What sparked this week’s Sunday Thoughts piece was a social media post suggesting that the person making it was cancelling their well-known streaming service subscription because they objected to some investments the owner of that service was allegedly making.

It was’t dramatic, it stuck to the facts, and there was no shouting about it. And, surprisingly, there was not all that much pile on from other folk as there often is on socials. It was just a simple statement. I am cancelling my subscription because I am not comfortable with this situation. Fair dos.

And I looked at the social media post, and I thought about it. And thinking about it raised a question, and exploring that question brought up more and more questions, so please indulge me if this gets a bit rambling – I have questions!

We have seen artists removing their catalogues from Spotify recently, too. The issue, as I discovered through trying to answer my many questions, centres around Daniel Ek’s apparent investment activity, particularly in companies developing AI-driven military and defence technologies. Some artists have decided that they do not want their music on a platform whose head honcho is financially involved in industries they oppose. Fair dos, again.

I fully “get” this stance. Pop music has a rich history of protest and anti-war sentiment going back decades, if not to the beginning of folk and popular music. There is not that much to write about when it boils down to it: boy meets girl, love, why is my country involved in killing apparently innocent people, young girls playing with precious stones in the air? The whole hippy movement was built on being anti the Vietnam War… and drugs… and free love.

That is a clear moral position – not the free love and the drugs, the removal of your content from a platform you have moral issues with. You may agree with it or you may not, but it is at least coherent and consistent.

But what about the rest of us? Do we really care all that much?

That is not meant as a cynical or pointed question. It is a genuine one.

Do we really care all that much beyond the odd social post? Is wearing a virtual (pin) badge enough?

Streaming has become so normal, so much a part of our everyday lives, that it hardly feels like a “thing” anymore. It is just there. You wake up, you tap an app, music plays. You are in the car, you tap a screen, music plays. It does not feel like handing over money in the same way as buying a record does. It feels like access to a service rather than a purchase. It’s like turning the tap on for water; you pay your monthly bill, you expect water to flow. Beyond that, your involvement is pretty much non-existent, and you don’t really care how it all happens, so long as it happens.

And when something feels automatic, we don’t really stop to ask questions, if indeed you think we should be asking questions in the first place.

Most people using a streaming service are thinking about what to listen to on a run, or what to put on while cooking, or what playlist to send to a mate. They are not thinking about venture capital, shareholdings, and investment portfolios. That does not make them uncaring. It just means daily life is busy, and you can’t analyse everything you get involved in buying.

If we are honest, the evidence suggests that most listeners are not cancelling en masse. Headlines flare up, as they do. Social media has its bit of a moment, as it often does. Subscriber numbers remain huge, as they are likely to continue to. In other subject areas, there might be a call for the inevitable “thoughts and prayers”. But not much else before we move en masse to the next “big issue” of the morning.

So then we get to the awkward bit.

Should we actually care?

If you believe money is not neutral and that its use has consequences, then it is reasonable for us to ask where it ultimately flows. We talk about ethical food, ethical clothing, and ethical sourcing. Why should culture, and specifically music, be exempt from that discussion?

But then we have to ask how far that logic goes. If you start tracing ownership and investment chains, you’re bound to discover that very few large companies exist in splendid, guilt-free isolation. There are funds, holdings, cross investments, and minority stakes. The modern corporate world is not tidy, and it’s there to serve one purpose – to make money for the shareholders.

So are we prepared to follow every thread and every investment chain? Or do we draw a line where it becomes inconvenient or a bit uncomfortable? Let’s be honest, how many of you reading this have looked into how your pension fund is invested? I’m not sure I have, though I am aware ethical investment funds for pensions are a thing, so there’s no real excuse on my part, I’m afraid.

Which brings me, inevitably, to HiFi.

If a well known HiFi manufacturer’s parent company was investing in something controversial, would we react differently?

My instinct is that we might. Perhaps.

HiFi is rarely an impulse purchase – the price makes it such. We do research. We compare products. We read reviews. We justify it to ourselves in many different ways. We talk about brand values, about heritage, about who is behind the company. We get a bit nerdy about it all. We like to believe we are supporting engineers, designers, and small teams. The back story matters almost as much as the specifications in some cases.

So if that back story suddenly included something ethically uncomfortable, it would feel a tad more personal. Perhaps.

But here is the thing. Many HiFi brands already sit inside the larger corporate structures – I touched on earlier in this piece. Investment groups. Private equity. International holdings. Much like our pension funds, we don’t always ask what else sits in those portfolios. We are happy to focus on the product in front of us. Some might say “rightly so”, and others might have a different opinion. Would that change if the investment were more visible? More out front and obvious. More politically charged? Or would we decide that the bit of kit on our rack is far enough removed from whatever is happening at the corporate level for it not to matter?

I did warn you that this subject brought up more questions than answers!

It is easy to say we would take a stand. It is harder when that stand involves not buying the thing we have been saving up for and really lust after.

Perhaps the difference between streaming and HiFi is not morality but scale. A small monthly subscription feels like “not a lot”. A big HiFi purchase feels like an investment of real money. One feels disposable and apart from real decision-making. The other feels like part of your personal identity, and so perhaps it should matter more – if you are that way inclined.

But both are choices. And both are consumer choices. Just like the dozens of consumer choices we make every single day of our lives. I recall at uni a lecturer making the statement that every buying decision you make in the supermarket is a political decision, and I guess they were kind of right.

There is also a generational and age element, I think. Younger listeners are often quicker to express ethical concerns publicly. Audiophiles, generally, we are a tad longer of tooth, may prioritise engineering over corporate politics. That is not a criticism, by the way, it’s just an observation about where different groups place their emphasis. I’m not saying that one is right and the other is morally corrupt.

So I find myself with more questions than answers, and this is not unusual for me when I am writing and researching these Sunday Thoughts pieces.

Do consumers of music care? Some obviously do. Many perhaps have not thought about it very deeply, if at all.

Should they care? That depends on how consistent you think we need to be with our principles and how deeply we bother to look.

It is easy to debate a global streaming platform that feels a bit invisible beyond the user interface. It is harder when the question lands in our own listening rooms and sits there, staring and judging us from our racks for the next few years. Or is it?

I am not offering a verdict this week, and I am not suggesting we should all be morally outraged at this or that. I am just asking a question.

If we want to hold the platforms that deliver our music to account, are we prepared to apply the same standard to other areas of our lives, including the kit we spend our hard-earned cash on?

Stu

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