Intervention: The Swedish Unicorn
In the spring of 2016, a campaign to support Spotify spread across social media in Sweden. On Twitter—and within Stockholm’s hipster business circles—the campaign rapidly became known as #backaspotify, which roughly translates to “encourage Spotify” or “support Spotify.” Curiously, the #backaspotify campaign was a local business action in support of a technology company known as a “unicorn” in the business press because of a market valuation exceeding $1 billion. Prior to the company IPO in April 2018, Spotify was the Swedish unicorn par excellence, and the #backaspotify campaign was a vivid example thereof. The campaign reached a climax when the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, which had already supported the #backaspotify campaign in different ways, hosted a support rally for Spotify with a number of prominent speakers. A dedicated Facebook group promoted the event, and some three hundred people turned up. Maria Rankka, the CEO of the chamber—and, according to rumor, a personal friend of one of Spotify’s cofounders—declared in an interview that “Spotify seemed ready to go from words to action.”1
In hindsight, it is difficult to pinpoint in detail what the #backaspotify campaign was about. It all started with an open letter to the Swedish government from the cofounders of Spotify. A common thread in the discussions that followed was the promotion of a better national business climate, which is why the Chamber of Commerce took an active stance in the debate. Given that Sweden has a long social democratic tradition, it is highly unusual for political demonstrations to be mobilized in support of globally operating media corporations. Nevertheless, the #backaspotify campaign clearly had an ideological slant. The launch of the event at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce demonstrated that #backaspotify was a coordinated operation with the aim of improving the business climate for Spotify and similar corporations.
Figure 0.3
Former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister Carl Bildt speaks at the #backaspotify event at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce on April 22, 2016. Image courtesy of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.
In our project, we began to trace various lobbying activities related to the #backaspotify campaign by closely following its traces in social media, as well as in the trade and daily press. By virtue of the proliferation of digital data and metadata, new ways of studying the interactions of corporate actors have been made available to researchers. Here, we were interested in exploring Spotify’s entanglement in political discourse on Twitter, a social media service that occupies a particular spot in public debates. As Marcel Broersma and Todd Graham have argued, Twitter functions as a “beat” in the everyday work of journalists, as it is both the source of information and a channel for distributing and re-mediating content.2 This beat makes Twitter attractive for the dissemination of political messages. It also makes Twitter suitable for the study of political mobilization. We propose approaching Twitter through a quali-quantitative analytical framework that is sensitive to the context of tweets and the medium specificity of Twitter itself.3 This implies using recorded digital fragments of political speech to map Spotify’s location in a broader sphere of public debate.
At the end of April 2016, we retrieved all tweets related to #backaspotify via the Twitter application programming interface (API) and turned the campaign into a case study. Collaborating with a former project member—the programmer, hacker, and theorist of science Christopher Kullenberg (University of Gothenburg)—we used the Python module Tweepy and downloaded 1,791 tweets by requesting all Twitter messages containing the word backaspotify (which included the hashtag #backaspotify). While the campaign was short-lived and faded out within a few weeks during the late spring of 2016, a broader network analysis of the collected tweets reveals that the #backaspotify campaign is illustrative of Spotify’s political significance in Sweden. The campaign also accentuates the soft power that lies dormant within streaming media corporations.4
For anyone living in Sweden today, Spotify cannot be ignored. According to the annual report Swedes and the Internet, almost 90 percent of the population under thirty-six now uses the service on a weekly basis.5 Almost every day, Spotify-related news items are published in tabloids and trade magazines. During Spotify’s IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2018, a veritable Spotify craze was rampant in Swedish media, with live coverage on both radio and television. A major part of the tech scene revolves around the company and has done so for almost a decade. Thousands of Spotify playlists are featured on national public radio, and the Swedish government regularly boasts about the service. The former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, even introduced a new practice at state visits, offering visiting dignitaries a virtual gift: a Spotify Premium account preloaded with playlists of Swedish music. The Royal Court of Sweden, in turn, maintains a Spotify account for sharing playlists, and Prince Daniel has enlisted Spotify’s cofounder Martin Lorentzon in a program for supporting young entrepreneurs.
