If you are one of Spotify’s 268 million subscribers, you might be interested to learn of a recent investment by the company’s co-founder and chief executive Daniel Ek. In mid June, it emerged that Ek had led a funding round of €600 million into a Munich-based start-up called Helsing, through his venture capital firm Prima Materia.
Helsing, whose founders have backgrounds in both the video games industry and in Germany’s ministry of defence, makes military drones and AI software for the enhancement of weapons systems.
By all accounts, this appears to be a very smart investment: the company, which was founded in 2021, has more than doubled its market value over the last year, and is now worth an estimated €12 billion. Ek is not just a major investor, he is also now chairman of the company’s board of directors.
Over the past couple of years, tech investors in both Europe and the United States have pivoted toward a collective embrace of the military-industrial complex. Just a few years ago, the culture of Silicon Valley was such that, for companies like Google and Meta, any kind of direct military application of their technology was considered beyond the pale. In 2018, after its employees staged a mass walkout in protest against a deal with the Pentagon, Google pledged not to work on AI weapons systems.
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But a number of cultural and geopolitical factors – an openly rightward turn among the tech elite; the growing perception of a Chinese threat to US global hegemony; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with Trump’s withdrawal from established defence arrangements, putting the fear of God into EU leaders – have made it clear that there is money, fast and deep money, to be made in defence tech.
Silicon Valley, whose deep foundations were laid in the postwar years with a massive injection of US Defence Department money into a handful of technology firms in Palo Alto, has rediscovered its roots in the military-industrial complex.
Perhaps the most arresting recent indication of this came earlier this summer, with the news that the US Army had launched a so-called Executive Innovation Corps, intended – in the words of a press release – to “fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation”. Under this new programme, high-level tech executives from companies including Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI were commissioned into the armed forces as lieutenant colonels.
Ek is, in this sense, by no means an outlier. He is simply and straightforwardly following the money. But there is something particularly galling about his ploughing such a massive amount of his personal wealth into the arms trade. Many people already feel ethical qualms about using streaming services like Spotify, whose total restructuring of the distribution model for recorded music has brought about the vast enrichment of people like Ek, a man with an estimated net worth in the region of $9.2 billion, while making it extraordinarily difficult for artists to make a living from their own work.
Rather than attempting to mitigate this situation – by, for example, using some of that money to pay musicians a fairer share of streaming revenues – Ek is putting it directly into a company that makes strike drones, and, in the words of its promotional materials, AI technology “to achieve scaled target acquisition and co-ordinated precision effects”.
So far, the response to Ek’s move into the weapons industry has been relatively muted – for, I would guess, two intimately-connected reasons: first, thanks to their near-total destruction of the means by which musicians were traditionally paid for the recorded work, streaming services like Spotify are the only way most musicians can now reach an audience; and second, Spotify’s standing among musicians was already about as low as it could get.
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The most high-profile response has come from the indie rock band Deerhoof, who at the end of last month announced the removal of all their music from Spotify. “‘Daniel Ek uses $700 million of his Spotify fortune to become chairman of AI battle tech company’ was not a headline we enjoyed reading this week,” as the band put it in a statement it published online. “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech ... If the price of ‘discoverability’ is letting oligarchs fill the globe with computerised weaponry, we’re going to pass on the supposed benefits.”
There is nothing very new about this interconnectedness of the music business and the arms industry. Back when there used to be such a thing as major record labels, EMI Records – along with its subsidiaries like Capitol Records and Parlophone – belonged to the Thorn EMI group, among whose multifarious corporate interests was the production of missile guidance technologies. In the artwork for their 2002 album Yanqui UXO, the Canadian instrumental post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor included a hand-scrawled diagram mapping out the web of corporate connections between major labels and the arms industry.
That band, and many others like them, went out of their way to avoid being ensnared in any such webs. But in the decades since that album was released, on a small Canadian independent label, the entire infrastructure of corporate record labels has all but collapsed, and streaming services like Spotify are practically the only show in town. If you want to listen to Yanqui UXO now, you can hear it on Spotify, along with all of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s other albums.
There may, as they say, be no ethical consumption under capitalism. But there is a special queasiness to the dynamic by which the creative work of musicians, having been so thoroughly devalued by the likes of Spotify, has been used to fund a weapons company. Simply by firing up Spotify and streaming a song from Yanqui UXO – or by streaming, for that matter, John and Yoko’s Give Peace a Chance, or Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, or Bob Dylan’s Masters of War – you can now do your bit to fund the arms industry.
Alternatively, you could cancel your Spotify subscription, and take your business elsewhere.
