Hey, everyone. Ekthony Bad Tano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. Wish I was talking about music, man.

Okay, look, if you are at all familiar with the history of capitalism, you understand that the entertainment industry is being mixed in some form or fashion with some of the worst sectors of our economy. It's nothing new, but it's somehow worsening thanks to Daniel Ek, CEO over at Spotify, who we all know, and we've covered it before on the channel, loves to make his money by cashing out on his Spotify stock to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

What are you going to do with all that money? The same thing any rich person does. They reinvest it into other things, and they make their money work for them. Now, if that were me and I had that much money in my pocket, sure, this doesn't make me Jesus or anything, but I would at least put some of that cash back into the music economy to maybe support the artists that are making my livelihood possible.

Consistently, for whatever reason, Daniel Ek has just loved dumping money into military tech and has most recently put this massive lump sum of money into a four-year-old AI defense software company named Helsing, which also deals in drone technology and stuff like that.

You know what's even weirder, stranger, more disturbing. It's not enough for Daniel to, I don't know, just passively, while ignoring the horrors of the military-industrial complex, just throw all this money into it in hopes that he's going to get a massive return on his investment, which is still pretty gross, pretty nasty, but mostly apathetic, you could say, apathetic. But that's not enough for Daniel. He's actually been named as a chairman of this fucking company now because Daniel can't just invest in this stuff. He's got to be at the helm of it.

And obviously, this was already clear from the way Daniel runs this goddamn company for years now. But does this guy even care about or like music? Was music ever really a passion or a driver for him in any way whatsoever? Or was it just a thing for him to paracitically suck off of in order to make the jump over into the fields of influence and power that he actually wants to be involved in? Weapons, war, tech designed to kill people and bomb refugees in countries that I'm sure he can't even find on a map.

So I'm not really sure what else to add past this point other than just fuck this guy. Fuck this guy. This man is trash. He is garbage. This dude runs his company in a way to where he's paying artists poverty wages. And for years and years and years, the artists and the labels and the fans and organizations like UMAW have been saying, 'Hey, pay these people more. They deserve more. Your company is so successful. You're getting hundreds of millions of dollars in your pocket, the stock is soaring, you could be giving these artists more.'

And Spotify's response has just been like, It's the labels who pay the artists, and we're just minding our business and doing our thing. So what? Meanwhile, the CEO of your company is sitting on enough money to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into military tech and then become the chairman of a company in that field.

Bro, is music not enough? There's a lot going on in the music world. A lot of messed up and fucked up shit that your company is responsible for, that you, as a CEO of that company, you should be, man, you should be knee deep in your personal investment to fix these issues, fix these inequities, fix these bugs, fix all the botting going on.

And rather than dealing with that, Spotify is just trying to find new ways to pay artists less, incorporate more AI garbage into the platform, and also, apparently, transfer a bunch of cash over into the military-industrial complex, which you shouldn't feel responsible for contributing to as a music fan just for listening to some music.

Artists getting ripped off was bad enough, and now it's this. Let me know what you guys think about this in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Spotify, Daniel Ek, your trash. Thank you.