It is sometimes argued that Stockholm has produced one of the highest numbers of unicorns per capita in the world—a claim that Swedish politicians are generally keen to pick up on. While Spotify was initially mentioned cautiously during Swedish Parliament debates on digital piracy, parliamentary minutes from the 2010s and onward strikingly reveal how the company gradually came to be seen as the epitome of Swedish high-tech innovation.6 In January 2017, for instance, German chancellor Angela Merkel visited Sweden, and prime minister Stefan Löfven gave a speech at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences: “Innovation is one of the things I personally find most fascinating and inspiring,” he stated. “As the proud founding country of Skype and Spotify, with Stockholm being second only to Silicon Valley in terms of the number of startups per capita in the world, we will continue to foster a development where new ways of thinking and smart solutions are encouraged, from preschools to universities.”7
If Spotify is vividly present in Swedish politics and entrepreneurial discourse, the company is also physically manifest within Stockholm’s cityscape. Spotify’s headquarters is located in the city center at Birger Jarlsgatan 61. The company is spread out on several floors of the building in a characteristic startup environment, complete with open spaces, colorful furniture, and foosball tables. The Stockholm office has been described as “insanely cool” and contains meeting rooms bearing the names of rock songs, such as “Teen Spirit,” “Pretty Vacant,” and “Paranoid.”8 Daniel Ek is usually a low-key person, hardly a prolific agitator who would use Spotify’s political popularity in order to gain advantage. One exception, however, has been the issue of housing, which was also one of the rationales behind the #backaspotify campaign. Ek has often expressed concerns about the housing crisis facing Stockholm because Spotify employees’ struggle to find places to live has allegedly been a recurring human resources problem. In the spring of 2015, for example, it was reported that Spotify had even started its own waiting list since apartments were scarce in Stockholm.9 Given that Stockholm is built on islands, available space for building new apartments is limited, and the real estate market is one of the most overpriced in Europe.
Housing problems were also the main topic of the aforementioned open letter to the Swedish government that Spotify’s cofounders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, published in early April 2016 on the blog platform Medium. The Swedish-language post was titled “We must act or be overtaken!,” indicating that the cofounders meant business:
When we founded Spotify, our dream was to build a company in Sweden that could compete on the highest global level, thereby hopefully inspire others in our country to start a company and make it grow. For us it is crazy that Europe, with a larger population than the United States, does not have a single company in parity with Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and other major US companies. We want to show that it can be done! Having said that, we Swedes have to decide what kind of country we actually want to be. Are we a country that believes that growth will also come from fast-growing new companies, or do we think it’s the traditional industry that will support growth?10
By juxtaposing the interests of high-tech startups with those of “traditional industry,” the open letter articulated three political demands to the Swedish government: housing, taxes, and education—with a special priority given to the first issue. In their letter, the Spotify cofounders explicitly demanded better access to rental apartments in Stockholm to facilitate the recruitment of skilled employees. Rent regulations should be abolished, they argued, allowing for higher rents—and more available apartments—in the city center, as low-income tenants would be forced to move to suburban areas. Ek and Lorentzon also called for lower taxes on employee stock options. In addition, the Spotify cofounders proposed that computer programming should be integrated in the primary school curriculum to meet future demands of the information technology sector. If the Swedish government did not act fast enough in following their advice, there was a risk that “thousands of Spotify jobs” could be relocated “to the United States instead of Sweden.”11
The open letter rapidly received widespread public attention in Sweden and consequently formed the starting point for the #backaspotify campaign; the hashtag started to be used the very same day the letter was published. Almost immediately, a number of Twitter users began linking to Ek and Lorentzon’s post on Medium, with some also tweeting in English: “Spotify founders speak out against Swedish politicians: housing in Stockholm, lack of programmers, and stock option taxation. #backaspotify.”12 The Medium post was also quickly picked up by international journals, such as Newsweek, which stated that startups in Sweden were planning a number of “protests after the founders of Spotify threatened to move the world’s largest music streaming service away from the country unless significant reforms were made.”13 This was an apparent misinterpretation of Ek and Lorentzon’s Swedish letter, which mainly addressed the future location of potential new jobs. Another exaggeration was the reference to the “thousands of jobs” at Spotify; at this time, only about four hundred people were working at the crowded Stockholm headquarters.
