Spotify and its moral backbone strike again! According to a new Bloomberg report, the streaming giant has been found to have spent less than 10 percent of the $100 million USD diversity fund it pledged last February.
You remember February 2022, when Neil Young had freshly removed his music from the platform over Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation and started the great Spotify exodus. It was one of the year's defining news stories, and prompted a lot of conversation about the landscape of music streaming and the devaluation of art over controversial "content" like the Spotify-exclusive Joe Rogan Experience — (still) the world's most popular podcast.
At the height of the controversy surrounding not only Rogan's blatant untruths about COVID-19 and his regular use of racial slurs, the company's ever-defensive CEO Daniel Ek tried to defuse the situation by writing a letter apologizing to his staff and pledging $100 million "for the licensing, development, and marketing of music (artists and songwriters) and audio content from historically marginalized groups."
In the 14 months since then, the Creator Equity Fund has reportedly used "less than 10 percent of its funding on that work," Bloomberg's Ashley Carman reported. The initiative was behind schedule on its plans to hire an eight-person team of staffers to oversee the project — which has "suffered from shifting priorities," according to an unnamed source.
At the start of 2023, the fund's budget was not completed, nor had its priority projects been determined. The symbolic $100 million — as Rogan's deal with the platform was once believed to be worth that amount, but later reports found it was over $200 million — was designed for use over three years, but Spotify seems to lack a structured system for vetting and approving projects, as well as allocating money; ideas were apparently pitched but often not accepted.
A union representing workers told Carman that another fund intended to promote diversity in the podcast space had also suffered due to layoffs last year.
Meanwhile, a report (ironically in podcast form) from Music Business Worldwide says that only 14,700 DIY artists generated over $10,000 in royalties on the platform in 2022 — down from 15,140 in 2021.
You remember February 2022, when Neil Young had freshly removed his music from the platform over Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation and started the great Spotify exodus. It was one of the year's defining news stories, and prompted a lot of conversation about the landscape of music streaming and the devaluation of art over controversial "content" like the Spotify-exclusive Joe Rogan Experience — (still) the world's most popular podcast.
At the height of the controversy surrounding not only Rogan's blatant untruths about COVID-19 and his regular use of racial slurs, the company's ever-defensive CEO Daniel Ek tried to defuse the situation by writing a letter apologizing to his staff and pledging $100 million "for the licensing, development, and marketing of music (artists and songwriters) and audio content from historically marginalized groups."
In the 14 months since then, the Creator Equity Fund has reportedly used "less than 10 percent of its funding on that work," Bloomberg's Ashley Carman reported. The initiative was behind schedule on its plans to hire an eight-person team of staffers to oversee the project — which has "suffered from shifting priorities," according to an unnamed source.
At the start of 2023, the fund's budget was not completed, nor had its priority projects been determined. The symbolic $100 million — as Rogan's deal with the platform was once believed to be worth that amount, but later reports found it was over $200 million — was designed for use over three years, but Spotify seems to lack a structured system for vetting and approving projects, as well as allocating money; ideas were apparently pitched but often not accepted.
A union representing workers told Carman that another fund intended to promote diversity in the podcast space had also suffered due to layoffs last year.
Meanwhile, a report (ironically in podcast form) from Music Business Worldwide says that only 14,700 DIY artists generated over $10,000 in royalties on the platform in 2022 — down from 15,140 in 2021.
