Bye Spotify
We're taking Deerhoof off Spotify.
"Daniel Ek uses $700 million of his Spotify fortune to become chairman of AI battle tech company" was not a headline we enjoyed reading this week. We don’t want our music killing people. We don't want our success being tied to AI battle tech.
We are privileged that it was a pretty easy decision for us. Spotify only pays a pittance anyway, and we earn a lot more from touring. But we also understand that other artists and labels do rely on Spotify for a bigger chunk of their income, and don't judge those who can't make the same move in the short term.
The company Ek now chairs is German weapons manufacturer Helsing. We want to acknowledge that it's possible that Helsing's weapons might be saving lives. And that they might be killing innocent people. They might be doing both. They might be doing neither. Helsing is a secretive company, which forces its supporters (including, without their consent, most musicians and most music listeners) to gamble on Daniel Ek's moral values. Is he behaving ethically in this one case, going against his usual patterns? Our gamble is to speculate that no, he is not behaving ethically, but behaving the way he always has since he entered the public eye.
The claim made by Ek and Helsing is to be protecting European democracies, including Ukraine. We do support Ukrainian democracy and independence. We respect that this is a sensitive subject and appreciate the huge moral dilemma. We aren't pretending to be experts. We don't judge Ukrainians doing what they have to do to survive, including repelling a fascist war criminal's illegal invasion, even by using AI weapons. At the same time we don't believe it's the duty of the musicians of Earth to continue to be ripped off by Daniel Ek just because of his questionable and misleading claims that he'll use the stolen money to save Ukrainian democracy.
We do believe that cultural workers have a responsibility to stay informed and take a stand on the important issues facing humanity. But we don't believe that this responsibility requires us to take the word of oligarchs on faith. Or require us to become involuntary stakeholders in geopolitical chess games being played largely in secret by the rich and powerful. Or require that income from our songs be used without our consent to fund murky corporate weapons experiments. We do respect musicians' right to be on either side of this debate, and if others look at the same evidence and conclude that Daniel Ek, Jeff Bezos, Peter Theil, and the other multibillionaires investing in AI warfare are trustworthy authorities on their own virtue, that's their right. But Deerhoof is not at all convinced.
Musicians already tend to know that little of what Daniel Ek says can be taken at face value, from years of humiliating personal experience. A possible objection to our decision to leave Spotify would be that if we were in Ukraine, we'd have a different perspective, which is undoubtedly true. And that perspective is valid. Our perspective is that we are professional musicians, which is also valid. Those not as intimately familiar with Spotify's practices might not be aware that Daniel Ek is a con man, with an exceptionally egregious history of creating and profiting from the desperation of others. We suspect that there is little a Daniel Ek defender could now reveal to a musician about that man's inner values that the musician doesn't probably already know from firsthand experience. Ek is not an honest businessman, he is a fraud. A very rich, very greedy fraud.
There's the PR Daniel Ek and there's the real Daniel Ek. The PR version is that he's just some sneaker-wearing good guy with a dream of making music accessible to everyone. But few in the music world actually believe that, because Ek is like Musk, like Theil, like Trump... another rich, entitled asshole who can't resist putting his foot in his mouth, inadvertently revealing the truth behind his PR smokescreens. For example Ek has publicly admitted he was never interested in music. In fact he's infamous for having nothing but contempt for musicians. He just wanted to find a way to get rich. Targeted advertising based on data-mining was his scheme. He was going to use movies, but Hollywood's legal infrastructure was too strong, so in search of a weaker opponent to exploit, he finally settled on musicians.
What Spotify actually sells is not music, but you, the listener. Exactly how much you cost is a well-guarded industry secret, but basically you listen, Ek tracks your data, he charges corporations for your secrets. The more you listen, the more ammunition he collects, and the more aggressively you can be targeted by ads. That's the business model, and it's shared by most music streaming platforms. Like many businesses, Spotify needs what's called a "loss leader" for it all to work. For a small shop, a loss leader is the item they sell for cheap to get you to come into the store and hopefully buy something else. Ek's loss leader is the unpaid and underpaid labor of musicians. In other words, we're the bait. He takes as much as he can of recorded music from the past, present, and future, and dangles it in front of the people of Earth for free. It's not a music company, but a music devaluation company. His dream is to make Spotify universal, i.e. to turn every human around the globe who enjoys music into a target for corporate data-mining.