In the context of this evolving debate, Maria Rankka, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, stated in an interview that a possible relocation of the Spotify headquarters would be severely “negative for the image of Sweden.”14 Forbes, in turn, interpreted the headquarters relocation as a real threat and stated that Ek and Lorentzon had used their “powerful voices to complain about many issues facing the business community in Stockholm, from education to taxes, and especially … housing.”15 Relocation—flytta in Swedish—came to be one of the most common words used in the almost 1,800 tweets we retrieved, together with words such as business, Sweden, and Spotify. Since the original Medium post extensively elaborated on the housing shortage that faced future Spotify employees, people using the #backaspotify hashtag concluded that the dearth of apartments in the city might cause Spotify to leave Stockholm. Another likely reason that the theme of a housing shortage appeared so frequently was that a number of politicians from the liberal end of Sweden’s political spectrum used Ek and Lorentzon’s open letter to argue for neoliberal housing reforms. “We need Spotify more than Spotify needs us,” Annie Lööf, leader of the Swedish Centre Party, famously wrote in one article.16
Political speech, however, is always enacted by a plurality of actors, and the tweets we had collected made it possible to study interactions and interlinkages within this political discourse. We looked closer at the most frequent speakers in the discussion and their profiles in order to situate the actors in their respective networks. While the most active #backaspotify discussion on Twitter lasted little more than a week, its emergence and disappearance renders visible a list of actors—detectable as Twitter users—in a network. Even if this specific and unstable actor network has now perished, a recorded database of the interactions (such as the one we collected from Twitter) can be used to reconstruct debates and map other, more stable political networks. It can also be used as a way to understand the broader political significance of Spotify, as well as its role as a political idea and arena.
One point of departure was to interrogate the profiles of the most frequent Twitter users in the #backaspotify discussion. Among these were users Fredrik Andersson (@Feffe2010), Diana Van (@MissDianaVan), Klas Vestergren (@kvestergren), and Andre Frisk (@Andrefrisk)—who, to our surprise, all worked at Miltton Labs, a firm that promises to deliver “cutting-edge digital public affairs, and develop proprietary digital tools … inspired by how Spotify turned the music industry on its head.”17 Another notorious tweeter during the #backaspotify campaign was Gustaf Reinfeldt (@GustafReinfeldt). Not only is he the son of Fredrik Reinfeldt, former Swedish prime minister and the leader of the liberal-conservative Moderate Party, he was also hired by Miltton Labs just as the #backaspotify campaign was coming to an end. As figure 0.4 demonstrates, several of the most frequent pro-Spotify tweeters were associated with, or worked for, right-wing political parties, in particular the youth branches of the liberal-conservative Moderate Party and the center-right liberal Centre Party.
An extended but graphically simplified network of some of the most frequent tweeters during the #backaspotify campaign.
The dynamics of online discussions, however, are more illuminating than the participants themselves. Participation in online discussions can reveal interesting patterns of interaction between the actors that encircle the #backaspotify discussion on Twitter. So-called in-degree networks, for example, measure the number of incoming links. When retweets are included as in-degree factors, they can be used to determine popularity or influence in a similar manner as citations are used in scientific literature or web pages are ranked in search engines. This method helped us identify actors in the #backaspotify campaign who were, whether intentionally or unintentionally, principal interlocutors. For example, Annie Lööf’s tweet (figure 0.5), which included a picture of herself, received 137 tweets, including retweets.18 Still, she actively tweeted only five times during the campaign.
“Sweden needs fast-growing companies more than they need Sweden. #backaspotify”—Tweet from Annie Lööf, leader of the Swedish Centre Party, on April 15, 2016. Image courtesy of the Centre Party.
