Justice at Spotify Day of Action Report

Edited by Marissa Alper

On March 15th, we organized a worldwide action at Spotify offices where we held a rally and delivered our demands along with the 28,000 signatures to each office. Actions happened in over 15 cities around the world. U.S. cities were: Birmingham MI, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York and San Francisco. Actions also took place in cities around the world including Berlin, Madrid, London, Melbourne, Paris, São Paulo, and Toronto among others. We received extensive press coverage for the action, including in Pitchfork, Billboard, Democracy Now! and Consequence of Sound.

In addition to press around the action, UMAW and our campaign were discussed as a focal point of an article in The American Prospect. This article gives context about our movement and what is at stake. As its author David Dayan (executive editor of The American Prospect) writes, "The music industry was once sprawling enough to accommodate a wide spectrum of artists. But artists today are beset on all sides by monopolists and oligopolists. Like so many sectors of our economy, government inaction has allowed the music business to consolidate, with devastating effects on musicians."

The action was so successful that Spotify responded. Three days following the action, Spotify released a website called “Loud and Clear” as an attempt at transparency around artist payment issues. Unfortunately, this website answers none of our demands and even further obfuscates transparency. The company simply deflects blame onto others for systems it has itself built and provided no further information on their per-stream rate (currently calculated at $0.0038).

It is important to note that the "Loud and Clear" page was a response to our action. When asked by a music journalist writing for Pitchfork, Spotify pointed to Loud and Clear and CEO’s Daniel Ek’s twitter thread launching the website as the official response to our action. They gave the same response to Swedish National Radio, in their international headquarters of Stockholm. It is obvious that Spotify is feeling the heat from us and the dissatisfaction of artists around the world.