Words: Tom Ward
Love it or hate it, Spotify has proved an enduring fixture of the music scene since its launch in 2006. Remember the days when the word ‘stream’ was a noun and meant a gently-flowing water course? It’s thanks to the likes of Spotify (and later platforms like Apple Music) that we’re now able to stream any song, anywhere, and largely without paying for it, barring a monthly subscription fee.
Like Napster and the iPod before it, any attempt to change the music industry doesn’t sit well with those who actually make a living from it – including the likes of Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift who temporarily withdrew their music from the service. And, with music piracy on the rise over the last twenty years, physical sales of actual IRL albums have declined, forcing musicians to take to the road if they want to make any cash. It’s a problem Spotify has certainly exacerbated.
"I'd sooner people stole my work than stream it from Spotify...”
“I’d sooner people stole my work than stream it from [Spotify].” Biffy Clyro touring guitarist Mike Vennart told the website Screaming Silence in 2012. “They pay the artists virtually nothing. Literally pennies per month. Yet they make a killing. They’ve forced the sales way down in certain territories, which wouldn’t be so bad if the bands actually got paid.”
The latest controversy around the streaming service centres on blowhard Joe Rogan’s spat with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell in which the artists criticised the The Joe Rogan Experience host for featuring guests who contradicted mainstream Covid-19 information. Young and Mitchell asked to have their music removed from the platform as a result of the fallout. Over 270 scientists, physicians, professors, doctors, and healthcare workers also expressed concern over Rogan’s show in an open letter to Spotify.
“I’m not mad at Neil Young, I’m a huge Neil Young fan,” Rogan, who reportedly signed an £82 million, multi-year deal to host his show exclusively on the platform beginning in 2020, noted in a 10-minute Instagram video. ““My pledge to you is that I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives, so we can maybe find a better point of view,” he said.
In this instance, the hatchet appears to have largely been buried, but Young and Mitchell’s Joe Rogan experience is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to controversies with the start-up platform. Here are some of its most memorable tiffs and upsets.
The Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan saga is just the latest scandal to hit the streamer
Payment disputes
The question of whether Spotify pays artists enough has been ongoing since the platform first began. According to a now archived page on Spotify’s website, the platform pays royalties based on an artist’s “market share”, that is, their total streams as a percentage of total songs streamed on the platform, with 70 percent of Spotify’s revenue going to the rights-holders of the music (record labels, song-writers etc) who will then pay performing artists based on their own contracts.
“Spotify isn’t fair to artists,” Black Keys musician Patrick Carney has said of the agreement. “It still isn’t at a point where you’re able to replace royalties from record sales with the royalties from streams. For a band that makes a living selling music, it’s not at a point where it’s feasible for us.”
Of Spotify board member Sean Parker, Carney said “That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that’s the bottom line.”
Carney isn’t alone in criticising the platform with the likes of David Byrne, Taylor Swift (who wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the situation) and more. In fact, 30,000 global musicians have joine dthe group UnionOfMusicians, which protested in 2021 with the slogan #JusticeAtSpotify which asks for a fairer redistribution system. As yet, nothing looks likely to change.
Joe Rogan has come under fire for giving a platform to controversial figures like Alex Jones (pictured)
It's not (always) about the money
Many artists, especially those from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s took their time before reaching a deal with Spotify. It’s why the music of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles have only fairly recently become available on the platform. For one of our best contemporary artists, Bjork, the issue was deeper than money, it was about Spotify not respecting artist’s work.
“This streaming thing just does not feel right,” she told Fast Company in 2016. “I don’t know why, but it just seems insane. … To work on something for two or three years and then just, ‘Oh, here it is for free.’ It’s not about the money; it’s about respect, you know? Respect for the craft and the amount of work you put into it.”
The alleged sex offender R Kelly has had his music removed from the platform
Inconsistent Policies
Spotify announced it would remove music promoting white nationalism in 2017. The next year it released a “Hate Content & Hateful Conduct policy” explaining why the music of alleged sex-offenders R. Kelly and XXXTentacion would be removed from its platform. So far so good.
“When we look at promotion, we look at issues around hateful conduct, where you have an artist or another creator who has done something off-platform that is so particularly out of line with our values, egregious, in a way that it becomes something that we don’t want to associate ourselves with,” the 2018 statement from the company read.
But this was short-lived; the platform pedalled back the statement in June of the same year after claiming its initial statement was too “vague” and that “Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists. Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct”.
Spotify has since removed content that falls under the definition of hate content, but, confusingly, the catalogues of convicted peadophile Gary Glitter, and Lostprophets (whose singer Ian Watkins was convicted on charges of child pornography and rape) are still available.
All in all, it’s a baffling and infuriating lack of consistency and morals on the platform’s part.
Fake tunes
Having a song included on a Spotify-made playlist is a big way for musicians to grow their audience, as such, it was strange when in 2016 Music Business Worldwide reported that Spotify had been paying producers to create music under fake names which it then placed on coveted playlists. Naturally, the concern was that this was taking away royalties from ‘real’ artists who hadn’t been paid by Spotify to place their music there.
A Spotify spokesperson later told Billboard that “We do not and have never created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists. Categorically untrue…We pay royalties…we don’t pay ourselves”.
Music Business Worldwide retorted with an in-depth article of its own, writing “We’re pretty sure A&R teams from across the globe would love to hear about artists with no online presence who have managed to rack up millions of Spotify plays with their first few tracks.”
Adele has called for the removal of the shuffle button on her albums
Adele vs. Shuffling
Late last year, Adele made a triumphant return to the music scene, grabbing further headlines when she asked Spotify to remove the shuffle button from all album pages. “We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended. Thank you Spotify for listening,” the singer tweeted.
“Anything for you,” Spotfiy responded before doing just that because when Adele asks a favour, you do it. All hail the mighty Adele.
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