If Spotify really cares about Australian music, then why has it kindled a culture of fear?

by Billy Burgess | Friday Sep 05, 2025 | Blog, Features

Liz Pelly speaking to Lauren Taylor at The Wheeler Centre, Photograph by Duncographic

There was a rumour going around BIGSOUND that journalist Liz Pelly had been scheduled to speak at the conference, but her invitation was rescinded at the urging of Spotify, one of the event’s two presenting partners. Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine, is a sobering indictment of Spotify and the entire streaming model.

It was an unverified rumour, but even the fact that people were credulously discussing it tells you how normalised it is for music industry folks to fear Spotify and to believe the Swedish tech company has sweeping powers of influence.

After attending Liz Pelly’s talk at The Wheeler Centre on August 28, I published a piece titled Liz Pelly confirms what we already know: Spotify friggin’ stinks. I’m talking about the sort of stench that opening a window won’t fix. Since publishing the article I have lost work.

Full transparency: I had been commissioned by an independent publication to write two articles about artists that Spotify has chosen to feature in its Turn Up Aus marketing blitz. I put my hand up to do the articles. I didn’t know that they were being paid for by Spotify but I also didn’t ask. I’ve got a cleaner conscience as a result of losing the work, but it’s hard to make money writing about music in 2025, and I’ve got a cat to feed and a decadent lifestyle of specialty coffee and extra virgin olive oil to uphold.

Spotify claims its Turn Up Aus campaign is a demonstration of how it “lives and breathes” Australian music, and as evidence, the company can point to its sponsorship of ARIA, AIR, BIGSOUND, and various music blogs. Meanwhile, the company has engendered a culture of fear and employs a quid pro quo editorial policy.

Essentially, if Spotify chooses to support an artist, it expects full cooperation from the artist. If the artist chooses not to cooperate – to opt out of collaborative social media posts and to say yeah, nah to recording videos about how their career simply wouldn’t be the same without Spotify’s support – the implication is that the editorial support will be removed. For years, artists have been wary of premiering songs or videos with other outlets lest Spotify get upset and not include the artist in its playlists.

If Spotify was interested in a healthy, dynamic Australian music scene – or if it, you know, believed in the intrinsic value of music – it would be open to criticism. It would encourage it. But Spotify’s focus is and always has been profit and share price.

Putting aside the company’s trash royalty payments to independent musicians and their insistence on making music blander with every passing year, Spotify’s billionaire CEO Daniel Ek is the chairperson and primary investor in AI military tech company Helsing. “There’s an enormous realisation that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield,” Ek said after injecting $AUD1bn into Helsing. That was in June. This year. 20 months into a genocide in Gaza.

Israel has been illegally occupying Palestinian land and committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians for decades. As documented in Antony Lowenstein’s brilliant book, The Palestine Laboratory, one of the ways Israel has maintained its military occupation of the Palestinian territories is through the deployment of the exact sort of weapons software and surveillance systems that Ek is now using his Spotify fortune to develop. We cannot pretend these things – a genocide that gets worse by the day and billionaires investing in military technology – are unrelated.

Disclaimer: I do not know if Spotify had anything to do with me losing the work. It’s quite possible that the publication didn’t want any friction with what it regards as an important sponsor. There is a tiny amount of money in Australian music media, and a large portion of the money that doesn’t come from grants comes via sponsorship and ad sales to big, awful corporate behemoths. The publication, to their credit, offered me compensation for the work I’d already done.

I do wonder, though, what good is a music media that has nothing to say, and lives in constant fear of advertisers and sponsors?

Disclaimer 2: I have written plenty of corporate sponcon over the years. I also paid for Spotify Premium for 11 years. I buy my olive oil from Woolworths. My cat eats kangaroo. I could go on.