One of the common claims about Spotify is that it makes one's music discoverable by anyone who signs up, no matter how remote they may be from the self-proclaimed centers of hipness. But just because someone is far from Western gatekeepers does not mean they lack culture, or need to hear our band. Deerhoof is a small mom and pop operation, and know when enough is enough. We aren't capitalists, and don't wish to take over the world. Especially if the price of "discoverability" is letting oligarchs fill the globe with computerized weaponry, we're going to pass on the supposed benefits.
How do Spotify's crooked business practices relate to the question of Ukraine, or other European states whose democracy is threatened? To us, it's directly relevant. Daniel Ek's business model has always been to exploit the desperation of others. Spotify became successful precisely because Ek secretly colluded with major label executives to administer the coup de gras to recorded music sales by pushing listeners into streaming. This created an endless queue of musicians desperate enough for exposure that they'd submit to any underpayment scam, even one as criminal as his. We've all watched Ek's fortune grow while the artists' end of the bargain just gets worse and worse. Recently this trend has extended into absurdity: the stoppage of any payment whatsoever for tracks with fewer than 1000 plays, the algorithmic promotion of AI "artists" whom he doesn't even have to pay, and dead artists suddenly releasing fake AI-created songs and images masquerading as the genuine work of the artists, without the permission of their families or estates. Now he's diversifying, with a new, desperate population to exploit. And we predict that if Ukrainians come to rely on Daniel Ek for their survival, they will be similarly cheated.
Ek's pledge to sell only to democracies is extremely misleading. For starters he has never bothered to clarify what he means by the word "democracy." Regardless of any hype he ordered his PR and web design team to come up with, that man's never shown the slightest commitment to moral integrity, human welfare, or anything we would call democracy. When the Rogan vaccine disinformation controversy blew up a few years back, Ek very publicly chose dollars over human lives. In January Ek gifted $150,000 straight to Donald Trump. Yes, that Donald Trump, sworn enemy of democracy, known admirer of Putin, and infamous backstabber of Ukraine. The very existence of multi-billionaires makes democracy impossible, because they inevitably buy candidates, rig elections, own the media, and bribe politicians to subvert popular will and achieve their desired policies. The current trend of Big Tech oligarchs taking increasing control over human affairs and attention, in which Ek has played a major role, is profoundly anti-democratic. The very idea of investing money earned off the backs of musicians to fund Trump, AI battle tech, or whatever whim strikes his fancy that day, without any input from his laborers, is profoundly anti-democratic. Spotify's corporate structure is profoundly anti-democratic. There is no Spotify parliament, no ballots for users or workers to weigh in on how his fortune should be allocated. Spotify is a dictatorship. So to us Ek's claims make no sense.
The pledge to sell only to democratic governments is also misleading because so many of these self-proclaimed "democratic governments" of the West, including our own, are abusing that term as a thin pretext to invade other countries and commit mass atrocities, against the will of their own populations. The nature of campaign finance, corruption, and "lobbying" in these supposed democracies is such that policy is often being written by corporations. It is they who are regulating government, not the other way around. Significantly, this includes military and foreign policy. Weapons manufacturers that largely underwrite political careers are seeing huge jumps in profits every time a new conflict starts.
Add to this that the actual designation of Ukraine as a democracy is contested by some. This is a criticism of Ek's unacceptably vague PR claims, not of Ukrainians, who deserve to survive in freedom either way, and are now turning out in the largest anti-Zelenskyy protests since the war began, as a result of his stripping the country's anti-corruption agencies of their autonomy. We don't see the evidence to believe that Daniel Ek's allegiance to democracy or the Ukrainian people is genuine, any more than we should ever have believed that his allegiance to musicians and music fans was genuine. We believe that Ek is using Ukrainian suffering as a moral smokescreen for what is actually just more garden-variety greed. Daniel Ek is trying to create a world in which human conflict will be won or lost with esoteric technologies under the control of himself and a handful of other multi-billionaires, who only dole out the weapons when it's in their financial interest to do so. This dystopian vision is in direct opposition to any notion of democracy, and completely unacceptable.
