'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup
Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ek’s announcement of a €600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones and military software.
The move, announced on 17 June, has sparked widespread outrage from musicians, activists and social media users who accuse Ek of funnelling profits from music streaming into the military industry.
Many have started calling on users to cancel their subscriptions to the service.
“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/spotify-faces-boycott-calls-over-ceos-investment-defence-startupOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
I boycotted them a long time ago when I found out they donated to Trump's campaign, despite being a Swedish company.
Wow didn't know that.
I also newly started boycotting them for the same reasons. Plus they don't give enough to the musicians, and support AI music.
Been off Spotify since they have Rogan his platform, which contributed to Trump also.
Highly illegal.
It's legal through a US subsidiary if the funds come from US operations. The morality is questionable though
Honey this is America, anything is legal if you got the money
"The land of the free"
Not to mention giving 100s of millions of dollars to fund Joe Rogan and his extreme right-wing propaganda.
thats when i cancelled as well. this guy seems like such a fucknut
Same, took some legwork to get files for my 700-song library, but we did it. Fuck 'em.
You shouldn't be "paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago" regardless of anything an executive has done. Be less lazy and cancel subscriptions to shitty services.
Also, if a CEO doing a bad thing is a dealbreaker for them, why the fuck are they on twitter?.
I think one of the most toxic things on Lemmy is the prevalence of judging normies for using incredibly popular services and ascribing it to a character defect instead of life just being too complex for most people to be able to prioritize exploring more ethical technology choices.
You're not wrong. There are lots of holier-than-thou types around here.
And they are all correct.
😎 If you're not compiling your own kernel 🏋🏼♂️ you're missing out on substantial gains 💪🏼. Just drink a little Nix shake in the morning 🤙🏼, then hit your favorite systemd alternative GitHub pages and pull the nightly 🤘🏼. You'll be so swole bro, you'll be Godify. 🎶
Agreed, most comments are miserable, toxic, old man yells at cloud, energy. More and more, so.
I get where you're coming from, but it's not like there aren't multiple obvious alternatives (and not just on the fediverse). And someone being clued in enough to boycott Spotify should have no trouble finding those alternatives. Additionally, the platform being owned by an outright Nazi should give even the most out of touch people pause.
But agreed that people could stand to be a bit more tactful about it and not immediately go on the attack.
So what is there for normies? YouTube which is also owned by a fascist company. Deezer which is shit. Apple which is another fascist company that supports trump. Tidal which has also had its fair share of controversy ( not paying artists), shit ui etc.
And if you mention the fediverse people will look at you like you speak an alien language.
Most of those are lesser evils compared to X, and that's probably the best you can hope for. And Bluesky is the obvious alternative lesser evil choice if you want a like for like replacement and aren't open to Mastodon.
Oh you were talking about social media. I was talking about music services.
Fair enough then. I agree there is no excuse to still use X
How is Daniel Ek a nazi? That's a wild take if I've ever heard one.
I thought it was clear from context I was talking about X.
Oh shit, my bad. Yeah, hard agree there
No... It's just laziness let's not sugar coat it. You have the wealth of human knowledge in your pocket, knowledge of how to do absolutely anything and everything for free on a silver platter, all you have to do is prioritize exploring ethical technology choices. Complexity of the problem itself is not a good excuse to not learning to solve it as it continues to become a bigger problem.
Laziness doesn't exist. Everyone has their own struggles and it's pretty fucked up to judge someone because they don't choose to put their limited energy toward overcoming the obstacles that you take you've taken for granted having the ability to overcome. We should be encouraging curiosity and exploration, not demonizing people who got left behind and are too scared to try new things.
"Damn this sucks, I'm doing the thing"
"Hey you lazy stupid fuck, go back in time and do it sooner"
Why is the Internet like this?
Dude, you should have stopped using Spotify when they let Joe Rogan on their platform… or when they started hosting fake music.
Or because they pay artist way less than any one else, while having lower quality audio.
Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.
This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts
Israel's Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn't work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as "terrorists" after the fact.
What are the Spotify alternatives people recommend?
IIRC Tidal and Qobuz should be good alternatives
Qoobuz had the most horrific app I've ever experienced.
Couldn't even search a song in a playlist bad.
I feel it's been getting better. Like, it isn't perfectly smooth, but I like what I get on the Frontpage way more than what I did with Spotify.
Oh yeah, I feel qobuz has the right mentality and ethos to really break into the scene and disrupt.
