Content

2024

8 SATB choirs and 8ch fm

5’ 33”

Commissioned by:

University of Aberdeen Chamber Choir

More information on electrocd and electroprésence

In May 2024, Daniel Ek, the CEO of the music streaming service Spotify (and, according to Billboard Magazine in 2017, “the most powerful person in the music industry”) posted the following, as part of a post on the social media platform X:

Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.

This angered me on many levels, not just because of the apparent ignorance of how much is spent by musicians on the act of creating music, something that is rather galling with this particular company’s shameful track record for not paying adequate fees to composers. No, the thing that really got to me was the reduction of what I have always understood as music, to the word content.

This piece is a response to Mr Ek’s statement. It is exactly 5’ 33” (or 333 seconds) in length, 333 being the average number of downloads required for a composer to earn £1 from Spotify.

The text is derived from the word “content” itself, reducing it to syllables, letters and phonemes with the eight channel fixed media part made entirely from recordings of the choir uttering those sounds.