Even if we ignored all the above and consented to Ek taking a larger role in Ukraine's affairs, Helsing isn't selling their AI arsenal solely to Ukraine. This is key. They're incredibly secretive about who their clients are, and have made no specific promises about who they'll sell to in the future. There's no way we can possibly agree to our music funding anything so open-ended, on the good faith that Daniel Ek only makes moral choices from now on. In the murky world of arms trading, it's also entirely possible to sell to one customer, who then sells to another. In fact, this appears to be what's happening. One of Helsing's major known clients is the German military. And Germany is well-known as the second-largest supplier, behind the US, of weapons to Israel to commit the genocide of Palestinians, and there have been reports of Helsing's "Wingman" weapons being used against Gaza. That's a hard no for us.
Historically, weapons technologies have a way of spreading and proliferating. They fall into enemy hands. Knowledge gets stolen and reverse-engineered. Arms races are encouraged. And this tendency becomes much more acute when the weapons are being developed for profit, as Ek's are. Industry workers move from one company, or even one country, to another. Mission creep becomes all but inevitable. We've all watched the claims that Israel only uses AI weapons to root out Hamas militants, or that ICE only uses AI weapons to deport criminals, disintegrate into obvious lies. It's similarly ludicrous to imagine that if democracy is achieved in Ukraine, Ek and his fellow venture capitalists will simply lose interest in money and close up shop. They'll be fiscally compelled to find or create new enemies to kill. This is disaster capitalism, the deliberate manufacture of emergencies as a pretext for authoritarian clampdowns and weapons profiteering that would be illegal in peacetime, refined from the Kissinger era to a new intensity that threatens human survival.
Just because a multi-billionaire or career politician makes a public statement doesn't make it true. It often means it's a big, fat lie. You have to look at their track record. And Daniel Ek has a particularly abominable track record. Robbery, lies, betrayal, backroom deals, corruption, exploitation, union-busting, cowardice, environmental destruction, dehumanization, trickery, and simple money-grubbing expanded to an apparently infinite scope. If Daniel Ek were inclined to try and start regaining the trust of the musicians whose labor has provided him his fortune, he'd need to start by humbly begging forgiveness. He could ask for consent on how he invests the money he's earned off of our labor. So far he's done nothing of the kind. Any claims that a secret heart of gold, a gratitude towards musicians, or a love of Ukraine, guide Daniel Ek's inner morality, deserve to be received with great skepticism, not blind acquiescence.
We support Ukrainian independence and self-defense. This doesn't automatically have to mean supporting the unprecedented, permanent militarization of Europe, and potentially the planet. It especially doesn't have to mean supporting such militarization when it's led by crooked venture capitalists. And it really, really doesn't have to mean supporting such militarization when its focus is experimental AI technology. The more we hand control of violence over to computers, the less human characteristics such as morality, compassion, remorse, intuition, fatigue, or strategic thought are allowed to remain in the equation. And even more importantly, climate scientists agree that both AI data centers and contemporary militarism are rapidly making the planet uninhabitable.
Even many of Ek's defenders admit that AI weapons are a terrible development in human history, but feel that Ukraine in particular is forced to use them, because their opponent does. We have no ill will towards those faced with that fait accompli. We're comparatively privileged to not yet be faced with it ourselves. But among the consequences of musicians investing our musical success in AI militarization by using Spotify, is the potential transfer of control of future wars, deportations, abductions, arrests, incarcerations, assassinations, surveillance, genocides, and ethnic cleansings to Ek and a handful of multi-billionaires with no perceptible moral code.
