Leaving/Boycotting Spotify
On July 1st, two years after I left the platform as a consumer and after six months of deliberating, I finally submitted the request to remove my two solo albums from Spotify. I also successfully helped keep the New Grown-Ups new album off the platform, save for a couple teaser tracks.
I’m a folky small fry, and my listener audience on it never seemed to go above 150 a month. Both my albums predate the big discovery phase where lots of niche artists would get some good traction through playlist features. Then of course they decided to stop paying out the pennies they were paying on any tracks that got under 1,000 streams a year. I went from getting a little streaming money to none. Still, I held off on removing my music until now because of that whole “exposure” factor.
Then this year came all the news about Spotify heavily featuring royalty-free faceless music they were underpaying real artists to crank out. Then it became news about all the AI slop taking over the platform. (Look up Velvet Sundown if you want to have a laugh.) Then it was revealed that CEO Daniel Ek is invested in AI weaponry. Finally, it was way beyond enough.
Liz Pelly has been doing great journalism on the subject, including her book Mood Machine. If you’re not a big reader, she’s done a slew of interviews and appearances very worth checking out.
I say all this not to shame anyone who still uses it. I get it - it's hard to shift when you've been using it for a long time, and goddamn, it is convenient. I know a ton of musicians who still use it, of all people! I'm mostly giving you all a heads up in case you listen to me over there. I lifted the streaming limit on Bandcamp so everyone can have unlimited free listens. That's how much I'd rather you use the Bandcamp app if you're not already.
You can still find my music for streaming on YouTube Music, Apple, and everywhere else. Just not Spotify. Listen, I know Google and Apple are probably no better as companies than Spotify. And obviously the streaming model is still devaluing art and screwing a lot of creators. But I find Spotify, with all the aforementioned issues plus the CEO’s openly dismissive attitude towards the work of artists, to be especially heinous.
I can’t tackle it all as a single, niche musician with a small audience who still needs to participate in the system, but I can at least do this.
And I won't lie, if I can influence anyone else to stop using it and switch to Tidal or Bandcamp, I would be very pleased. Support the artists you love directly.
