OMFG Month at Spotify!

Thursday School Journal

It is OMFG Month at Spotify!

An OMFG Month is when everyone starts saying,
Please cancel my account, you suck, Spotify.

A lot of people have been saying,
Please cancel my account, you suck, Spotify.

What will Spotify do?

Spotify is worth 40 billion dollars.
That is a lot of money.

You could buy a mansion in the South of France and twelve Lamborghinis and a New York townhouse and a villa in Spain and a stately home in England if you had that much money.

That is also what you could buy with your money if you were a big rock star in the 1970s. 

Everyone knows that if you want to listen to you favourite song from your favourite  rock star, all you have to do is click on Spotify.
But there was no such thing as Spotify in the 1970s.

If you wanted to hear your favourite song you had to wait until they played it on the radio.
And they might play Billy Don't be A Hero first,
or Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree and then Billy Don't Be A Hero again. 

So if you wanted to hear your favourite song whenever you wanted, 
you had to get it from the record shop.
And all the records were behind a paywall.
So you had to pay for them.

When everyone was paying for their favourite records, 
it added up to a lot of money.

There was lots of money for the rock stars,
even after their crooked agents 
and their record companies 
and the hotels with the TVs thrown into the swimming pool 
had all taken their share.

If you weren't a big rock star, you didn't get as much money as that.
But you could still get enough to pay for your groceries. 
People would come up to you in the supermarket and say, 
Hey I saw your new song on Ready to Roll I’m going to buy it could I have your autograph please?

There were also things called cassettes and mixtapes.
So you didn't always have to get your music from behind the paywall. 
But mostly you did.

But then a man called Al Gore invented the internet.

And then everyone started giving each other copies of the songs they had bought.
And then people called TechBros came along.

And they said,
Hey what if we got all the songs in the whole world and put them in a folder? 
You could click on whatever you wanted to hear and you would just have to pay us, like, ten bucks a month.
I mean, there are, what, 100 billion people in the world? 
I bet if they all paid us 10 dollars a month we could share that money around all the rock stars and they would all get enough money to buy a mansion in the South of France and twelve Lamborghinis.

That is what Spotify does.

Except there aren't 100 billion people in the world.
And the money the Spotify users are paying isn't enough to go around all the rock stars.

It can only go as far as the really big ones like Neil Young and the Rolling Stones. 
If you are not a big star you only get enough money to go into the BP station and buy a Best of Boney M CD for $4.99 just like in the olden days.

It must be strange to work at Spotify and put all of the numbers into the calculator and try to make them add up.

You might feel a bit sad to know you are paying out more money than people are paying you,
even though what you are paying out to most to the rock stars is not enough to live on or even buy the Best of Boney M. 

That is probably why Spotify has been paying people to make podcasts.

A podcast is very easy to make.

You sit in front of a microphone and record something.

It is like when Neil Young plays his guitar in the recording studio for ages and ages and goes,
You are like a hurricane there’s calm in your eye,
and it makes people go,
That's blown me away Neil you're amazing even if you can't, like, sing properly.

Except when it is a podcast it is just a man who starts talking,
and they record whatever comes out.

You would not think that people would want to listen to this.
But they do.

There is a man called Joe Rogan and he makes podcasts that a lot of people like very very much,
even though what Joe Rogan says is very very stupid.

If you made a list of all the stupidest things you could say about the Covid,
all of the things Joe says would be on it.

It is like if the boy in your class who lights his farts was put in charge of teaching maths.

So Neil Young told Spotify they would have to choose between Joe or him.
And then so did the Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell and lots of other rock stars too.

But the people at Spotify have also worked out on their calculators that they can pay Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars and still make money.

So now you can't play You Are Like a Hurricane any more on Spotify.

That is why lots and lots of people have been saying,
Please cancel my account, you suck, Spotify.

And that is why the people at Spotify have been going OMFG.

But also a lot of other people have been saying,
You don't suck, Spotify, please stick up for my bestie Joe and don't listen to that total hypocrite freedom-loving boomer who can't even sing.

Neil Young did not mention that when he wrote Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World he was being sarcastic.
But he probably should have.

Now a lot of Joe’s friends are saying,
This is a goddam choice between freedom and goddam tyranny.
But it is really more about finding a clue or getting stupider.