Why is Spotify held to a different standard than Meta?

PLUS: Why I’ve stopped responding to pitches from PR agencies

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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Let’s jump into it…

Why is Spotify held to a different standard than Meta?

Spotify increased its payouts to music rights holders by a whopping $1 billion in just the last year:

In 2014, the music industry reached a low point when global recorded music revenues hit $13 billion … Spotify’s annual contribution at the time was around $1 billion, with around 15 million paying subscribers. In 2024, Spotify alone paid out a record $10 billion to the music industry — totaling nearly $60 billion since our founding.

For a lot of people, those numbers might go in one ear and out the other. And they’d perhaps ask why Spotify keeps shouting about it. It’s because the system we’ve built together is working, and where we are now is only the beginning. Today, there are more than 500 million paying listeners across all music streaming services. A world with 1 billion paying listeners is a realistic goal we should collectively set.

The company pretty much singlehandedly reversed the decline of the music industry and got consumers to start paying for music again. And yet it's consistently attacked by musicians for not paying enough to artists. Meanwhile, platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Snapchat collectively generate annual revenue north of $150 BILLION, and yet they share pennies on the dollar with the creators that provide them with nearly all their value. Why are these platforms held to a completely different standard? Imagine if the largest creators criticized these platforms with the same frequency that musical artists criticize Spotify?

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At this point I’ve probably interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.

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The term “mainstream media” is becoming an anachronism

It's been only a few hours since Jim Acosta announced his departure from CNN and he's already officially launched his Substack.

I think it's telling that these media stars don't even bother looking for other jobs before launching their own independent outlets; that's not to say his agents won't continue shopping around for deals, but my guess is that any future legacy media contract would operate in parallel to what he's building on his own.

Paul Krugman. Jen Rubin. Jim Acosta. All these jumps from legacy media outlets happened within just the last few weeks, and they were all completely voluntary. This is just such a rapid shift in power and influence from traditional outlets to independent media. This should be an exciting time for those frustrated by the mainstream media’s stranglehold on both political and cultural narratives.

Speaking of Paul Krugman…

Years ago, the New York Times allowed Paul Krugman to launch his own blog on the NYT website, and he used it to nerd out, effectively giving the newspaper a lot of extra content that he wasn't contractually obligated to write. Then the Times shuttered the blog in 2017, so Krugman launched a Substack so that he had a place to channel all this extra energy. His bosses were agitated by this, so they reluctantly gave him his own NYT newsletter, which made him happy again. THEN they shuttered the newsletter, once again angering him/

Here’s his recounting of the incident:

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

If you have a huge star columnist who's champing at the bit to give you a lot of free extra content, why on earth would you deny them that opportunity?

Creator incentives actually work

This is a great overview of Fortnite's creator program, which allows individual users to create their own games within the Fortnite universe. Not only are there 37 creators now generating over $1 million through the program, but a whopping 36.5% of Fortnite playtime is within these creator-made games. In total, Fortnite shared over $350 million with these creators.

This just underscores a point I make over and over again in my newsletter: when a platform makes a genuine effort to share revenue with creators, those creators do everything they can to enhance the value of the platform.

Why AI slop will never be very profitable

G/O Media once again got caught publishing AI-generated slop, this time on its business news site Quartz:

Its articles, penned in bland and formulaic text, field the business news gamut; the site's AI previously only generated standardized corporate earnings updates, but recently began to include full-fledged news hits. At the foot of each article is a telling disclaimer disclosing the use of AI and warning of its likely pitfalls.

"This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting," reads the disclaimer. "While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we'll always be successful in that regard."

Here's what the purveyors of AI slop can't seem to grasp: Let's say AI does reach a point where it's not so error prone; what would differentiate your AI-generated content from all the other AI-generated content out there? You would have access to the exact same LLM models as all your competitors, which means you're just competing with millions of versions of the same article.

The only advantage you could possible have over the others is slightly better marketing arbitrage, but that's going to be constantly undermined as platform algorithms change and other companies keep copying your marketing playbook. There's absolutely no scenario where you capture enough market share of the AI slop ecosystem to profitably monetize your content. It's all just a race to the bottom.

Why TV news dragged its feet on a digital transition

The UK broadcaster Sky News plans to launch some sort of digital paywall now that its current revenue streams are “largely stagnant”:

In a speech to staff on Tuesday, David Rhodes, executive chair of the Comcast-backed news broadcaster, laid out a strategy dubbed Sky News 2030 that will reshape its digital-focused service over the next five years to attract new audiences willing to pay for news … This is expected to include some subscription-based services where premium content is held back for paying customers.

It's a testament to how lucrative the linear TV news market was that companies like CNN and Sky are only now, in the year 2025, devoting significant resources to building out true digital-first businesses.

It's especially egregious that it took CNN so long given that it spent the last 25 years operating the most popular English-language news website in existence. It had every advantage that would have allowed it to build a hugely profitable digital business, but its executives were so laser focused on Nielsen ratings that they failed to realize the huge opportunity that was staring them right in the face.

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Behind the paywall

Here’s what’s on deck for paying subscribers:

1. Why I’ve stopped responding to pitches from PR agencies

2. Every freelancer should start a paid newsletter

3. Did the media industry ever support large-scale fact-checking?

4. Are “star” journalists hollowing out the media outlets they work for?

Why I’ve stopped responding to pitches from PR agencies

Semafor profiled Shawn Ryan, a podcaster who built up a huge audience by interviewing veterans. What I found particularly interesting is how he chooses his guests: