Follow the money to see how Spotify exploits musicians by paying them $0.0033 per song streamed while paying Rogan $100 million for a podcast with racism and COVID misinfo.
"Grammy-award winning R&B singer India.Arie pulled her music from Spotify, citing Rogan’s “language around race” but also noting that the company pays artists “a fraction of the penny” while spending a reported $100 million for exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcast." - Washington Post
"Rogan has repeatedly downplayed the need for coronavirus vaccines and used his platform to flirt with misinformation about covid-19. Podcasters and artists such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have told the streaming service they were taking their work off Spotify because the company was allowing Rogan to spread misinformation on the pandemic. Spotify acquired Rogan’s podcast library in 2020 in a reported $100 million deal." - WaPo
"Spotify has paid artists as little as $.0033 per stream, with other sites reporting upwards of $.0054. Translated, you'll need about 250 streams to earn a dollar." - Business Insider
Follow the money with this relationship map to see how Spotify exploits artists and uses its profits to fund podcasts that spread racism and COVID misinformation.
India Arie removes her music from Spotify
"The Grammy-winning musician explained on Instagram why she is removing her music from Spotify in protest of hosting Joe Rogan’s podcast. “I’m going to leave a short message here about why I decided to ask my music be pulled off Spotify,” she said in the video, followed by clips of Rogan using the n-word and comparing a black neighborhood to The Planet of the Apes. "We have this person who is offensive to a lot of people and is paid $100 million. The backbone of Spotify is the music. You pay the musicians .003-.005 percent of a penny and take this money generated over here and use it to invest in this guy? Do you what you want, but take me off. Or pay me too. I mean us. Pay artists like me too. Pay podcasters of color too."
Exploiting the musicians whose music Spotify makes $billions off
"Artists are paid between $0.0033 and $0.0054 every time their song is played, according to Business Insider. By another metric, according to data that the rapper T Pain tweeted in December, it takes the average artist roughly 315 streams of a song to earn $1 from Spotify. “Every other service pays better rates than Spotify. Napster pays the highest rates, believe it or not,” Hanley said. There, for comparison, a song has to be played only 53 times before the artist earns a dollar."
Withdraw economic support - MLK Jr.
"We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda--fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
"And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis... As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair..." - Martin Luther King
#DeleteSpotify
TakeAway: 'Withdraw economic support' from firms, their investors and advertisers that exploit artists while spreading racism and COVID misinformation.
Deepak
DemLabs
Spotify - COVID death count dashboard
This realtime dashboard refreshes regularly with the latest U.S. COVID death count with data from the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
How to use the Spotify relationship map
