Spotify steals from artists, a Spotify exclusive

More Chokepoint Capitalism stunt-publishing.

In our next book, Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I set out to shatter the false binary that creative workers can only choose between rooting for Big Tech or Big Content, as if one flavor of monopolist will be better for us than the other. No company epitomizes the hopelessness of this approach more than Spotify.

You’ve probably heard about the pathetic sums that creators earn from the Spotify streaming, often blamed on the tech industry’s unwillingness to pay creators what they’re worth. Maybe you’ve also heard the rebuttal — that Spotify pays plenty to entertainment companies, but they intercept this money before it can get into creators’ pockets.

That right there is the false binary — either Spotify is cheap, or the Big Three record labels are greedy. But what if — and hear me out here — Spotify is cheap and the Big Three are greedy? What if Spotify and the labels are actually colluding to rip off the “talent”? What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they’ll never truly love us back?

That’s the thesis of Chapter 5 of Chokepoint Capitalism, where we get into eye-watering detail on how Spotify and the Big Three work together to transfer value from…