Hello beautiful human,
Well maybe you’ve heard—I just stumbled across it this morning because I sort of do live under a rock these days—that back a few days ago in late May Spotify’s CEO posted on X that the cost of “creating content” is “close to zero.”
This just…blows my heart apart, not to mention my mind.
First off, if you’re the CEO of a platform that makes its money—its gobs and gobs of money—off the work of creators…to feel or express anything but gratitude and respect for those creators and the work they do is pretty bankrupt, humanly speaking.
Okay, there’s that.
Never mind that you don’t pay them for shite. That’s another conversation.
Beyond that, how do we measure the cost of creation? I won’t use the ubiquitous phrase “content creator” because it flattens the vibrant, variegated world of art making and expression so completely. Songwriters, musicians, poets, speakers, writers and authors, podcast hosts and meditation guides…sooo many people on Spotify alone and that doesn’t even point beyond a single platform to the wide, rainbowed world of art in its largest sense.
What is the cost of all this? Let’s just cut to the chase and I’ll tell you:
the cost of creation is a life.
It’s the hours and hours and years and years spent at the desk, the easel, the microphones. It’s the practice rooms and garages and basement studios and coffee shop open mikes. It’s time you could have been doing anything else…and we make a choice, because something within compels us to keep at it.
When I say the cost of creation is a life I don’t mean we die, I mean, we spend our lives. We literally spend our lives. And yes, money too. But money is, as is so often true, the least of it.
To hear the CEO of Spotify has said that the cost of all of this is “close to zero” hits more or less in the same way it did when one’s life partner admitted late one night that he believed, on some level deep down, that you’d wasted your life.
At that point there’s really only one response. Bye Spotify. It’s been real. Or maybe it hasn’t. I know you think I’ve invested too much time and effort into building my playlists and favorites categories to leave you but trust me, I’ve done much, much harder things.
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It’s a stormy sea over here this morning but let me ask: how are you spending your life?
*In the wake of this nonsense with Spotify, I’m definitely going to have to think about my podcast plans. Nothing is going on hold, yet. I’m simply revisiting. Ideas and conversation welcome.*
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