In a similar manner, Linda Nordlund, an editorial columnist at the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and previously the leader of the youth branch of the Liberals, achieved a very high in-degree status when her following tweet was retweeted sixty-five times: “Wait time for rental apartment: Berlin – 0 w[eeks], NYC – 0 w[eeks], Brussels – 0 w[eeks], Stockholm (county) – 208 weeks. Guess why businesses are moving? #backaspotify.”19 However, not all in-degrees were the result of a successful interaction. The official Twitter account of the Swedish Social Democrats (@socialdemokrat) did not tweet about #backaspotify at all but received many critical tweets from the conservative party’s youth section (@mufswe), which basically argued that social democratic politics were undermining business in Sweden.
Social media services such as Twitter encourage this type of tongue-in-cheek dialogue. Among other aspects of the #backaspotify campaign was a playlist that the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce circulated on Spotify, entitled “#backaspotify.” It featured pop songs that in various ways alluded to the idea of Spotify abandoning Sweden: first on the list was “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. A few #backaspotify memes also circulated. The youth wings of the three center-right parties in Sweden produced meme-style images in support of Spotify. One slogan read, “Backa bakåt or #backaspotify” (Go backward or support Spotify), with backwardness illustrated by a cassette tape. Another meme (figure 0.6) pictured the current Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, holding an old-fashioned cassette tape in his hand, asking himself, “Vad är problemet?” (What’s the problem?).20
#backaspotify and the local production of memes: “Vad är problemet?” (What’s the problem?), the Swedish prime minister and Social Democrat, Stefan Löfven, asks in a twitter meme from @Rodgronrora.
By advocating a more liberal business climate, the #backaspotify campaign clearly had an ideological purpose. Swedish right-wing parties simply saw the opportunity to align themselves with a globally successful company, using Spotify to try to gain approval for entrepreneurial political ideas. Since the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce is the leading business organization in Sweden’s capital region, its active role during the campaign was not surprising. But our network analysis of retrieved tweets from #backaspotify also reveals a number of distinct links to persons and organizations on the right wing of the political spectrum.
Surprisingly, Spotify itself did not take part in the #backaspotify campaign in any visible way. After publishing their open letter, Ek and Lorentzon remained silent. One concrete blowback against Spotify nevertheless arose when it became publicly known that the company—despite its complaints about Stockholm’s housing deficiencies—had turned down an offer from Järfälla municipality to rent twenty-four newly built apartments for its employees.21 Järfälla is a well-connected suburb, and the commute to Spotify’s headquarters would have been only twenty-five minutes long, which is considerably shorter than the average commute for residents in the Stockholm area. That Spotify declined to accept these apartments led to a discussion about the role of urbanity in attracting skilled employees in a global labor market. Supporters of the #backaspotify campaign defended Spotify’s decision. It would be “embarrassing” for Spotify to offer employees housing in a suburb such as Järfälla, tweeted a representative of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprises.22 And the most influential of Sweden’s editorial pages, Dagens Nyheter, wrote, “An international company, with employees who choose between living in New York, San Francisco, and Stockholm, cannot direct people to a suburban bed. Especially for the young, the city is an attraction and an employee benefit in itself.”23
As our intervention demonstrates, the #backaspotify campaign sheds light on the political significance of Spotify in Sweden. It shows that the company can be linked to elite lobbying efforts and political strategies that go way beyond the music industry or even the tech sector. Within such a discourse, Spotify appears as a national icon, a disruptive entrepreneurial hero, and a pioneering industry actor with preeminent importance for the future of the Swedish economy. Through the Twitter campaign, Spotify was also deeply drawn into party politics, as manifested by the participation and utterances of politicians from centrist and right-wing parties. What mobilized political discourse over the course of the #backaspotify campaign were mainly the conditions of entrepreneurship. This shows how Spotify is not simply a tech company but an actor around which larger political claims may be formed. By intervening in—and carefully unpacking—the actions that occurred around the #backaspotify campaign, an image of Spotify as a locus for political tension arises. Notably, music was hardly mentioned at all in these discussions. Apart from the occasional reference to pictures of cassette tapes it remains somewhat ironic that Spotify was nevertheless always framed and portrayed as the future of music distribution.