I loved everything about the experience, but the app was shockingly bad. Like, if it just behaved as gen 1 iTunes it would have been an improvement. Really bad at just the basic things. Just bad. And I cannot stress that enough lol.
I'll keep an eye on them, but whoo-boy! I've never been scared off from an app so quickly
This is kinda funny to me because I was using Apple Music before, and I honestly feel it's less jank.
I will say I'm still rocking my samsung a71 so, maybe the tech just want up to it... but that experience was bad. Glad it works for you though
If might also just be a testament to how jank Apple Music on Android can be. Anyway, I just hope you find a solution that works well for you.
Thanks.
I was talking to my wife this morning about this thread and the Qobuz recommendation was just what she needed to replace and cancel Spotify. She was able to import her playlists from her Spotify account and she's been commenting for the past couple hours about how much better the audio quality is.
Napster, bearshare
If you're technically inclined, self-host navidrome or jellyfin.
If you just want music and don't care about the streaming part, bandcamp (although it does have some basic streaming I believe.
If you want streaming and aren't technically inclined, Tidal.
Tidal is cheaper and better quality, Deezer is good, too.
Funkwhale
Qobuz is great. It's a french company, they pay the artists well and the music is in high quality
Qobuz
I have been using Deezer because it was local for me, France. At the beginning you could upload your own collection to share with others, it was fun. Now it's basically the same as the others, I think it pays artists a little bit more than Spotify. Also just learned that it is now majorly owned by some US investment fund. 🫠 At least it's not directly funding terminators yet?
This is where I'd have recommended deezer, but they shit the bed on their mobile app.
+1 for tidal
I jumped to Tidal many years ago because Spotify could not be bothered to provide high quality output. Yes, you can ear the difference, even on shitty gear.
For the stuff I could not get on either platform I started buying CDs on Discogs and ripping them to FLAC.
Edit: ear, not eat.
Apple music believe it or not. Nice selection and interface. Works on Apple devices as well as android. Has a high bitrate and supports aptx on android. Don't think they have a native app for windows or Linux, though, so you'd have to use the web version.
Spotify CEO also donated millions to trump campaign.
I stopped using Spotify long ago because of their shitty business practices. Producing a product they killed support for within just a couple years without reimbursing customers and producing huge amounts of e-waste. Jacking their subscription prices twice in one year. Apparently, they also donated to Trump despite not being an American company?? That's to say nothing of their shitty recommendation algorithm, which just plays your most played tracks over and over. Good riddance.
For those interested, I use Tidal now. I'm satisfied with, their recommendation algo is fine and the higher quality streaming is really nice but nothing I've used has ever been as good as Google Play Music, I found so much good music though that service and could upload whatever I was missing. Once Tidal inevitably pisses me off, I'm going to move on to self hosting.
Being able to upload to Google Play Music was such a great feature. Honestly though, maybe it's best that they killed it when they did. That way it can live on in memory as the example of what a music streaming service should be like... instead of becoming an enshittified zombie like spotify is today.
“Said one user on X.”
Funny enough, for local downloads of video game OSTs (which I like way too much), I've been recently turning to Steam of all things. Often cheaper than Bandcamp and DRM-free!
Helsing supplies Ukraine which is defending itself in accord with international law and the UN Charter. An attacked nation defending itself against Russian aggression. Nothing wrong with that. Basically the opposite of Russian Z-fascism.
Yeah, it seems they also didn't mention that it's a European defense company, not a US defense company.
Europe is investing a lot into defense now and it's actually a good thing that they're moving away from dependence on the US defense industrial complex.
Spotify sucks tho. But that's a separate thing.
Clickbait article.
I empathize with the sentiment and agree with the argument that Europe should invest in its own defense infrastructure, particularly if Putin is gearing up to make a move.
That being said, Im increasingly wary of Europe's willingness to appease Trump, and find it probable that, if right-wing parties continue making political gains, this same infrastructure will be turned against marginalized communities in these same countries; in a similar vein to the U.S regime's attacks against immigrants and dissenters.
Again, I'm not opposed to re-armament, but I hope EU citizens exercise more vigilance and skepticism in this era of resurging nationalism and protectionism.
Everyone knows what Trump is. Trump is demanding an increase in military spending with the expectation that the money will go to the US. He's basically demanding tribute.
Saying "sure we'll spend more on defense" while spending on our own defense industry is calling his bluff while also getting ready for if and when he starts using the US military to bully allies.
