How to quit Spotify
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Music streaming service
15 min read
The article centers on Spotify's exploitative payment structure to artists. Understanding the economics of streaming royalties, how per-stream payments are calculated, and the historical evolution of digital music compensation would provide essential context for readers wanting to understand why artists like Björk and Lily Allen criticize the model.
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Bandcamp
13 min read
The author recommends Bandcamp as the primary alternative for supporting artists directly. Readers would benefit from understanding Bandcamp's unique artist-friendly revenue model, its acquisition by Epic Games and later sale to Songtradr, and how it differs structurally from streaming platforms.
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Daniel Ek
12 min read
The article mentions Spotify's founder investing in 'lethal military tech' (Helsing AI) which sparked artist boycotts. