I don't really know who this guy is or why you'd spend 100 million on him to secure a deal. But he's walking away with that money and Spotify is left with the infighting. They fucked themselves over with that absurd investment.
Is Spotify going to blow another 100 mil on that one and hope for the best?
They messed up by betting large on a celebrity and ignoring the fact that Joe Rogan wasn't a cultural fit.
He's a cultural fit for x hundreds of millions. You may not fall into that demographic, but there's no discounting that other cultures exist outside of your own.
He's a pro weed, universal health care loving, self-described left of center guy big in the MMA and stand-up comedy circles.
He now has the world's most popular podcast, but because he frequently has guests who are right wing, despite debating them about these things on the show, he is attacked for giving these folks a platform to spread their ideas.
Due to his expertise in MMA and the fact that he's a formally trained fighter and martial artist, he was shaken by an event he witnessed: The fracturing of a woman's skull by Fallon Fox, a transgender woman who hid the fact that she had previously been a male, and had recently transitioned from the league. He commented on it.
This put him in very hot water with the trans activist community, despite the fact that the vast majority of the American public has similar concerns.
The reality is this deal made Spotify a lot of money and brought them listeners and advertising revenue. You don't know who he is, but you aren't the target audience, and your opinions and the opinions of the employees don't matter. Spotify exists to make investors money by creating value for the listeners. The employees shouldn't have any power over how it does that, because they own as much as the equity they've been given, and nothing more.
Okay, sure.
> [...the rest of the post...]
I don't see how this connects.
> your opinions and the opinions of the employees don't matter
But your opinion does? It must matter to you, since you spent a few paragraphs on it.
Expressing my opinion on a message board isn't a claim that the executives should listen to me.
I'm unaware of any law which requires a business to make money for investors. A business can promise to pay dividends and they can speculate on where their stock can be at a future date, but there is no legal recourse if they lose money.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/24/stakeholder-gover...
Guessing that what ljm meant was that those opinions shouldn't be important in their personal choice about what to listen to or not listen to.
Their logic dictates that none of our opinions matter. That's fine by me; we're squabbling over nothing.
It seems like most SJW-converged companies have been doing just fine as companies, otherwise the invisible hand of the market would have put a stop to this long ago.
And it’s not the values, it’s the disruption. If you had anti-abortion Republicans doing the same would everyone be saying how the company should “tread lightly”.
> And it’s not the values, it’s the disruption.
People want to feel like they're in a career that aligns with their values, and the more in demand your talent is, the more you're able to make demands of your employers to have them be values-aligned. If employers don't need top shelf talent, they're free to ignore that and be less competitive in the market for talent. However, successful companies usually tend to compete. We're talking about Spotify because they competed for and hired high-grade talent, and that high-grade talent wants their company to be values-aligned.
And your examples of silence seem fuzzy. Who was trying to “silence” (suppress speech) of South Africa? Suppress their racist political system? Sure, but I don’t recall anyone saying they can’t talk.
I listen to JRE on Spotify and am not happy about the decision. Actually the first episode I listened to was an Alex Jones + Tim Dillon episode (Tim being a comic I like) that is now gone. And while I don't agree with Alex Jones, I listened to it because I expected it to be controversial or nutty.
There are people who say once you give in to the woke mob they won't stop there, I wouldn't be surprised if now they know they can get other targets canceled if those targets don't consume their orthodoxy.
The line is when you take actions designed to prevent someone else from ever speaking, or people hearing their speech, instead of (as is your right) loudly calling them a *ist.
"free speech" only makes sense in the context of government regulation (vs individuals/corporations), because governments have a monopoly on violence. As soon as two non-government entities are "regulating each other", it is a matter of mutual free speech. e.g. what about the free speech of Spotify?
Rogan sold his intellectual property, i.e. his speech, including the speech of his guests, to Spotify. Now depending on the contract (I do not know what the exclusivity clauses look like) Rogan might be able to host that content on other platforms, or he might not. Either way, on Spotify's platform, legally the speech is Spotify's not Rogan's nor the guests.
FWIW, if recorded conversations/speech cannot be considered intellectual property, that can be bought and sold, all current media will be impacted as it cannot be run as a business.
In this case 'woke' is just another term for having a firm grip on reality.
* "More Than Half Of Republicans Believe Voter Fraud Claims"[1]
* "As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states."[2]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/04/05/more-th...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/stat...
> One of the submitted questions was "Many LGBTQAI+/ally Spotifiers feel unwelcome and alienated because of leadership's response in JRE conversations. What is your message to those employees?" Another was “Why has Spotify chosen to ignore Spectrum ERG's guidance about transphobic content in the JRE catalog?,” referring to a group of Spotify workers who focus on related issues.
> At the meeting, Ek also told employees not to leak to the media, noting "If we can't have open, confidential debates, we will have to move those discussions to closed doors."
ERGs often have some kind of liaison from HR, especially since they are often associated with diversity programs. But the ERG itself is usually just advisory if they're consulted on something the company is doing.
It seems like all I hear are the usual suspects: Me Undies, Blue Apron, etc.
On other hand, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the companies marketing on things like pod casts... Some pretty famous ones don't seem to be too special products, see Raid Shadowlegends, Raycon and all of the VPN providers...
I don't have a problem with the platform restricting content. I have a problem with the behavior of the employees reaching outside of their role to forward their political goals. If your job is to curate content, and you disagree with the content of JRE, you would have stopped the deal from happening in the first place.
The vast majority of executives in the corporate world are conservative, and in addition to personally supporting conservative movements, they frequently direct company resources towards furthering right leaning agendas.
Is it really that offensive that a handful of employees are at a handful of tech companies are trying to steer the ship in the other direction? Are you similarly offended when oil companies lobby the government to further the oil industries interests? Are you offended when corporations successfully push congress to pass tax breaks largely targeted at corporations and the rich?
Spotify has 5,000+ employees -- I wouldn't assume for a second that it's the tech workers doing this, I suspect it's probably HR and marketing and so on. It's a big bureaucratic organization.
I like to think if I was at Spotify, and I saw people holding the company hostage like this -- threatening to quit (or whatever) if they don't get their way -- that I would stand up and threaten to do the same if they do get their way.
If the only way to remove the ability of these people to make threats is to create a lose-lose situation for your employer, then you have a responsibility to do that. If enough companies see this happen and are forced to navigate a needless lose-lose situation, maybe we'll see companies take a harder position against advocacy and activism and politics in the workplace. If all else is equal, hopefully they'll be forced to take the position that they would have taken if nobody threatened anything; they'll fall back to their actual principles.