Tom Dunne: Neil Young proves he can still stick it to the Man
Neil Young and Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek.
Neil Young telling workers at Spotify to quit their jobs this week was the most hippy-ish thing I’ve heard since Dublin's Dandelion market closed. It was naïve, silly, impractical, old school and daft. It was also 100% on the money, money being the one thing Spotify understands.
“Daniel Ek is your big problem - not Joe Rogan,” said Mr Young. “Ek pulls the strings. Get out of that place before it eats up your soul.”
The youth of America have not been this conflicted since they were told to burn their draft cards. But this time it isn’t Vietnam in the crosshair, it’s the very thing that protested that war, the music itself.
Spotify was already on my mind this week. It is week three of the Spotify War and, once again, there have been more twists and turns than a Fair City omnibus. And, just like Fair City, there is still no end in sight, no resolution, just more and more people harbouring grudges, and more and more people you just don’t like.
I had already come to the conclusion that Spotify has become the ‘Man’, that famed target of Sixties counter culture that represented all that was exploitative and controlling. The Man may have been a faceless villain, but if you were young and full of ideas about freedom and equality you knew who he was.
Much of what the internet age has promised was freedom from the Man. It was ushering in a new age, free from borders and restrictions on art and music, books, ideas, even friendships. Neil Young fans in Tullamore could share music files with Neil Young fans in Japan. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Then, prior to the realisation that your personal data could be harvested to undermine democracy in the US and the integrity of the European Union, Spotify arrived. It was to be music for everyone. Total accessibility. All the tracks ever recorded available to everyone all the time. A Pandora’s box of happiness for all.
This is the point at which we, collectively, did not read the small print. But let us not beat ourselves up. In the music business not reading the small print goes with the territory. It’s part of the deal. Music and Business are two different worlds and most of us are just here for the music bit.
Spotify chairman, Daniel Ek, is not. Daniel is here for the business side. Billboard named him the “most powerful person in music” as far back as 2017. He has only consolidated that position since. He not only read the small print, he commissioned it. Daniel is the Man, all day long.
Which means it was always only a matter of time before he found himself under the watchful gaze of Neil Young. An old-school musician as suspicious of music industry execs as only a Sixties musician can be. A world where a Van Morrison contract was once, apparently, sub-contracted to the Mafia.
I am hopeful that his words will make employees at Spotify start wondering what it is they have done to annoy the old guy. I am hopeful they will Google Neil in his prime and realise they are edging closer to the ‘state trooper’ side of the divide in his old videos than the ‘young and beautiful’ side and might be wondering ‘how did I get here?’ I imagine many of these workers will have recently discovered Neil’s music on vinyl or some other arcane music form. Concerned as I’m sure they are with climate change and the future of bees, they might be wondering why the man who wrote Ohio, is lumping them in with Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
“I thought we were here for the music,” they are all hopefully saying to each other, something, I think, we are all starting to say in relation to Spotify.
Neil’s words inspired me to dig out CSNY’s beautiful 1970 album Déjà Vu, home of hits like Woodstock, Teach Your Children and the stunning Our House. Mine is not an expert view but I tend to see it as ‘peak hippie'.
The spirit of the Woodstock Festival inhabits its every groove. It captures a time of enormous optimism and a feeling that people were really ‘getting back to the garden'. It is no surprise, therefore, that the authors of that Utopian vision, Joni et al., could spot better than anyone, all that is now being lost to the algorithm.
