Spotify and the military

[RichardB]

Musical artists have been complaining for a long time that Spotify sponges off their work and gives them almost nothing back. Now we see what those profits are being used for - this from the Telegraph:

A year after launching a €1bn investment company to boost European tech, Spotify’s co-founder Daniel Ek has placed his first bet with a stake in Helsing, a defence tech start-up that produces live maps of battlefields.The start-up, which was founded this year and plans to have offices in Germany, Britain and France, received €100m from Ek’s Prima Materia, at a valuation just over €400m. Ek said he had founded Prima Materia in September 2020 to “identify society’s most difficult problems”. The software developed by Helsing will use artificial intelligence to integrate data from infrared, video, sonar and radio frequencies, gleaned from sensors on military vehicles, to create a real-time picture of battlefields. Possible applications include helping troops to detect swarming drones, enemy forces or camouflaged vehicles more accurately than the human eye.

People here with Spotify subscriptions might like to consider the ethics of supporting a company which exploits musicians and uses the profits to invest in the defence industry.

[cat]

Spotify doesn't invest in the defence industry, one of its minority shareholders does. In any case it seems like this particular investment might be useful to guard against the threat from Russia - I can't see how it's unethical unless you think European society isn't worth defending.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid using Spotify, from the way they treat artists to the sound quality.

[RichardB]

Spotify doesn't invest in the defence industry, one of its minority shareholders does

Which was clear from the quotation in my post - although Daniel Ek isn't just "one of its minority shareholders" but also the co-founder and CEO of the company. The money he is investing in the defence industry is the direct result of his company parasitising musical creativity.

"The threat from Russia"... yes we've been hearing that for many decades now, and it's been used to justify all kinds of atrocities, not to mention the increasingly bloated military-industrial complex. If you think that's the most useful thing an extremely rich person can spend an astronomical sum of money on I don't think you're paying much attention to what's going on in the world.

[ahinton]

Which was clear from the quotation in my post - although Daniel Ek isn't just "one of its minority shareholders" but also the co-founder and CEO of the company. The money he is investing in the defence industry is the direct result of his company parasitising musical creativity.

"The threat from Russia"... yes we've been hearing that for many decades now, and it's been used to justify all kinds of atrocities, not to mention the increasingly bloated military-industrial complex. If you think that's the most useful thing an extremely rich person can spend an astronomical sum of money on I don't think you're paying much attention to what's going on in the world.

Loud applause for that!

[jayne lee wilson]

I don't think Spotify HiFi (i.e lossless) got going yet did it? Despite all the promises early in 2021....

So now we know what they're spending their money on instead....
If you're on there, have a look around at alternatives and think about chuckin' spoty....

[cat]

Which was clear from the quotation in my post - although Daniel Ek isn't just "one of its minority shareholders" but also the co-founder and CEO of the company. The money he is investing in the defence industry is the direct result of his company parasitising musical creativity.

"The threat from Russia"... yes we've been hearing that for many decades now, and it's been used to justify all kinds of atrocities, not to mention the increasingly bloated military-industrial complex. If you think that's the most useful thing an extremely rich person can spend an astronomical sum of money on I don't think you're paying much attention to what's going on in the world.

If you think we ought to stop spending any money on defence and see what happens, that's fair enough. It's a bit of an extreme view though, but it's basically what you're saying if you claim that such a defence start-up is so objectionable that people ought to switch their music streaming service in a vain attempt to reduce the funding available for it.

My point is that there's enough objectionable things about Spotify itself to cease using it (or if like me you've cared about those things from the outset, not start using it in the first place). No need to invoke some tenuous link to a co-founder's other investments.

[RichardB]

If you think we ought to stop spending any money on defence and see what happens, that's fair enough. It's a bit of an extreme view though, but it's basically what you're saying if you claim that such a defence start-up is so objectionable that people ought to switch their music streaming service in a vain attempt to reduce the funding available for it.

Whatever one thinks of the necessity or otherwise of the "defence" industry (and it basically exists in order to make money out of war rather than to defend the populace against some supposed enemy or other, as we saw in Iraq), we already pay far too much towards it from income tax without paying yet more indirectly through streaming subscriptions - quite apart from the other ethical reasons for not using Spotify, which I've never done either.

[ahinton]

If you think we ought to stop spending any money on defence and see what happens

Where did anyone suggest that?

[ahinton]

Whatever one thinks of the necessity or otherwise of the "defence" industry (and it basically exists in order to make money out of war rather than to defend the populace against some supposed enemy or other, as we saw in Iraq), we already pay far too much towards it from income tax without paying yet more indirectly through streaming subscriptions - quite apart from the other ethical reasons for not using Spotify, which I've never done either.

Spot on. The "defence" industry has, apart from other considerations, one of the worst transgressive history when it comes to eye-wateringly expensive procurement failures of the PPE and Test/Track/Trace kind. Yes, there does need to be such an industry financed largely by the taxpayer but it should be proportionate in terms of its value; is a multi-billion pound nuclear "deterrent" really a more appropriate investment than the same or similar sum allocated to NHS, for example?

[cat]

Where did anyone suggest that?

There is the notion presented in the OP that defence spending is fundamentally unethical.

[RichardB]

There is the notion presented in the OP that defence spending is fundamentally unethical.

I did not actually say that, but yes I do believe it is fundamentally unethical. If it were actually directed towards protecting people from some credible threat that might be another thing; but as I already said the main purpose of "defence" spending is to generate profits for the arms industry, as for example in the upgrading of Britain's "nuclear deterrent" which serves no other plausible purpose than to enrich that industry. Added to which Britain is the second largest arms exporter in the world, and a large proportion of those exports go to countries ruled by repressive regimes and dictatorships, for example Saudi Arabia which has used them to commit war crimes in Yemen.

[khiiutvhjui]

I have taken up Spotify Premium today after reading this, the head honcho sounds like my kind of chap.