Nobody else in the world needs to be lectured about the problems with the US military industrial complex. We know.
Sharing my thoughts isnt lecturing. Sit down and stop being condescending.
"Sit down and stop being condescending." -- someone that doesn't lecture people
A lot of money being invested in Euro defense right now.
Been thinking of booting them for a whilst. Just cancelled. Better late than never.
Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There's a lesson to be learned somewhere.
Qobuz' recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify's slop.
Same story here. I cancelled Spotify after the whole Trump thing and switched to Qobuz; the whole thing was pretty seamless. I've got to say, the increased quality is actually noticeable and, as you said, the curated selections actually seem to be, well, curated. Also, if you've got a load of playlists on Spotify you want to keep, Qobuz actually provides subscribers with free access to a migartion service that did a superb job.
I switched to Tidal and love it.
I think that’s the worry. Do I have to start again. Will my stuff be disrupted. Spotify has counted on me sleepwalking though with them and not moving because of this fear. They have had enough of my money.
I had to laugh at the leaving page “if you leave me now you’ll take away the biggest part of me”. Spotify is not a human and I’ll take my money. They need to get lost with the emotive marketing, Spotify and the CEOs actions speak louder.
My hard earned money and who I spend it with is one of my biggest voices in my world.
damn people are just learning that spotify is a shitty pro fascist/pro white supremacist company?
Seeking profit above all else isn't human nature. Humans have lived and still live in societies that don't do this. The socioeconomic system that we find ourselves in currently in a large part of the world does put profit above all else. But this system is just one iteration of how we live. And even it has changed over time where it has gotten worse over the last 50 years. It too would change and likely be replaced by another in the long run. Many believe that would be some form of socialism. Or we could go largely extinct before we abandon it. A better world is possible though.
It is theorized by anthropologists that for most of humanity's existence (almost 200,000 years), humans operated on gift economies, without keeping any ledgers or IOUs, and also not bartering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
Humanity mostly beat out (kind of, not really, humans mated/bred with neanderthals) neanderthals as a species in evolution because humans cooperated with each other, whereas neanderthals were more individualistic (also not a universal truth).
Greed and profit seeking are a direct result of forming massive civilizations with defined leaders and the possibility to gain power over other people. There are ideas for new economic systems that will eliminate this hierarchal structure, namely anarchism and some other socialist idiologies like forcing all corporations to be worker-owned coops (not all of them).
Here's a playlist that's a good introduction to anarchism: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8V0LbSKRwxqBt2Odrl_Yp_SlEVrv-w9G
And here is an intro to a worker coop focused economic system and modern Marxism (the non-authoritarian type): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9Whccunka4
Great idea! You first, I'll totally be right behind
Fuck both y’all, I don’t want to go extinct and it’s fucked up to try and get someone to die. Go touch grass both of you. The planet is going to be fine, it’s a giant rock in the middle of space, life will continue regardless of how bad we fuck it up, life exists in sulfuric lakes for fucks sake. Humans are cool as fuck, we turned rocks and metals into magical devices we can use to be edgelord douchebags on the internet.
Totally agree. Just have someone let me know when you've done it. Maybe we could set up a chain or something. You start, have someone that knows notify me, and then I notify the next person.
Now go on and start the change you want to see 🌠
The best time to start boycotting was when they started platforming a conspiracy theorising, testicle headed manosphere peddler. The next best time is not I suppose.
You're way to late then too. The perfect time to act on this was back in Iraq with that prince dick head with xi.
Also we all should have taken a harder stance at celebrity using these private security companies. Drake's in Toronto blocking roads so he can get all 16 armored cars on to the 401.
Lots of people really defend the stuff by saying "look how much money they bring to the city, we can ignore it" but at the end of the day, it's growing a new industry. I don't get why we don't call it out more like these fucks need to wait in traffic like the rest of us. I don't care who they are or how much money they make. Roads are a public space and shared by everyone equally.
Out of every company I would have never expected Spotify to be one of the ones to want that
Who's calling for that boycott? Putin?
Respect for the true pacifists out there, but investing in EU-based defense industry is hardly questionable by ordinary standards.
Probably. Rashism is real.
Europe used the specter of Russia to justify it's dive into militant fascism the last time too.
False. Western Europe increased arms spending in response to German aggression. Germany increased arms spending... well.
Germany, famously not part of Europe.
Well what? The specter of Russia was a huge part of how Germany justified it's fascism.
Just like now.
False.
Germany built up it's army in preparation for attacking the rest of Europe. Adults usually know this. Sorry if I have misjudged your age.
Germany and Soviet Russia were allies and cooperated in the attack on Poland. This only fell apart when Hitler betrayed Stalin by invading the Soviet Union.
It is said that in all his life, Stalin only ever trusted one person: Adolf Hitler. When German communists conscripted into the Wehrmacht defected in the night before the attack, to bring warning to the Soviet Union, Stalin had them shot. The last supply train carrying grain for Nazi Germany crossed the border less than 2 hours before the launch.
That’s a dog’s breakfast of anti-communist slander you’ve gobbled up, Mr. Adultman. This is the garbage they taught in West Germany? I guess that’s one of the consequences of Stalin stopping at Berlin.
Oh wow. Looks like you fell into a time warp, comrade. No spoilers but it'll all get better in 1953. But stay away from Moscow in March.
It must be so easy being a right winger: you can just make up any old bullshit off the top of your head and apparently people will believe you.
It is possible to get off Spotify.
What you can't buy legitimately via other means you can use a Youtube-To-MP3 converter to rip and add the file to your music library.
You're saving an already low-quality stream into a lossy format. Just use Soulseek.
Don't have high end audio equipment anyway, I can't tell the difference on 99% of songs.
I somehow cannot wrap my head around soulseek, so I'm just torrenting like I always do 🏴☠️
Jokes on them, I moved to CD and love it
Got 80GB of music on my phone, tried Spotify once, it was all live versions....
What's up with the cool startup names recently? First Palantir the fortune teller ball, now Helsing the vampire hunter? Fuck yeah, who doesn't invest in these? /s
thiel has an obsession with lotr, so he named all his evil companies after various lotr themes.
I thought we were already boycotting this shit
I can't speak for how viable it is for success or whether it's just a grift (as I haven't had the time to really research into it) but feels like as good a time as any to mention that, out in Australia, The Pack Music Cooperative is fundraising for a cooperative music streaming service: https://www.thepackaustralia.com.au/
They haven't raised a lot towards their goal, yet, and could probably use an the help they can get. As a cooperative, they'll side step a lot of the probably problems a corporation like Spotify or Tidal will have and they already are dedicated to prioritizing artists and their rights.
it will always be and has always been about money
Reading this while listening to vinyl...best enjoyable music experience.
To hell with the enshitification of music streaming.
Well tough guy, how else is Raytheon supposed to perfect its AIM-9X Romper Room baby-seeking missile's accuracy?
I’m doing my part!
We all know that scene in Robo Cop 2 is going to happen eventually.
There are lots of reasons to boycott Spotify and call out Ek for being a fascism enabler but this is not one. Helsing is a promising project that could give Europe the edge in the face of Russian imperialist aggression. If anything, we need more companies shaking up the crusty MIC. They also provide important military aid to Ukraine.
The Germans can surely be trusted with AI murder tech.
Do you want Germany to take part in the NATO defense quotas or not?
Must be so nice to be so privileged as to be spoiled for choice on which fascist to support.
Spotify is the only streaming service available worldwide other than YouTube Music and Apple.
So for a lot of people it is either piracy or supporting a US tech megacorporation. Tidal, Qobuz, deezer. Cool, nice that they exist options. But most people in the planet would have to also pay a VPN and hope to not get their account banned if they want to use some of those alternatives.
It's funny really, to see how the “fascist option” for some is actually the most ethical for others.
There's always piracy of course, I suppose that is the only morally correct option always.
Yarr
Is there a p2p music streaming platform yet?
It requires a bit more effort but Soulseek has been around for years. I build my own music library from P2P or buying on Bandcamp. It all goes on my NAS and I stream it via Plexamp. I have my own library, my fiance's, a few friend's on there. I'm pushing 10k albums at this point.
I know I used to have an adblocked version of Spotify on my phone for convenience sake but I think they finally caught on and killed that. The AUR version still works for me however. I haven't had a Spotify subscription since probably like 2018.
Based. We need to fund european military technology in preparation of a Russian attack on sacred Western European soil.
Yo wtf you don't need to simp for a company building automatic killing machines. That shits existence is a threat to everyone but the wealthiest and most powerful.
No War But Class War
The wealthiest and the powerful can't hide forever from a guillotine. But first, we take their money.