Why I left Spotify
Enough is enough. I’ve left Spotify and pulled my music and poetry podcast.
I’m not going to give a lot of disclaimers here (the info is not hard to find), but it’s pretty crystal clear now that Spotify doesn’t give a $h¡t about creators because all hail the almighty dollar (as usual).
In a nutshell, here’s a part of what’s happening: Spotify creates and/or employs “ghost artists”, which may be human or A.I., to flood the Spotify platform with muzak, and then they add mostly those tracks to playlists, which they then heavily promote—especially in the sense of passive listening, because that results in more streams.
This way, when they pay the ‘artists’ that get most of the streams, they’re basically paying themselves, because they’ve either created or hired these artists to create that content. (As opposed to promoting active listening where a user might go and search for a real band and listen to their entire catalogue of music.) The outcome is that Spotify gets paid, and real musicians don’t.
That’s probably the core issue of malpractice, but it is not the only serious one. Spotify also recently added podcasts to their arsenal, and used a royalties law loophole to further dilute the pool of money from which artists can get paid. They also recently changed their policy so that smaller artists much reach a ceiling in order to make any streaming royalties at all.
So the end result is that the money which was getting paid to artists now gets paid to Spotify. Thanks, Spotify, for creating a platform you could use to launder and steal the money meant for artists to pocket it for yourself. The fact that this is not only somehow legal, but celebrated as “industrious” in this society is beyond my understanding. But this is the result of unchecked capitalism I guess.
NONE of this is good for artists or creators. It’s all good for Spotify’s leadership and shareholders.
I could no longer be a part of it. I use Apple Music as my primary streaming platform, and a few years ago, I began to buy physical media to play at home. I removed my poetry podcast from Spotify, as well as my entire music catalogue. I won’t be publishing anything there anymore. I hope it devolves into a graveyard of barely-alive music-bots and everyone gets the message that real music doesn’t live at Spotify.
This behavior should be illegal. (I can’t believe it’s not.) At best, it’s blatantly immoral. Unquestionably, it’s anti-creative. Spotify’s shareholders, leadership and the FTC hold the power. Do better.
What can you do?
If you care about human-created art, then you should leave Spotify, too. To support creators, go to their primary websites and buy directly from them. Don’t stream their music, go to their website or Bandcamp and buy the digital download. (Apple Music is one platform which still lets you add your own digital music to your library.) Buy merch. Subscribe directly to their podcast using a known-good streaming tools.
Want to learn more? probably start with the book: