What’s being lost in the Spotify JRE and censorship story

How we have lost site of what "or who" the product is with tech platforms.

The Product

Running in parallel to the blatant attempts to censor Joe Rogan and any of the dissenting voices that offer alternatives to the “required” worldview (Glenn Greenwald writes a great piece focusing on the censorship angle) is the evolution of a product. As humans (and even further as Americans) we are in an unending race to build. This effort is playing out in the later stages at many of our tech giants right now.

Google - founded 1998

Facebook - founded 2004

Twitter - founded 2006

These companies have continued to build and iterate their product, as if on the hunt for the holy grail of the ultimate product.

You are that product

The fact is for each of these companies we are offered up free usage of their software and platform while in turn each of us is molded into their “ultimate product.” The equation is rather simple, if the service is free you are the product. In exchange for the service, you need to understand that you’re going to be a part of their product roadmap.

Why the trouble with Spotify?

You see Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Disney+, HBOGo, etc. face a rather different problem they look to us to be users of their product. They are in pursuit of the same holy grail of product but their pipeline is very different. They need us as customers of their product and therefore are more inclined to take stances opposite to the more users as product tech giants.

Censorship

I’ve intentionally kept out the politics and ulterior motives out of this to bring a different perspective to the conversation. I’m not naive enough to think that politics and other motives are at play in these scenarios I just wanted to offer another perspective to keep in mind as we continue down the “censorship journey” of our times.

What should you do?

If you use free services, you should look into and attempt to understand their business model. Why are they free? What are they offering to you or others? How do they monetize? Many might say “well we will never replace Google” and while that does seem like an insurmountable task. If Google is free for many of us today, what could happen tomorrow? If we cared about censorship I’m sure we could pay a little to another as a replacement to their service.

Math

Google Revenues: $182.5 billion (2020)

Number of internet users: 4.95 billion (let's cut that in half 2.5 billion)

If half of the internet users started paying for Google they would only need to pay $73 annually to reach the same revenues ($37 annually if every internet user paid)

Facebook Revenues: $86 billion (2020)

Number of Facebook users: 2.91 billion

If we all paid $30 annually Facebook would reach the same revenues

*rather rough math pulled from... you guessed it, Google.

Conclusion

Perhaps the outrage we feel needs to be offset by a change of actions on our part, if we want to stop being the product maybe we need to be a part of the solution. Perhaps we are the ones that have created the censorship problem with our weak response to the idea of paying for big tech services. Maybe it’s time we take back the power and start letting our dollars decide what services we can’t live without.

Spotify’s response

On Sunday Spotify responded with a letter from the CEO addressing the current situation. CEO Daniel Ek said the platform didn’t want to “take on the position of being content censor,” which in my opinion only goes to highlight how well Spotify understands they cannot sabotage their product. Facebook faced a similar controversy in 2020 when their advertisers began boycotting over criticisms that it wasn’t doing enough to tackle hate speech. Facebook very quickly adapted to this problem, why? Because it was from their true customers, the advertisers.