Within the past decade, Spotify has secured itself a position as the default platform for music streaming to the extent that it has become synonymous with the music listening experience itself. Playlist culture has redefined how an entire generation of artists and listeners create and consume music, and advertising campaigns like Spotify Wrapped have become cultural events. But this monopoly has been questioned in recent years, and the ethics of the platform examined. Concerns about the platform’s royalty practices disproportionately benefiting large artists have been circulating for several years, yet when it was revealed in June that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invested €600 Million into AI military technology company Helsing, this reckoning reached new heights. While Ek is profiting enough to make such an investment, the artists that people are on the platform to listen to are earning an average of $0.003-$0.005 per stream. In response, major artists like Massive Attack and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard announced they would be removing their music from the platform in protest. But is this an effective, or even necessary measure?
Those who oppose the principle of their subscription money going to Helsing will be disappointed to hear that military tech is not a new foray for Ek. He provided Helsing with their initial startup funding of $100 million in 2021 through his investment firm Prima Materia and he has even been appointed Executive Chairman of the company. Helsing claims to ‘ethically protect common democratic values’ by developing AI-powered strike drones, uncrewed fighter jets and combat surveillance technology, yet the implementation of AI military technology raises many ethical concerns.
Kanaka Rajan, a neurobiologist researching AI at Harvard, points out that AI military technology “weakens the association between acts of war and human cost”, suggesting that if nations can engage in warfare without having to put their own soldier’s lives at risk, they will be inclined to do so more readily, leading to even more civilian casualties and destruction globally. It also gives the economically dominant nations that can afford this cutting edge technology an inconceivable advantage, offering the potential to invade less developed countries without having to incur any casualties or even leave their own territory.
AI military technology also presents another facet of inequality – systematic bias within the AI system itself. If a system is trained on data that is sourced from a society in which there is ingrained racial and cultural discrimination, it is inevitable that this bias will be represented in the AI model to some degree. This has already been observed in facial recognition technology – systems were trained based on data that underrepresented people of colour, leading to a disproportionate rate of false positives for people with dark skin.
Regardless of individual opinion, it is reasonable to conclude that subscribing to a music-streaming platform shouldn’t by extension mean supporting a military ethics minefield. In their statement of withdrawal from the platform, Massive Attack condemned the “moral and ethical burden, whereby the hard-earned money of fans and the creative endeavours of musicians ultimately funds lethal, dystopian technologies”. Spotify became the default due to the ease of access to music it facilitated, which has now removed so much friction from the listening experience that you don’t even have to choose what to listen to anymore, thanks to their algorithms. Now, music lovers are faced with a reckoning– can morals be overlooked for the sake of convenience? And should music really be charged with political responsibility?
Since the beginnings of modern culture, music has always been used to vocalise protest, and musicians have always used their cultural influence to platform activism. Mahlia Jackson, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez all took to the same stage in DC as Martin Luther King Jr. when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. At Tiananmen Square, protesters unified by singing Ciu Jian’s “Nothing to My Name”, and benefit concerts from George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh to Live Aid have mobilised millions of individuals and dollars towards political causes. In the same vein, artists like Massive Attack and Kneecap have used their concerts in recent years to call for an end to the genocide in Palestine. Cultural boycotts like the “No Music for Genocide” campaign have been joined by over a thousand artists, geo-blocking their music from being streamed in Israel.
And just as it has countless times in the past, the powerful cultural currency of music continues to unite and mobilise people for change. The impact of Kneecap’s activism is evidenced by the lengths the British government went to try and silence them, charging them with terrorist activities. Massive Attack’s announcement that they were removing their music from Spotify drew publicity to Ek’s investment, ensuring the story was picked up by mainstream news outlets and alerting music listeners to the hidden impact of their subscription fees. It also set a strong example – as artists, they had much more to lose from stepping back from the platform than the average listener. Their boycott serves to remind us of our power as consumers and creators. Powerful investors like Daniel Ek cannot create, contain or control art – they can only platform it. And a platform can only exist with an audience.
