Spotify’s CEO apologizes to employees over Joe Rogan controversy

What platform is that, and are you really sure?

Every platform that has a free tier has dismal pay per play numbers. But what I care about is how much of my $10 per month the artists and songwriters get. AFAICT it's almost universally 70%. But I'd be happy to be corrected, because I'd be really easy to convert away from Spotify at the moment...

(Even if you check your own experience and think back to times you start music and just let it play for multiple hours, consider that there are people who start one podcast and keep listening through multiple episodes)

I support free speech. I don't support treating your paying customers like an ad audience. "free speech" is a weak justification for scummy business practices.

On a content front, Tidal has 76% of my Spotify liked tracks and 83% of tracks from liked playlists (stats from Soundiiz). That's a not insubstantial amount of music to lose access to.

That might be okay, except nobody comes close to Spotify's recommendations for me. I can count on the overwhelming majority of the "Daily Mix" or "Track Radio" content to be a good fit for me, and to have passable choice in musical moods. By comparison, Tidal gives me poor individual recommendations, and can't keep a consistent atmosphere during a playback session. I'm sure Tidal has great music that Spotify doesn't, but it's not showing that to me.

I like that Tidal has higher-quality playback, gives artists a bigger cut, and has better controls over banning tracks/artists, artist credits, etc. And Tidal's recommendations are pretty far ahead of most other services for me. But I just can't count on turning it on without constantly skipping songs.

I don't know if this is some 4D chess move from Spotify, but I actually had to take a look at the two "antivax" episodes and neither had antivax message. So either this is all very clever marketing from Spotify or people try to make Rogan look bad for whatever reason and they don't realize that if you out right lie about things that are easy to verify it makes everything else you push less credible.

Like paying musicians reasonable amounts of money per stream? People have been complaining about this since the very beginning of Spotify. But as usual woke nonsense takes up all the air in the room because it's fiscally irrelevant.

If someone is really offended or disagree with what he's broadcasting, then why do you think that removing him would be low on any rational list? His podcast reaches 11 million listeners, so getting him off the air seems like it would be pretty impactful.

How do we know they aren't just average or mediocre software developers?

Also, 'good' engineers won't keep you at the top. Once the best start to flee, they my accumulate at other companies. Birds of a feather and all that.

When major cloud vendors and government can conspire to shut down an alternative platform (I've already forgotten the example - Parler) right before an election, it's not a good testament. Parler is online today, it seems, but that's small beer considering how it all went down.

We still have the government spox calling for censorship, collaborating with private companies to implement censorship, and corporations buckling under the strain of PR, employee, shareholder, prospective regulatory, and litigation pressures to comply.

The problematic element here is increasing centralization of the Internet and collaboration with government. Either of those by themselves would be normal, the two combined speaks badly for the health of the Internet.

It will be interesting to see how Rumble, HowTube, GETTR, and other alternatives to the majors fare if they can gain traction with general audiences rather than servicing the politically disenfranchised. One might argue that they only survive now based on their obscurity. Arguably there is pressure to keep them obscure by labeling anything aligned with the principles of free speech as racist, hateful, dangerous, etc. Until society gets calloused to those accusations and a climate of constant fear generally, alternative communication channels are held under an effective ceiling of success.

Not their employees' understandable disgust with that decision.

I don't know about Marx, but that sounds closer to a comic book villain than a real person. And skimming through some search results, it looks like he heavily supported freedom of the press.

I don't think it's the same. DJ's make decisions what to put on air like editors; they express their personal musical and political views, and so does the radio station as a whole. They don't advertise to the listener as if they played all the possible music in the world, but Spotify does. It has curated playlists, of course, but all of it's messaging to the user has an implicit assumption that user will be able to find whatever she wants there, and it won't be expression of Spotify's musical or political views.

Spotify is a small player though and Facebook is the big winner in this category.

I hate this phrase, we are better than that. No one is asking businesses to become charities, what they are asking for them to become more socially conscious. Invest even a small quantity of profits into areas of the business that, while may not be profitable, could provide some level of support to society.

We as a society need to move past this excuse of "they are just a business" and not expect them to be better than that.

> Rogan is enormously popular. Content from marginalized groups is, almost by definition, less so.

Spotify should be using some portion of their profits to give these marginalized groups a platform to tell their story. We should not dismiss them.

I think this could be true and at the same time I think they might have even paid him more knowing what they know now.

Really? They didn't view any of the 1700 something streams they imported ahead of the deal?

I also don't think he's necessarily antivax, but he's not innocent on this point.

The blessing and curse of having the worlds information at our fingertips is that we can usually find the data, groups and echo chambers to mirror any narrative.

If you were hesitant about certain medical procedures, you now have access to groups and data that can and will reaffirm that you should not undergo that procedure because of X, Y & Z.

Wether X, Y & Z are directly relevant, or even statistically probable - it doesn’t matter anymore. Group think, peer pressure, societal pressures and desires to be “free” and “independent” etc start to reign.

The backlash against Spotify is warranted - it’s just a large corporation that people can condem and refuse to do business with. Same with governments.

Perhaps not exactly the same analogy, but muslims won’t generally use the services offered by a Church, or some people might go see their Shaman over a GP, or vegans will avoid the meat-heavy BBQ place. We have our beliefs, some are misguided, some are dangerous. Covid is pretty dangerous, and deadly to certain demographics.

Actual white supremacists don’t pose any threat to the prevailing system of thought, so mostly get ignored as marginal wackos.

On the other hand, mainstream people who dissent, even in a minor way, pose a serious threat. They challenge orthodoxy in a way that crazy racists don’t. The real danger? People might start listening to them!

That’s why they get shut down harder. It’s about silencing credible dissent.

Actual harm prevention is a distant secondary concern.

It's not an overtly stated narrative and doesn't have to make rational sense, only be emotionally appealing. But it's quite self-consistent in its own terms, and it's ultimately what justifies this kind of outrage.

It's definitely not a just strategy, but it might actually be a fairly effective one.

AS someone who's also in an interracial relationship, I applaud his support and hope my own children benefit from genetic diversity.

When reading books like "The Scarlet Letter" way back in my younger days, I always thought of them as being so irrelevant. Unfortunately, I didn't understand they were actually sci-fi novels. My only consolation now is that perhaps a new crop of Americans eventually emerges that views the moral panics of today with as much exasperation and disdain as I viewed the moral panics of the 1600s.

Weird. I must have missed the historical text about rights and freedoms that compensated for this.