NEW YORK — Spotify dismissed CFO Paul Vogel when a video of him dropping a dollar into a subway busker’s guitar case came to light, according to aghast sources within the streaming giant’s offices.
“Our executives are ambassadors of our brand,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. “How does it look when a high-level member of our team is going around paying hundreds of cents to artists. Our shareholders don’t want to see that kind of precedent being set. We pay three-thousandths of a dollar per stream, and there’s Vogel giving a full dollar to a filthy busker? He said he listened to about two and a half songs—that works out to forty cents per song, which is a patently obscene figure.”
Vogel didn’t think he was doing anything wrong at the time, but now admits it was a terrible lapse in judgment.
“I was waiting on the subway platform, and a young woman was playing guitar nearby,” said Vogel, ugly-crying on a park bench. “I saw other people toss some money into her open guitar case, and I did the same without really thinking about it. She just gave a little nod to acknowledge my donation, which struck me as ungrateful. Didn’t she understand how much money I was giving her per song? I got on my train and forgot about the incident until Ek called me into his office and showed me that my transgression had been filmed and put on Tiktok.”
Business Insider editor Gavin Huntington says that with the proliferation of smartphones, employees must always assume they’re being filmed and should behave accordingly.
“It’s unbelievable that an employee at a prestigious company like Spotify would behave in a way that is so flagrantly antithetical to their employer’s mission,” said Huntington. “These sorts of blunders do happen from time to time, though. Recently, a VP at Shell was fired after he admitted to using a solar-powered lantern on a camping trip. The company said they would’ve gladly given him a Shell-branded oil lantern if he needed a light source. Shell was left having to do damage control to explain why one of their own was using the sun as a power source.”
At press time, Spotify announced it would be providing its employees with slivers of pennies to carry should any of them ever feel the urge to give money to a street musician.