What is the role of an artist when the world is burning?
I lied at the DMV this morning. I had to renew my car tag, and the clerk asked me if I have been driving my car during the eleven months it's been expired. I said no to save $150 and some extra paperwork. Meanwhile, the car in question was seventy feet away. The engine was still warm.
But we'll come back to that.
Jon and I (just to once again clarify that, though we are brothers, we are two different people) have a zoom call every Monday to talk business (we usually talk about the Steelers for half of it). This past week, he brought up a question somebody recently asked him - something I think he plans on writing about later, but which he gave me permission to write about today.
The question was about Spotify. I'll paraphrase it this way:
How do you rationalize using Spotify as both an artist and a listener, when Spotify clearly uses their power and money to do bad things?
The person, who is a regular and thoughtful reader of this newsletter, highlighted three things:
1) Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek is also the main investor and chairman of an AI military tech company.
2) Spotify's contractual agreement (to which all artists and users on the platform agree) allows them to use content uploaded to their platform in any way they want.
3) Spotify allows ICE to run recruitment ads.
Deep breath.
I could respond to each of those points one by one. I'm tempted to.
But I'm also tempted to comment on my aunt's Facebook posts, and here as well as there, my opinions don't accomplish much. Either I agree that all those things about Spotify are both true and bad, or I agree with some of them and disagree with the others, or I don't agree about any of them.
In any case, my experience is that when we take things issue by issue like this, we end up treating our opinion about each subsequent issue as a trump card - maybe I could see where you're coming from on that other thing, but this next one is damning.
In Spotify's case, even if it's not any of those three issues, it's bound to be the next.
So the question underneath the question is this:
How bad does a person/corporation have to be for us to write them off entirely?
I am a Christian, and my music reflects my faith. One of the core tenets of Christian practice is that lying is generally bad, both for the world and for individuals. And I blatantly lied at the DMV this morning. Not only that: I lied for the sake of money and convenience, two more things for which Jesus didn't have many gentle words.
Should my fans stop listening to my music?
But maybe that scale is too small. I only have a few thousand fans, and a DMV lie is so regular it's laughable. Here's a bigger example. I go to a small Anglican church in Nashville. A few weeks ago, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of North America was accused of abuse. The jury's still out, but churches don't have a promising track record with this kind of thing.
Should we leave the Anglican church?
Maybe even that scale is too small. Let's go one step further. I am a regular user of Meta (most frequently Instagram). They report roughly three and a half billion daily users. They also are constantly accused of super-villain stuff you only see in movies: propaganda, rigging elections, using phones to listen to and locate users, deliberately addicting four generations of the helpless public... should I keep going?
Should we stop using Meta? What about Google? What about our phones in general?
Should you stop reading this email right now and go full Wendell Berry/Henry David Thoreau? (Probably).
Deep breath.
Up to this point, you can tell where my bias is: I don't have plans to stop using Spotify as an artist or a listener, even if the people in charge of it use its power and money to do things I think are very, very wrong.
My main reason: every human life, every community of people, every multi-billion-dollar corporation, every trillion-dollar government - it's all rotted through. Write off one, and I had better be prepared to write off them all, including my own. I lied this morning to save 150 bucks; you don't need to follow your own life's logic very far to see why a corporation might make a questionable moral call to make billions of dollars.
But guys, even this is too simple.
Because there are times when we must stand up to power.
There are times to boycott corporations and governments.
And artists have always been in the vanguard of such movements.
What is the role of an artist when the world is burning? What can we do when the very tools at our disposal - the instruments and apps and venues - are owned and operated by the very corporations in which ordinary human corruption gets magnified a billionfold? What do we do when the only way to get to the audience is through the muck of industry?
I'm not sure I have a clear answer. But this is not a clear world.
What I will say is this.
An artist is armed with their skill and their conscience, and no two artists are alike.
It may be my role to use the tools granted by Spotify to release music that, in small ways, steers a tiny audience towards a more thoughtful, less corporation-controlled life. This would be a great joke on Spotify - that in the little corner of their catalogue that is my listenership, Spotify exists to eventually eat its own tail.
It may also be my role to have an opinion so disagreeable to you that you are moved to boycott Spotify altogether. This would be a great joke on me and on Spotify - and though we differ, you and I would both be playing our roles faithfully.
And it may be okay in the end to not know what to do, but to keep trying to do what is right, as best as you can, minute by minute, technology by technology.
Because the role of an artist when the world is burning is a simple one: it is to keep making art, because it is beautiful by itself, and because it might help other people,
-Tom
Tom Anderson
Artist & Strategist @ Two Story Media
Jon's (Taller) Brother
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