Podcast interview with Emily Fox, KEXP
KEXP: You tweeted on the Future of Music Coalition's Twitter that Black musicians should not be treated as carbon offsets to all of this fallout. Tell me more about your reaction to this latest news.
Kevin Erickson: Well, what I was trying to do there, I guess, is to give voice to the feeling that's coming from a lot of musicians: that this company is really trying to have it both ways. Spotify is funding programing that has this long history of including racist rhetoric, as well as vaccine disinformation. Spotify is elevating that content on its platform, promoting it above other material on that platform and profiting from that content, while still refusing to take any real accountability for the impact of it. You know, musicians are, of course, big defenders of free speech. The Future of Music has actually gone all the way up to the Supreme Court in defense of free speech, but speech has consequences. And Spotify is just not acknowledging those consequences, the impacts of the content that they're commissioning. They have not been accountable really to critics, either inside the company or outside the company. You can't be accountable for damage that you've done simply by funding something on the other sides. You can't "both sides" white supremacy. Now I want to be clear, like more investment by Spotify in diverse voices is good, and I don't want to undercut the efforts of the employees of the company that have been trying to encourage more of that kind of investment towards Black creators, towards historically marginalized communities, towards queer and trans people. Those are the kinds of efforts that are happening within a lot of different digital media companies, and we want to be supportive of those. But we also have to acknowledge that that's just a wholly inadequate response to the harm that we've experienced here.
You work so much with music policy on the national level. Besides this latest news with Spotify and Joe Rogan, going back to the Neil Young stuff from a few weeks ago, watching this all unfold as you analyze the music industry policy stuff — what has been your overall reaction to all of this fallout around Joe Rogan and musicians?
It is true that musicians have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. Some of us have lost friends and colleagues and loved ones, of course, but a lot of musicians have also lost work. Lost income. Live touring is still not really back, you know. A positive test on the road and all your dates get canceled. The entire tour ends up in the red, and that's lost income for everybody on the tour: the crew, the venues. COVID disinformation, including the kind of disinformation that Joe Rogan is actively spreading, that Spotify is commissioning him to do, is actively harming musicians right now. Now, Spotify does deserve credit for the little bit of work that they did in supporting pandemic relief legislation. They did make donations totaling about $10 million to various music-related relief causes. They deserve some credit for that. But, you know, $10 million for a company of that size, you know... Do the math, that works out to maybe point .1% of their overall annual revenue. It's a drop in the bucket. So again, while musicians really do support free speech, one of the ways that musicians express themselves and express their freedom is to make creative choices about who they want to be in business with and how they want their work to appear and where they want their work to appear. So, if somebody like Neil makes a choice and says, "I don't want to work with a business that makes these kinds of investments and this kind of content," that's not censorship, that's freedom.
February 14, 2022
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