthy as America would be subsidizing health care, housing, education, & perhaps even basic income for all its citizens, so being a committed artist wouldn't be the sacrifice it is today.

But we live in a globalized capitalist society. We do not live in my communist utopia. And so we must confront the world as it is & its people as they are.

And so... Daniel Ek. He's a complicated topic. Where to even begin?

He saved the music industry from the digital download & near-certain collapse. Some say it should've collapsed, & a populist industry should've risen in its place. And maybe there's truth to that. I don't know. But I do believe that the invention of the infinite jukebox was inevitable. And that the music industry we have now could be made into something very good with a little bit of regulation & enforcement.

It's bad that he's involved with Peter Thiel, the Lex Luthor of our time & place, who was an early investor in Spotify. It's even worse that he's invested almost $700m into an AI defense company, & that he chairs the board. I mean, if we could solve international disputes with some sort of BattleBots situation, I'd be for it. But I don't think that's what they're working toward.

And if you want to cancel your Spotify subscription or remove your music from Spotify because you believe that, for instance, the use of AI to murder will only make murder easier to choose & therefore more prevalent in underdeveloped countries like Palestine, then I support that decision.

But we should not abandon Spotify simply because Daniel Ek is wealthy.

Ek actually doesn't take a salary & oftentimes doesn't even take bonuses. In 2022, for instance, his entire compensation was $181,085 for home security costs. What people often criticize him for is the value of his shares in the company, or for selling shares. I'm against the capitalist idea of auctioning off shares of a company (I personally believe that profits should be distributed to the employees or reinvested in the company), but it takes a real hack journalist to call out Daniel Ek specifically for this, or to compare a stock cash out to streaming royalties. When Tim Cook sells shares of Apple, for instance, there is no expectation that he should share the proceeds with artists.

Consider that Daniel Ek is worth around $10b thanks to his Spotify stock. And Spotify distributed about $10b in royalties last year. So if Ek sold all of his shares & donated all of his wealth to artists, it would double the payouts for one year (which would be great) but everything would return as it is now the next year. (Yes, we're ignoring capital gains or whatever taxes Sweden has on stock sales for the sake of simplicity here.)

All of this is to say that Ek's wealth, offensive as it may be, is neither the problem nor the solution to the streaming economy.

The reality is that... this idea that Daniel Ek is taking a portion of users' monthly subscription fees & spending it on fighting robots is just untrue. And there's no realistic scenario where the proceeds from selling stock is owed to artists. If a record store owner sells their shop, they don't pay the artists whose music arguably built the value of the company. If a big box store like Target were bought by a private equity company, proceeds from that sale would not go to artists. Equity & revenue are two completely different things.

If Daniel Ek were drawing nine figures in salary like some other tech executives, that WOULD be a scandal. But he's not. He's barely taking any compensation at all.

And I don't enjoy defending Daniel Ek. I think he's lost the plot a little bit, & that the platform has shifted into engagement farming somewhat. But I feel like it's important to explain this stuff so that we can argue for practical changes to the industry that really do make things more equitable, rather than simply directing all of our energy at scapegoating Daniel Ek.