I finally cancelled Spotify. I’d been meaning to do this forever, and frankly I’m embarrassed it took me so long. Spotify has been driving down wages for artists far longer than the AI companies, reducing payouts for musicians over the years until most are now making a statistically meaningless amount from the platform; many estimates put the figure as low as $0.003 per stream. In 2024, Spotify stopped paying artists for songs that had fewer than 1,000 streams, despite the fact that 81% of musicians on the platform don’t cross that threshold.
Stories abound of successful artists with millions of monthly listeners can’t afford to take a vacation, a break, or pay rent. The pop star Lily Allen says she makes more money selling pics of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify royalties. Meanwhile, Spotify just raked in nearly $700 million in quarterly profits. It’s rank exploitation. Don’t take it from me, take it from Bjork. Earlier this year, she succinctly described Spotify as “probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians,” thanks to how the company, and the streaming model it normalized, have so completely corroded artists’ incomes over the last decade or so.
Meanwhile, the company declines to label the AI songs that are overrunning the platform and even boosts them into Discover Weekly playlists, incentivizing their spread. Founder and CEO Daniel Ek used his Spotify fortune to invest in a lethal military tech startup, prompting the most recent round of artist boycotts from the platform. I could go on, but that will probably do—Spotify is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley’s engagement with culture and labor condensed into a single platform. Plus, the audio quality sucks.
So why didn’t I go sooner? I justified staying by telling myself I’d use Bandcamp to buy the albums and songs I listened to a lot, which I did, while using Spotify for convenience. That, and the same reasons I still use Gmail: I felt locked in (all those saved songs and playlists) and that the costs of switching would be too high (I would surely lose access to countless songs by switching over). But I am here to tell you today that both of those counts are absolutely false.
Serious question: don’t the artists have the ability to remove their music from Spotify if the deal is so bad? Are they leaving it there for exposure, or does the label require that they publish on Spotify?
yes, and more than a few prominent ones have such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Xiu Xiu, but for most artists it requires negotiation with your label (annoying, not ideal, you don’t have much leverage) and the willingness to take a potentially permanent revenue and recognition hit (Spotify has an estimated 700 million users) in an already difficult business
Interesting for KGLW since they live stream concerts and have released an album for free. I didn’t know that they did that with Spotify.
I imagine most labels have the final say in the matter.
Also, even if artists could take themselves off the platform, I’m not sure that many would. It has the largest market share for music streaming, and it isn’t even close. The artist would be losing a ton of potential listeners and a huge opportunity for new listeners to discover their music.
Furthermore, while Spotify notoriously pays artists much less than they’re worth, they still make some money from it, as opposed to no money. Sure, artists could tell Spotify to shove its pittance of a payout up its theiving ass, but what do they get out of that? Maybe a few existing fans buy the album off Bandcamp when they otherwise wouldn’t have, but how many? Would those sales offset the loss of revenue from streaming? I’m skeptical.
I think you’re on to the answer. An independent artist can remove their work from a platform, but if their label has control then maybe not. Plus, Spotify has a large network effect from the number of users. Meaning greater chance of exposure, but also that there isn’t a precieved loss by having your work on Spotify.