John Ngo

I don’t know about Rdio—I’ve never done any looking into it. Spotify, in particular, is just straight-up class warfare. There was this stat about Lady Gaga, who was the biggest selling artist on Spotify, getting $800 in one quarter for having over 8 million plays. People are getting paid from Spotify, but it’s not artists. The amount of money that artists are making on Spotify is ridiculous. The amount of money that Sean Parker and EMI and those types of interests are making of off Spotify is where the real crime is. The question when it happened was, “Who okayed this major transfer of these commodities—hundreds of thousands of songs and records?” No one I knew had anything to do with it—it was all these labels. They got big cash bonuses that are not part of the royalty stream and won’t trickle down to artists.

They’re all shareholders as well so when it IPOs, they’ll make another billion dollars each and the artists will make exactly zero. Spotify, in particular, is very much the story of the 1% and the 99% all over again. It’s particularly rich because it applies to this force culturally [music] that can be cleansing of those heists or injustices so it’s kind of comical.

Anything that causes people to have less of a connection with the artist that they specifically would like to listen to and consume deludes it. The lack of connection that we all have now relative to how things worked 30 years ago as far as community and personal connections is getting more and more diluted. I think that social networking and all that stuff is just another aid in falling out of relationship with one another in any real sense. I think those subscription-based things are just one less commitment that consumers have to make. It’s that much more being removed from committing to a purchase and a decision. In general, I think that that’s an unhealthy way to live—period. The vast amount of choice that we have is meant to be helpful and part of our freedom, but it’s really the most crippling element of modern life.