Every Stream is a Vote
On Daniel Ek's defence investments, what your subscription actually funds, and why the choice is not as difficult as the industry wants it to seem
Every music subscription decision contains a question the major platforms prefer you not to think about. The advertised question is about access: how much music, at what quality, for what price? The actual question should be: who gets the money, and what do they do with it?
In September 2025, Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, stepped down as CEO to become Executive Chairman, with a personal net worth estimated by Forbes at approximately $9.8 billion. In June 2025, his private investment vehicle, Prima Materia, led a €600 million funding round into Helsing, a Munich-based AI defence technology company that manufactures strike drones, develops AI systems for fighter aircraft, and is preparing a fleet of unmanned submarines. Ek is Chairman of Helsing. He has cashed out over $800 million in Spotify stock since mid-2023. In the same period, the average Spotify payout rate to artists has remained between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. These two facts are not in a causal relationship. They are in an aesthetic one.
Bands including Deerhoof, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor publicly objected to the Helsing investment, with several pulling their music from Spotify. Deerhoof's farewell statement used the word 'product' three times and never once used the word 'music.'(1) A band leaving a music platform over its founder's weapons investment, and the platform's public response centres the word 'product.' It tells you something about the gap between what Spotify says it is and what it has decided to become.
None of this is hidden. All of it is verifiable. The question of what your subscription contributes to is answerable with publicly available information. The answer is not only music.
Setting aside any view on European defence policy or AI military technology, the payment mechanics tell their own story. The pro-rata streaming model pools subscription revenue globally and distributes it according to stream share. Artists who benefit most are those with the largest global audiences. Entities who benefit most from those artists' streaming income are the major labels whose royalty agreements are built around stream count dominance. Independent artists receive fractions of what the system generates from their listeners' subscriptions. The people at the top of the system receive the rest, and decide independently what they invest it in.
The Pack's model makes the flow visible and changes who controls it. Your $10 goes: $7 to the artists you listened to, in proportion to your actual listening; $1.50 to sector development, grants and industry infrastructure for the Australian music community; $1.50 to platform operations. There is no undisclosed surplus. There is no investment vehicle. There is no defence technology startup. Under the cooperative structure, the governance of surplus funds is a democratic decision by the artist members, not a decision by a founder whose personal investment strategy operates entirely separately from any consideration of the artists whose work built the platform's value.
The historical precedent for cooperative alternatives to extractive infrastructure is long and not obscure. Credit unions were built because banks served capital accumulation rather than the depositors whose money made the accumulation possible. Cooperative electricity networks brought power to rural communities that profit-focused utilities had decided were uneconomic to serve. Community radio broke broadcast monopolies not by being better-funded but by being differently accountable, to listeners rather than to advertisers. Each of these cooperatives faced the same initial argument: the existing system is more efficient, more scalable, and better resourced. The cooperative model is slower, more complicated to govern, and smaller. That is true. The question is what you want the efficiency to serve.
The need is documented. The Support Act Mental Health and Wellbeing survey of 2024 found that almost a fifth of music and creative industry workers reported total annual income below the poverty line.(2) Music Australia's Listening In research found that Australian artists earned $860 million from all music sources in 2023-24, royalties and live performance combined, while the total Australian recorded music market generated $717 million in wholesale sales.(3) The industry is, by its own reporting, flourishing. The artists are not. These two facts are being presented as one story. They are two different stories, and they have different protagonists.
Every subscription decision allocates capital to a particular structure of ownership, a particular model of governance, and a particular answer to the question of who the platform is for. The major platforms were designed by people who wanted to build large technology companies and, in the process, solved a real problem: piracy. Artist welfare and community cultural sovereignty were not the objectives. The objectives were scale, engagement, and return to investors. The platforms achieved all three. What they built along the way was a system that extracts value from artists, routes it through a complex intermediary structure, and delivers a fraction back to the people who created it, while the platform founder uses the surplus to fund autonomous weapons systems. That is not how the brochure described it.
The Pack is designed around different objectives: direct artist compensation, cooperative ownership, community connection, democratic governance. What it offers is not a better version of what the major platforms provide. It offers a different answer to the question of what music infrastructure is for. The defence contracts and the billion-dollar personal investment portfolios are not incidental features of the existing streaming model. They are where the money goes when the model succeeds. The alternative is a platform where the question 'what does the surplus fund?' has a constitutionally determined answer: the sector that generated it. That is the choice. It is, as these things go, a reasonably clear one.
Notes
Resident Advisor — Deerhoof, King Gizzard among artists objecting to Ek's Helsing investment, June 2025. https://ra.co/news/83030
Support Act — Mental Health and Wellbeing in Music and the Creative Industries 2024 survey. https://supportact.org.au/individual-support/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support/mental-health-survey/
The Music Network — Listening In report: Australian artists earned $860 million in 2023-24. https://themusicnetwork.com/australians-actually-love-homegrown-music-listening-in-report/
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