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Spotify Sucks (That’s It. That’s the Headline.): The music streaming giant is hiking prices, fighting lawsuits, and laying off employees. But hey, at least investors are happy.
The music streaming giant is hiking prices, fighting lawsuits, and laying off employees. But hey, at least investors are happy.
In response, the Mechanical Licensing Collective—a government-established nonprofit that helps coordinate royalty checks from streamers— lodged a federal lawsuit against Spotify last month, accusing it of undercutting liabilities by lowering artist payouts from Premium fees while expanding the products available to subscribers at little to no additional charge. The bundling controversies earned condemnation from outside the legal realm, with Spotify’s own former global head of music publishing writing a Billboard op-ed decrying the new arrangements as “ blatantly dishonest.” Other objectors came roaring over the weekend, when CEO Daniel Ek posted an ill-advised tweet that noted, “Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.” After many artists expressed understandable fury at having their painstaking, expensive, labor-intensive creative work referred to as low-effort “content,” Ek clarified that his “original point was not to devalue the time, effort, or resources involved in creating meaningful works” and that he had been thinking of “the significant drop in the cost of creation tools (microphones, laptops, cameras).” As it happens, Ek and his fellow executives have taken advantage of that to sell off ample amounts of their shares, Bloomberg reported, with the CEO redirecting the proceeds toward “ investments focused on artificial intelligence, life sciences and climate,” including “a Swiss startup that works on slowing the aging process.” (Seriously, what’s up with these guys and antiaging tech?)
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