This week…
Spotify lost market value, froze—then unfroze—subscription cancellation, and Apple Music users remained unfazed. The audio streaming duopoly leaves very few options. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that I’ve stopped embedding Spotify players into my podcast or playlist recommendation a while back, actually, since finding out the company’s co-founder and CEO is funding military tech (Mike Butcher, Tech Crunch).
Yet I’m still on Substack, the only newsletter service with a native podcast/audio hosting, which is expanding into video with a native player, despite having the same moderation policy as Spotify, ie. non-existent, having learned nothing from first- and second-generation social media platforms. Let me know where you think I should move this newsletter to, I’m happy to let go of the audio hosting option, to be honest.
So here’s a selection of top reads on these stories, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Spotify isn’t really about the music anymore ($)
Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic:
The company’s deal with Joe Rogan was part of a larger strategic shift whose implications listeners may not fully understand. Since launching in 2008, Spotify has transformed the music world by helping make on-demand streaming a reality for millions of listeners and rescuing the industry’s coffers from a years-long decline. But Spotify pays most of its revenues from songs back to labels and artists and has rarely turned a profit. In 2019, the company announced a new focus on “audio,” meaning recorded books, live chats, and the booming medium of podcasts.
[…]
Spotify’s bet on podcasts has attracted subscribers and ad dollars, but Neil Young’s protest of Rogan highlights one downside of it: Spotify has responsibility for its content, and its content may be controversial. Policing speech is, to be sure, not an entirely new challenge for Spotify. The company has removed racist music and briefly attempted to punish artists who had been accused of personal misconduct. Its recent statement about Young said that it has also taken action against a number of COVID-related podcasts (though the statement didn’t quite spell out why). But when you’ve paid a fortune for a podcast, pulling episodes for any reason is not going to be a routine, or attractive, proposition.
What’s more, the company now finds itself where few companies intend to be: as a figure in the culture wars.
Anti-vaxxers making ‘at least $2.5m’ a year from publishing on Substack
“Center for Countering Digital Hate research calculates that anti-vaccine figures could be making $12.5m from the online platform,” writes Dan Milmo for The Guardian:
A Substack spokesperson referred The Guardian to an essay published on Wednesday by the platform’s co-founders, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, in which they said silencing vaccine sceptics would not work.
“As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation,” they said.
Substack’s content guidelines state that “critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities”. The platform bars content that “promotes harmful or illegal activities” but also expects writers to moderate and manage their own communities.
Additionally, QAnon influencers and white nationalists, banned from most mainstream platforms, are also flocking to Substack, writes Elise Thomas for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
And, the week we observe Data Privacy Day (Jan 28th), we learn that not much has changed:
Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, writes Alexandra S. Levine for Politico. “These are people at their worst moments. Using that data to help other people is one thing, but commercialising it just seems like a real ethical line for a nonprofit to cross,” says Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford University.
Gay/Bi dating app, Muslim prayer apps sold data on people’s location to a controversial data broker, report Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng for The Markup. The categorised list of 107 apps and the GitHub data are provided in the link.
Elon Musk tried to pay a 19-year-old to stop tracking his flight, writes Veronica Irwin for Protocol. “Once Jack Sweeney explained to Musk where he was finding the data, the entrepreneur was surprised by how accessible it all was. ‘Air traffic control is so primitive,’ he said.”
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Searching for Susy Thunder about the great female hacker of the 1980s who disappeared without a trace, by Claire L. Evans for The Verge.
I’m watching the Canada vs USA World Cup qualifier.
More stray links:
The rise of science-based investigative journalism by James Fahn for GIJN.
Between belonging and individuating: Data, identification, diaspora, by Emnet Tafasse for Data & Society. (It’s like how I fight against Canadian bureaucracy that forces me to have a last name, and then calls me by my father’s name.)
Chart of the week
From The Economist’s interactive analysis of Spotify data, and what it shows about the decline of English, based on five years of hits in 70 countries: