An ethical guide to quitting Spotify

0:11Have you joined the Spotify exodus? I mean the CEO has just stepped down. There's a lot of people leaving. There's artists boycotting the platform and pulling their music. So where do you go if Spotify was where you accessed music and where you paid quite a large amount each year to consume the music you love? Well, in this episode, I meet an expert who knows all about this. She runs an Instagram account called Cut Off The Spigot, which begun as an account to kind of look at your alternatives to some of the big corporate platforms. And over the last few weeks, she's been digging in really, really deep with some brilliant research into all the different streaming alternatives to Spotify.

0:48She looks at which ones pay artists better, which ones don't have investments in the war machine, like Spotify's AI investments in war drones, not investments in AI, investments in drones that use AI which if you watch this little clip you will understand why that is so abhorrent. Everyone is talking about military AI but they're not talking about what military AI is exactly so I'm going to explain it to you like you're five. So an example of military AI is drones and vehicles that can navigate and target specific targets without any human input. So for example, you have these drones in the sky that are miles and miles and miles away from you.

1:31You can't see them. The naked eye cannot see these drones. That's how far up in the sky they are. But those drones can detect who you are. And if you are a target, it can kill you without any human input. That is a very dangerous weapon. You know what I mean? And that is the weapon that is being used in places like Lebanon and in Palestine. There is no one to be held accountable. And this is why we should all be worried. That was a clip from Nailie by Nature posted on her Instagram account. It's well worth going to watch the full thing. Also on this week's podcast, I am rejoined by Laura, aka Minor Birds, who protested Spotify, took her music down and has led the charge.

2:17She's had millions and millions of views on her videos saying why as a pacifist, she didn't want to use Spotify anymore as a platform, but also why as an artist she'd fallen out of love with the platform quite a long time ago also another artist on this week's show this is the biggest amount of guests we've had on a dronin sound podcast apart from a conference panel one we did a while ago kajibone it's a brilliant musician she's put out some fantastic records on ninja tune and we have a conversation about why she has made a stand about spotify all the research that she did on her own back which was all backed up by what cut off the spigot discovered so this is my conversation about the spotify exodus and where you as a music fan can try and go and we do reveal which platform is the one that we've all discovered seems to be the most ethically um ethically strong ethically there doesn't seem any big red flags let's just leave it at that this is the drowning sound podcast.

3:14I'm Sean Adams and in this episode we get deep into the Spotify exodus.

3:28Well welcome to part two of Drowning Sound's podcast series about the Spotify exodus. I think today's guest, so that we can hear who you are and join the voice and introduce you how you'd like to be introduced, could you introduce yourselves please? Yeah so I am Alexa Speed. I am the person behind Cut Off the Spigot, which is a platform. Essentially, I go through and try to find alternatives to bad companies and do the research so you don't have to. And yeah, I'm Kadia Bonet. I make music. And that's me. At least I try to. You make wonderful music. I've just been listening to your new EP. It's fantastic.

4:12oh thank you so much which is available on bank camp and not on spotify could you tell me why you objected so much to spotify that you went and did some very similar work to alexa put up some information about why you were leaving how you were leaving and where people should go what was the the breaking point for you yeah um i mean honestly for years i've been like asking labels I've been on like, hey, like, you know, I don't really feel I'm not really feeling Spotify. Like, can we try not to do this? And it always get the same. No, we have to be on Spotify. Spotify makes up like 40 % of our revenue, blah, blah, blah.

4:53And so but you know, there's be all these new little things would come out about Spotify and the kind of things you're doing. They're like weird payola models where they'll like offer to promote with zero transparency, your music in exchange for you giving up even more of your tiny little tiny share of royalty that they give you um and obviously very strange ai practices and um and honestly i didn't notice the first time uh daniel eck invested in helsing like three years i mean four years ago he put like a hundred and something million dollars in like four years ago and that just went over everybody's radar like nobody brought that up to me and then this summer when he put in another was 600 million I don't know if it was dollars or euros euros 600 million euros yeah I was like okay yeah no I'm pretty sure that's it like I'm pretty sure that's my line and I went back to my label again because I had just spoken to them like two months before like trying to convince them that maybe we should pull off of Spotify.

6:01Not maybe, we should pull off of Spotify. And they're like, you know, we really, we really can't do that. And I was like, okay, that's, that's a hard line for me. Would you be willing to like, let me out of the deal? And they were really kind because they didn't have to let me out of the deal. I've signed a contract with them that they own the music I put out. And, and they were like, yeah, that's, we'll do that. So they, they, they cut me loose early. but then when I started like thinking about you know pulling my music from Spotify or not giving them future music because obviously the labels own the past music I realized that it's not just Spotify and that like Spotify has done this very like or Daniel Ek has done this very like public act of investing in this AI war tech firm but all of the major streaming services are war profiteers.

6:54And at that point, I felt like it wasn't enough to just pull from Spotify. And I understood also that I was like, killing my career, basically, but that I was okay with that, because it's like, okay, we know, you know, Apple's complicit, in the least complicit in, you know all of the terror happening in the congo um we know deezer's owner len blavatnik has been um had conversations leaked over whatsapp with trying to um uh silence pro-palestinian protests on campuses because he's got invest he's invested in bulldozing um palestine um um also has some strange link to some tv station in israel as well and i guess we're going to get into some of these things not all of which we can accurately and precisely find the information because obviously transparency is not a premium um but like you said like when you like it's not like all of the companies are directly buying arms and selling arms often it's the private equity companies behind them in those layers and layers and layers which is what makes cut off the spigot such a brilliant resource and i know um kaji you tried to do research and you put some really great resources into your instagram carousels like it's a lot to dig into though isn't it did you find it yeah i mean it like stopped everything else i was working on to just do research for several weeks on like trying to get to the bottom of it and and i felt like it was really important that i do that because at the time i hadn't found cut off the spigot yet And I didn't have anybody else to look to for that stuff.

8:39So I was like, oh, somebody needs to be doing this work. Because I think most people don't want to be contributing to the horrors that are happening across the globe for our minor conveniences. But it's just that the information is so well hidden. It takes so much work and people just don't have the mental energy to do that work for themselves. and I'm convinced that people are are good and if they knew all these things they would not accept these tiny privileges for such immense suffering for other people. I agree a million percent and I think that we have reached a tipping point because I think for at least my entire life you know that there's a little bit of bad that's happening right you buy a thing and you know that because of capitalism, someone's pocketing that money and maybe someone suffers as a result of the way the thing is made, an animal is hurt in testing, whatever it is, you know?

9:40And you think, oh, well, it's getting better. It's getting better. But I think what we've witnessed over the past few years is the peeling back of the layers to actually see the harm. And we think the harm is becoming so great that whole populations are suffering terribly, animal populations, The whole planet is suffering in such a terrible way that, you know, it's sort of like no more, no more. And so I'm so grateful to be here with you, Alexa. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the deep research you provide. Because for me, it was very easy to say, OK, I'm done with Spotify, but now I have to look at everything.

10:17You know, it's like, all right, let's talk about Apple. Let's talk about Amazon. Let's talk about YouTube. You know, Deezer. Are there any good? Yeah, YouTube. Are there any good platforms? Help us know. So, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's really why I started Cut Off the Spigot is because in even my own life, I wanted to quit Amazon and to just try to do that. I had all sorts of subscriptions, you know, that made it super easy to manage my household. But also I felt bad every time I was using it. And but then, you know, I didn't want to give my money to another bad company. and to what you guys were saying.

10:57I mean, they obfuscate it, you know, the ownership, what they're truly doing. And I think what a lot of consumers are realizing is that, yeah, maybe there was always a little bit of bad, but companies are now essentially just trying to like squeeze every little bit of profit they can out of the consumer. so even if you're getting that convenience you're getting kind of screwed in another way whether it's like maybe you know subscription prices increasing much more frequently things like that but um it's exhausting to kind of live in this economy when you're just trying to you know avoid getting screwed over in your day-to-day life and so to me like the research is definitely intense And it's definitely time intensive, but it is something that I'm so happy I'm doing and being able to share with people because I also agree.

11:57I think a lot of people really don't want to be putting their money towards companies that are actively harming people or harming workers or harming artists. And there's a lot of different ways of harm, but really they just don't have the time or energy to go find these things. You know, like I talked to my sister, she's a single mom with two kids and she doesn't have time to research like all these alternatives, but she really wants to. And so I think being able to put the information out there and help people, you know, choose differently is something really awesome. It's exactly what the Internet was built for.

12:34I mean, that was meant to be the utopian vision when people first got online was that the knowledge and the information would be free. and I think it's worth putting into context your account isn't just an account that's researching Spotify in fact this feels like a little bit of a kind of step off of what you normally do do you want to talk about how you first started the account and the sorts of things you usually cover so I started the account in April of this year and I basically quit my job I was incredibly burnt out and I wanted to start my own business and I had kind of one idea. And then I was just, there was this article that was the straw on the camel's back where Amazon was saying how they would essentially, like you couldn't opt out of them scanning children interactions with Amazon Alexa.

13:30So like if you have an Amazon Alexa in your home and your kids are talking to it and interacting with it, you can't opt out of that data being used to then train their AI model, which I don't know what it was, but it was just like they're acting with such impunity. and I was so angry and I was just like I'm I'm sick of this shit like I can't do this anymore and you know I was in that position where I was kind of trying to figure out what my next move was and so I was like I can do this I'll do the research like even if I just do it for me and then I know and no one else pays attention to it then at least I feel better but I think I mean, I've seen really explosive growth in my accounts and profiles and things like that.

14:18And I think that speaks to people wanting this information and wanting to find alternatives. And so, yeah, it started from just being frustrated and wanting something different. And what sort of companies have you looked into and how different was that to looking into streaming services? is? Yeah. So originally, you know, it started kind of figuring out alternatives to Amazon and then Target as, you know, we started boycotting them across the U.S. and then Walmart's always been a bad company. So I'll throw that in there, too. But the reason why I started with those is because I think with the landscape of at least the U.S.

15:00economy, it's really hard to find those day-to-day things without going to Amazon, Walmart, Target. And so a lot of my categories are more focused on things like that. Like I did like a cleaning supply series where I did like seven videos in seven days. So a lot of times it's more kind of day-to-day things like that. But you know, I'm willing to tackle any category and take a look at it and see what those good options are and with spotify and looking at spotify alternatives it basically was a very similar process i look at ownership i look at whether the company has spent money on lobbying in the u.s and then i also look at their diversity policy if they have one if they've taken it down um and that's kind of where that's something since trump people are taking down their diversity policies aren't they yeah um so with like trump's executive orders uh earlier this year against like diversity and dei um a lot of companies pulled back their policies like google is a great example um where they pulled back a lot of their dei support and actually have cut funding for any non-profits that they previously gave donations to that have it's like diversity equity inclusion I think it's racism and then women like any of those terms in their mission statements they won't give money to anymore which also includes the national network to end domestic violence so I mean that's kind of insane but yeah like uh diversity is definitely a big thing um and then you know when I look at a category like music platforms I then look into okay like what are the subscription options what does the catalog look like what do uh you know what are the features things like that that are all relevant for how much the artists get paid i think is one of the harder ones to dig into because yeah that was the first thing i looked at because i i think as an outsider the industry music industry might look quite strange i don't know whether you are in music industry whether you have worked in music before um because i think that the thing that as someone that puts records out, manages artists, like I just see them all as the same access to the same database with different interface now.

17:28And I think for the average consumer, they go, oh, Spotify's got Discover Weekly and wrapped in all these things. And I noticed last year, a lot of people kind of felt shamed if they shared their Spotify wrapped. There was like a conscious, I'm sharing this, but I know I should be on a different streaming platform kind of vibe. whereas two or three years ago I think people were quite happy to brag about their Spotify numbers and that's been quite a big shift within definitely within the music nerd circles and I think that's permeating people's family members asking them which service should we be using and I think those shifts are happening probably a lot quicker we can't know if the reason Daniel Ek has stepped down as CEO is at all related but I'm assuming they have a quarterly shareholders document coming up.

18:18We please talk about that for a minute. I can't believe that they'd like quietly made, he came out and was like, dear friends and family and countrymen, I am now going to step down and hand the reins over to two new CEOs, which I think was totally a face-saving effort. And of course, talk about obfuscating things. You know, it's like, well, now you have, now there's not one face. You can't just say, well, Daniel X the problem. Now there's two people. So who do you point the finger at? I'm also curious as you talk further about the DSPs and how you evaluated them, if you had any environmental evaluation as well.

18:56I know that's kind of hard to look at. You can kind of look at AI policies to say, well, we know AI is bad for the environment, and I know that plays some factor, but I don't know how else you can evaluate them. Yeah, I think environmental factors across any category are something that I look at, but it is often hard to find like actual audits or reporting that certifies that these people are actually doing what they blast all over their corporate websites. and I've worked in corporate America I have you know on marketing teams where it's like yeah we have all these initiatives and then internally no one is actually seeing them through or making sure that they actually happen so I and then on top of that it's just hard in terms of like yeah like environmental certifications and things like that so it's something that like I touch on a lot, but I don't necessarily say, oh, you know, this company is definitely environmentally good or environmentally bad because I think there's so many different ways you can look at it.

20:06All that to be said, I do think AI, like using AI and energy consumption is a huge issue. So not only from the overall environmental impact, but even on a day-to-day consumer basis. So we're seeing energy prices go up significantly across the U.S. because of these data centers. A Carnegie-Melligan report actually found that in northern and central Virginia, where they're building a lot of data centers, electricity prices are expected to rise by up to 25 % by 2030, which I would assume would actually be even higher. So there is a huge, you know, concern regarding AI energy consumption and things like that.

20:55But I think for me, it's hard to figure out how to exactly quantify that and compare from company to company, and also actually find like the data and resources on how much they're actually consuming. Next month, hopefully I'm publishing some work that In Place of War have been doing, and they've got a brilliant researcher who's been really digging into it the biggest challenge is most of them use aws so that's amazon's um hosting there are some amazon servers that are actually in renewable areas but it's you can't really pick where the data is hosted and often you're accessing a mirror server like i'm not going to bore people how the internet works but like often you're accessing like the local server rather than the international one sometimes you're accessing a cached file rather than so if you play a song several times it probably keeps a temporary version on your machine so it's not doing as much work if you download a song if you listen to it less than 30 times apparently that's not good so there's loads and loads of data which this amazing organization called in place of war i've done loads of research in so we're hoping to co-publish that next month but it's really difficult and similarly i looked into like podcast hosting it's really unclear some people say they've got carbon neutral programs or planning to be carbon neutral by 2030 and those kinds of things I looked into web hosting we use a company called Ghost they say they do things a certain way but I don't really know how we would check I don't like it's not something I can necessarily audit them on and then you start to look at the rest of the food chain of music it's like so many of the bits like the energy use of vinyl like which contains petroleum as that's the p in the pvc um and heavy metals and all the other bits so there's a lot of complexity and the challenge of analyzing the environmental impact of the music industry in general is something that people get quite quiet about and i did a panel about this at a conference a few months ago and my reason why i think spotify is one of the worst is because of joe rogan because he has some of the most climate misinformation of any podcast at scale and it's shifted narratives in ways that almost no one else can and if you listen to someone like renee d 'arester who's written a couple of really good books on disinformation like she sees those people at scale has been the biggest problem um media matters did a bit of a breakdown on some of the climate misinformation that joe rogan put out it's worth reading if anyone's interested in that but i would say giving 450 million dollars to joe rogan is probably a quite a good sign that you're not prioritizing the planet over profit i'm getting some clicking from laura that was me just giving you some finger snaps um i'm really curious alexa as someone who started doing this research what thing shocked you the most that you didn't expect when you started digging into the streaming companies yeah so i would say not necessarily what shocked me the most but what angered me the most was deezer and um kaj had touched on it but basically if you're not aware deezer is majority owned by Access Industries, which is an investment firm that is founded by Len Blavatnik.

24:27In spring 2024, Len Blavatnik and other billionaires joined this WhatsApp group to basically sway public opinion to be more pro-Israel. And they were like, you know, figuring out ideas and ways to do that. In spring 2024, this was when across the US, There were tons of college campus protests against the war in Israel, against the war in Gaza, and essentially against U.S. involvement in supporting Israel and bombing Gaza. So while these college campus protests were going on, essentially the NYPD entered Colombia's campus to arrest protesters in a big escalation. And so this billionaire WhatsApp group with Len Blavatnik and others basically messaged Mayor Eric Adams of New York City and said, hey, how can we help you to get back on NYPD's campus?

25:25This is all allegedly. But allegedly, they were offering to give the NYPD their own private investigators. They were talking about how to basically lobby the Columbia president to have them ask the NYPD back onto the campus and things like that. So there was this billionaire group that was directly involved with America's largest city's police force entering a local campus to basically arrest protesters against a genocide. And to me, that's really insane, right? Billionaires are infiltrating local police forces to get protesters arrested. and it's almost like conspiracy theory levels but it's not it's real they have this level of influence and it's billionaires that i'm sure most of us have never even heard of um i didn't know really who len blavotnik was before i started doing this research his wikipedia is quite spicy he's also sanctioned by ukraine there's like a protest um with tate in london to try and get removed from the board um sorry no no i was just yeah that wikipedia is wild yeah yeah and there's also like you know allegations that he may have started coordinating with russia and back in like 2016 um there's a lot going on with len blavotnik but um but yeah i mean at the end of the day like deezer and len blavotnik and his billionaire whatsapp group are really emblematic of the wealth inequality and the power that is concentrated at the top and what we have to fight against like i i don't want a billionaire telling any police force what to do or coordinating them or offering their own resources of private investigators to supplement what they're already doing isn't there a name for that like fascism oligarchy authoritarianism i don't know it's all right and why are they involved in music like what how is that the integration there is insane and as a musician you're like what absolutely not especially as a person who's written protest music my entire career like there's no fucking way i want to and it's on every yeah yeah so we're just saying on every level of the music industry whether it's streaming or or live nation or whether it's music festivals like there's so much embedded into the music industry that it that that's why it made like I was just like okay that if it's career suicide it's career suicide because all of these levels of the music industry are rotten so like we need to cut them out I mean yeah you look at like Ticketmaster and Live Nation which have a monopoly and you know people complain about high ticket prices all the time it's because of consolidation it's because of monopoly like um absolutely and you have something like South by Southwest, which used to be a music discovery series, you know, it was like such a great platform.

28:37It's how I got started, you know, and now, you know, they're dumping where they were, right? Dumping money into arms. And it's like, how did that happen? Well, it's because they were sold and sold and sold. And then people who own them are billionaires who are dumping their money into war because war is, as Sean said, last time we talked, war is profitable. The first time we met was at South by Southwest when you were playing with a member of Q and not you weren't you yeah yeah from the dc hardcore scene um you were you were you do that was definitely not a hardcore set from what i remember no it was definitely some indie twee shit in in the times before pensk um did did the pensk um media organization own um south by southwest back then i don't know if they did no because that's the same pensk that sponsors the formula one team that stood on the front on the white house lawn with uh trump wasn't it recently the uh the bizarreness like and rolling stone is well and also if you wanted meant to be political and right and if you also want to talk about penske what i i would i say penske in the u.s i don't know i don't know how right but they also uh their trucks are rented by ice agents who show up in these Penske trucks and show up at Home Depot is pretending to be workers.

29:55And then they go out and just like kidnap a bunch of people. So it's all tied together. I think that also all ties back to wealth inequality, right? Because basically you have all of these billionaires and, you know, very, very multimillionaire rich people who are looking for more and more places to invest their money and because they have more and more and more of it and they want it to keep growing. And so I think that's why you see such a rise of and domination of private equity in the US. Like I've looked into yarn and fabric companies and it would be it's surprising how many yarn companies are actually owned by private equity.

30:40And it's, you know, it's just kind of like another thing they can add to their portfolio and say they're diversified or things like that. But as you keep having more and more of this wealth concentration on the top, you're going to have all of these, you know, music companies that are turning around that money and putting into something completely different that doesn't make sense, like war profiteering, because they need another place to invest it. And war is really hot right now. And so it's, yeah, it's very, very frustrating. Do you know that the military is, I think it's the fourth or fifth if it was a country the military would be the fifth biggest emitter of carbon in the world there's a website called thewaronclimate.org which has got scientists putting together information and i think the u.s military's output is the same as all of sweden like just the military and america's output is the same as the entire country of sweden there's some shocking data in amongst that and i think it's worth remembering that the emissions of a streaming platform are going to be dwarfed by a few hours of fighter jets and tanks and bombs and everything else which the same people are making money from you actually made me wonder when you're talking about people investing in yarn they often make the argument oh it's only like five percent of our business that's in military and only three percent of our business is in fossil fuel and i wonder what percentage of that food chain of companies and if those companies then don't have more ethical policies that then means that they're still using fossil fuel, which means they're still kind of upholding these DEI policies or keeping people on the lowest possible wages so the kind of inequalities kind of stagnates.

32:29And it's, yeah, if you can then control so many different parts of the market and the supply chain as well as the kind of shop front, it's, yeah, I think there's a lot more than just these companies are bad because they are funding and profiting from war.

32:53Hi there, it's Emma here. I'm gay crashing the podcast to quickly tell you about the Drowned in Sound newsletter. Every Wednesday, I invite myself into your inbox, with permission, of course, to share opinion writing and resources, tell you about cool things that you should be involved in within the world of music, activism, etc. I also bring track of the week and a little bit of hopeful news for you because we all know that the news cycle can be grim at the best of times. Drowned in Sound newsletter every Wednesday in your inbox. Sign up now. I was just going to say like what's the bits that have been hardest to clarify in terms of some of the companies and then like I'm not saying what did you leave out because for obvious reasons you can't tell me that but was there areas that you tried to look into that you couldn't find the detail yeah so just to touch on audience audience trust for a second because I think that is really important um I don't think cut off the spigot survives if I don't have audience trust because if you don't trust me why are you listening to me you know and so it is paramount to me to maintain and even grow that audience trust and that's why like I don't accept any advertising or post sponsorships from any of the businesses that I review or really any businesses at all except with the exception I might do something with a local business at some point in the future I have not yet but like I don't want to create that profit incentive to skew my reporting and I think that is something that like I talked to a lot of people when I started this and they're like oh so you're going to set up affiliate links and like, I hope you're getting some kickbacks.

34:44And I'm like, no, I'm not. Cause that's like, I can't make money that way. Cause it's just going to skew everything I do. Um, so that is really important to me. Um, in terms of like what information I include or don't include, I a hundred percent make anything that I'm writing or claiming is backed up by a source and I link it within like my subsack articles. So, I'm very clear and explicit about that. One thing that always gets a little bit murky sometimes is company ownership structure. But that's something where if I'm unsure, I will include all the information I have and make a note saying, this is what I think it is based on all this information, but I don't know 100 % for sure.

35:34And then just in general, if there are any things I missed or anything like that. I definitely so far, you know, knock on wood, there's been nothing major, but if there is anything I feel like I need to update, I just go back and then I clearly mark like updated and things like that, or make another video if I needed to, because, uh, you know, I'm not trying to say I was right the whole time. I own up to my mistakes and then, yeah, just trying to make sure, like, if I do find anything, um, I generally try to include it i don't try to like gatekeep or say oh maybe this isn't relevant people won't care about this because it's funny like i found you know posting my videos uh i will uh post on some category that i'm like oh nobody cares about this aspect and then everybody comments about it so i'm like i you know i'm not i don't know what could be relevant for other people or what they really care about so i try to make sure that i'm incorporating anything i find kajian laura when you saw the videos was there anything you're like oh my god I've not heard anyone talk about that or was there anything where you're like I'm so glad that this bit of information I've been sitting on like someone's actually found the evidence of it yeah for me I was glad to see that the research that I had done had lined up with what Alexa has had done independently that made me feel like confident in myself that I can handle this work and just glad that I didn't mess up and give information that I would regret.

37:06But the other thing is that like, as these, if we successfully move people off of these platforms to other platforms, and then those platforms get bought, we have to be prepared to abandon those platforms too. Like it's not, this is not a forever information thing. And this is for right now. And this is like, this is a lifestyle of constantly informing yourself and being willing to take the steps to, to, you know, continuously divest from harmful systems. So, you know, like right now, I know, cut off the spigot and myself and others have been saying, if you're going to go for a streamer, we're recommending Kobuz.

37:42However, if that gets bought and we don't trust it, we're off that thing. Like, you know, and we're on to the next and we're just going to keep on reshaping it because I think we all know that we have given all of these billionaires their power like because we just you know we'll take what they offer and we don't question it we we're putting value in their companies so we also have the obligation to do the research and remove the value with ourselves yeah their company value is based on the number of users they've got and there's like i think i've forgotten what the unit is they can measure it and i don't know if anyone knows but like i remember when we looked at we did a brief deal with drowning sound years ago and like we looked up like mobile phone companies and like they work out it's worth about a hundred pounds per each new customer they get because people are going to stay with them for like two to three years if not longer and so they have a customer acquisition that's just off the charts and which means as advertisers they can afford to spend loads per new customer they generate and those numbers are pretty shocking when you start to look at how much profit they make from each person because like with music streaming there's no cost of creating the product they create a platform so you can access it and then they maybe have an editorial team that picks what goes to the fore the biggest department in spotify has always been their advertising sales team because they've not outsourced it to another company because they think they can make more money but i don't remember the last time anyone in the music industry was like oh great we can take out some adverts on spotify to promote our music because the return on investment is just not there it's just like a completely broken model um so in terms of the information that's out in the world right now why is it that kobuz is one of the best ones do you want to start on that for me i mean it's just that i could not find dirt on it and that was just like the first thing it's like i tried my best to be like who who owns this and what are they up to?

39:51And I couldn't find it. And that doesn't mean that they're up to good stuff. It might just be that they're very covert in operation. But for now, that's what it looks like. And this brings me to one thing I wanted to clear up earlier, because I think there's this kind of misconception about how streaming income works, that people think that Spotify pays less. And in reality, all streamers pay out at the same rate. But it's just because so many more people are using Spotify that that rate gets cut up and cut up and cut up. So when people are at, you know, maybe they're using Spotify and it's just streaming in the background all day, or there's millions of bots using Spotify and it's flooded with all of this kind of mess and that all gets diluted more and more and more.

40:36So if all that same stuff were to end up on Cobas, it would be the same for artists. So it's not that they're like necessarily paying better. It's just that they they're used less right now and that means a better ratio for artists that doesn't mean more money because they have less subscribers so they have less pool um but that's why i think the end game for me is not using streamers at all some streamers came about because people wanted like an alternative to piracy but i think the best alternative is for people to invest in local arts and invest in their community and support art because they love art or to have, you know, co-op systems where we're all supporting each other.

41:21But anyway. I want to second what you said, Claudia, about a keep holding whatever platform we're recommending now, holding their feet to the fire over time and saying, we expect you to stay true to your good vision right now and your good practices. And for Koba, the same thing was what I found. I had my label reach out to various DSPs to ask them questions. They got back very quickly and I was asking them about their AI policies. And that was a little like loosey-goosey. They didn't seem to have like a specific AI policy other than the fact that the CEO was like, fuck AI if you find me loving an AI band, somebody shoot me was basically what he said.

42:07And, you know, it's not necessarily yet. And Alexa, you can please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that they're not necessarily flagging AI in any way or rejecting AI, because I think even for musicians, that line is gray, right? It's like, where is AI used as a tool in which maybe you're even using your own music. I mean, I will say to me, it's always, I'm not interested in that because an AI model is always trained off of other music. So it's always going to be profiting off the backs of unpaid labor. But yeah, I think, I think that for that reason, Cobuzz is, is interesting to me.

42:54And it does seem to be a platform run by music lovers. So, and that's definitely not the case for any of the other music platforms. They are not, that I've seen run by music lovers. And who knows, maybe there's some co-op model in the future that's like made by musicians, for musicians, for actual fans of music that actually pays people for their labor because they care about the content and the labor that goes into making it. And just to touch on that, there are definitely co-op models out there. um they are quite small right now I will have a post in the future highlighting some of those um so there there is some hope um but yeah I mean I think Koba's is my favorite kind of similar to what Kaja said I couldn't find anything like you know any major red flags or anything it seemed to be like a pretty straightforward company and I completely agree like once you are considered good and you know maybe people switch to you that doesn't mean you get to rest on your laurels it just means that you need to maintain that otherwise we're off to the next one and you know even if there isn't another major streaming platform maybe it is then everybody switches to the co-ops at that point or something but like we can't keep putting our money I keep thinking of this example as we're talking, which is that at one point, Whole Foods was a local grocer from Austin, Texas that was committed to, you know, great organic local food.