The common claim by politicians and CEOs that AI is now necessary in order to maintain things like "order" or "safety" is an obvious lie in most cases. AI-enhanced policing, border control, warfare, facial recognition, arrests, incarceration, and removal have become enormously profitable for their own sake, requiring only the thinnest of smokescreens as pretext. Undocumented immigrants are being AI-targeted, AI-raided, AI-detained and AI-deported not because they are unsafe or disorderly, but because they need to be terrified into accepting near-slave conditions so that the US economy lives to see another day. And no one could honestly claim that Israel's bombing of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, assisted by AI spreadsheets and drones, have made Israel safer or more orderly. Any child can see they make retaliatory strikes inevitable. Alas, this profitable but anti-Semitic outcome is precisely what is desired by the CEOs of arms manufacturers, the boards of universities and banks invested in arms trading, Biden, Harris, Trump, Netanyahu, and the corporations that own the news. Such violence could never be undertaken by anyone without a profound contempt for Jews.
The ruling classes and multi-billionaires are well on their way to constructing a new economy of global destabilization, genocide, mass deportation, mass incarceration, and AI weapons. We believe Ek and other multi-billionaire war profiteers, and their increasingly fascist home governments, benefit financially and politically from creating, aggravating, and prolonging conflicts. If trends continue this will be a goldmine for the super-rich, and a way for the powers of the imperial core to tighten their capitalist stranglehold on the rest of the globe. We feel that our present moment demands that the human race make a pivotal decision: Do we allow Putin's aggression to be used as an excuse to turn warfare into a profit bonanza for venture capitalists peddling AI violence, with tools that its users are meant not to understand? At the very least, this issue deserves a legitimate debate, not just a few oversimplified pro-billionaire talking points.
A possible rationale for supporting Spotify is that Russians are using AI weapons, so Ukraine is forced to as well. From the perspective of a people defending themselves, this is reasonable. From the perspective of the musician being informed that their life's work now funds long-term, open-ended AI weapons development, it's more complicated. Another way of stating this rationale is that the more Russia uses AI weapons, the better business becomes for Daniel Ek. Every time Putin commits another war crime, Ek can celebrate a potential jump in his bank account. If peace breaks out, Ek's Helsing profits dry up. His business model is the very definition of perverse incentive. He's praying that humans will keep learning to hate each other more, and become more and more comfortable solving their social problems not with reason, compassion, international law, diplomacy, or democracy, but with ultra-expensive robot weapons they'll have to buy from Ek, or other multi-billionaire gamblers like Peter Theil and Jeff Bezos who bet on forever war. Of course these oligarch's dreams could never come true without the assists from fascists like Biden, Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin.
Ek, Theil, Bezos, Trump, Biden, Netanyahu, and Putin have been working together to fill the world with AI violence, and have been succeeding, now with accidental help from the musicians of Earth. It's increasingly clear that the military and police exist primarily as the security detail for the billionaire class. The more of the killing you can get computers to do, the better your bottom line. AI violence also finally solves the perennial inconvenience to war-makers -- It takes human compassion and morality out of the equation. The hot new big ticket items in this budding industry include: AI facial recognition, AI weapons that see through walls, AI targeting based on its ability to steal and read your private emails, AI spreadsheets that automatically obliterate entire apartment buildings when a surname happens to match, AI drones that don't discriminate between civilians and military, and warfare that is run automatically by corporate software without the pesky inconveniences of human thoughts or feelings. A highly lucrative future awaits those willing to invest in wars, arrests, abductions, surveillance, incarceration, deportations, assassinations, genocides, ethnic cleansings, and general chaos, all deployed with AI assistance, even as this technology's many glitches and inaccuracies have already resulted in some of the most rapid and indiscriminate killing the world has ever seen.
Putin is a fascist war criminal. His invasion of Ukraine is an illegal, immoral, colonial attempt to consolidate power and steal the resources of a neighboring country. At the same time we don't think it should be forbidden to ask whether US and European governments, as well as arms manufacturers and dealers now profiting from the situation, have really been doing everything they can to bring about a swift Ukrainian victory, especially when looking at the current sorry state of diplomacy and international law. We don't think it should be forbidden, or interpreted automatically as Putin propaganda, to read or discuss the many investigations into whether the West bears any responsibility for prolonging the war unnecessarily, or perhaps knowingly making the invasion more likely in the first place, that have been undertaken by Western historians and scholars.
Ukraine appears to represent something different to Western generals and tech bros than it does to Ukrainians defending their home. Though their military objectives may appear to overlap for the moment, their long-term goals are likely to be at odds. Ukraine has, in the words of those generals and tech bros, become a perfect laboratory to test their experimental AI weapons, since unlike in Gaza, both sides of the conflict are using them. According to many major news stories over the past several years, Ukraine has become a techno-military playground for Western politicians and generals, and a feeding frenzy for tech investors, who have stated in their own words that the toll for their assistance to Ukraine's self-defense will be to turn the country into a hub for Western big tech and military bases, much like Israel. The future is unclear, but at worst this could represent the replacement of one colonizing power by another.
Because of the company's secretive nature, it's unclear how much Helsing's weapons have actually influenced the outcome of the war in Ukraine. We hear conflicting reports. We have yet to be presented with proof, or really even hear a claim, that Ukrainian victory hinges on the existence of Spotify. What is clear is that Ukraine's case would be helped if there were such a thing as international law. If Daniel Ek (or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Peter Theil or Jeff Bezos) had actually been interested in promoting peace and democracy, as opposed to achieving global domination and amassing personal wealth, they'd have been working to ban AI weapons. They'd have been working to strengthen the frameworks of international law and the UN and ICJ, so that when someone like Russia commits war crimes, they could be held accountable. Better yet, work towards building new and better international institutions that might have some hope of being effective against the world's worst outlaws. But when the most-wanted list is topped by the very names above, this becomes impossible. So we watch as Western powers and multi-billionaires aggressively undermine and defy international institutions and norms, especially in the past two years. In Ek's case, his new business stands in opposition to the ban advocated by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, on all lethal autonomous weapons systems. We aren't convinced by Helsing's nebulous ad copy claiming that its weapons are only "partially" autonomous.
The four members of Deerhoof have been funding the arming of Ukraine with our taxes for approximately 10 years. We don't feel the onus is on individual musicians to also fund this or any war via their own exploitation, even if we thought that were possible in this case. While we have been outspoken on Palestinian liberation for example, this has never taken the form in our case of petitioning the US government to send those billions in fighter jets, bombs, and bullets to Hamas instead of to Netanyahu. And if Ek had announced that he was pledging to arm Putin, we would also have responded by removing our music from Spotify.
This trend in powerful Western countries of flouting international law, of absolving the ruling and corporate classes of wrongdoing, while shifting all responsibility to individuals struggling to pay their rent, is gaslighting on an epic scale. Trump promised to end this conflict on his first day in office - a total lie. The claim that this is now the fault of indie musicians reminds me of all those AI data centers consuming hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day in drought-ridden US states, while residents are told to take shorter showers. We support Ukraine's self-defense and don't blame them for using AI weapons to achieve victory. But we don't believe Ukrainian independence and democracy will be achieved by forcing musicians to labor away for the benefit of a CEO's secret, shifting political beliefs, without ever being allowed to weigh in. We aren't convinced that lasting peace can be brought about in Europe, or anywhere else, by robot weapons, crooked venture capitalist war profiteers, or the privatization of war.
Why has it come to this? Because as everyone can readily see, the billionaire class has squeezed the global population to the point where they're running out of money. There's little left to transfer to their favorite billionaires or political candidates anymore. The era of infinite profit from the sale of goods and services has reached its logical conclusion, and there's nowhere to go but down. Capitalism now demands new sources of income, which increasingly means investing in atrocities: rape, torture, mass deportations, mass detainments, mass militarization, mass exterminations, and global destabilizations. As Americans it's particularly easy for us to see this. The investment described is literally the current platform of both US political parties.
There was a time -- most famously the end of WW2 -- when the US empire profited from installing stable, corporate-friendly puppet governments around the globe. That era was unsustainable and has inevitably given way to the one we now endure, in which the US empire profits by deliberately creating permanent conflicts, unstable governments, and civil wars. We shouldn't fall for the marketing trick that investing in AI military tech will magically win wars and bring world peace. That isn't even the goal.
Global war profiteers, the US government being the worst one, now stay flush by arms dealing, and rarely will they fail to sell to the highest bidder. The US even sometimes gets caught arming both sides. "Winning" wars is no longer important, as we saw in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. The priority is that the military industrial complex be permitted another increase to its profit margin, and that the US economic bubble, which such war profiteering props up, be prevented from popping. Forever war, with the taxpayer as both the funding source and the victim, is the business model. That AI is the future of this model is unfortunately a deeply held, bipartisan belief, not even up for discussion. And it is increasingly a global belief, particularly in the whiter, richer countries of the imperial core. Although neither Ek nor Helsing are American, we see them as intimately lining up with the same trend.
One advantage of AI warfare is it removes the need for morale. All the propaganda normally required is just too costly and labor-intensive. Just think back to Bush, Cheney, and their fever dreams of destabilizing Iraq and the region around it for profit. Back then it was only possible to justify such war crimes by working overtime to concoct fully fleshed-out fictions: Saddam has nuclear weapons! Saddam attacked NYC! The poor guys had to spend almost a year doing press conferences and talk show appearances to sell their lies before they could begin robbing four million souls of existence.
But by the time Biden decided to wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth, US history had turned a corner. As these AI technologies were first being mass-tested on a real population, Biden simply disappeared into the shadows. Not a peep for months and months, until that fateful debate day when the world came to understand first-hand the level of intellect sending all those bullets and bombs and fighter jets. This was the first US president to realize that traditional PR efforts were an unnecessary waste of time and money. Public opinion (something that used to be known as "democracy") simply was no longer a factor. The oligarch-owned press predictably fell right in line. He and Harris would simply fast-track their beloved AI holocaust into the tens of billions of dollars, even if it meant becoming widely hated and losing the next election. None of it mattered as long as violence remained profitable. Again we see the US leading larger Western trends, not as an exception.
War profiteers have no shame, as Ek and his frequent malapropisms prove. Words of criticism mean nothing to them, only threats to profit. Deerhoof has been publicly criticizing Spotify for many years, but only when we decided to take our music away did we suddenly hear from their minions via email, begging for a reconciliation. War profiteers no longer believe in our planet. They don't think most of our species can, or even should, survive the global instability and climate catastrophe they are themselves creating. See fellow AI-violence billionaire Peter Theil's stammering inability to answer a question as simple as, "Do you want the human race to survive?" put to him by a recent interviewer.
In other words, today's war profiteers have declared war on everyone else. It's already underway, and it will take a great deal more than a once-every-two-years electoral horse race to win a war like that. We need massive, targeted strikes, boycotts, and lawsuits; civil disobedience; openness to new political groups and parties. Either that or the oligarchs will go ahead and wipe out most life on Earth, thereby to create small enclaves for themselves, protected by the very AI weaponry being developed right now by our taxes, our votes, and our consumption habits.
For us the big picture is this: Our politico-economic system increasingly presents humanity with a hideous fait accompli: Buy from me, vote for me, consume my media, use my service. Yes, it means mass deportation, mass detainment, and mass extermination of those deemed unprofitable by a handful of rich white people living in enclaves protected by AI weaponry. But if you don't, you can't have a job. We think this dilemma is coming to a head soon, and we predict that most people aren’t going to take the billionaires' side. In the case of Spotify, we believe that eventually a lot more artists and fans will want to leave this already widely hated data-mining scam masquerading as a "music company." It’s creepy for users and crappy for artists. Music-making lasts forever but this or that digital get-rich-quick scheme is sure to become obsolete.
We aren't sure exactly how soon the takedowns of our music can happen, but it will be as soon as possible. We want to thank our various labels for their support on this tricky decision. The grunt work of pulling content off of Spotify is something they're now tasked with, and they are sharing the financial hit. We know we are asking them to make a sacrifice, and it means a lot to us.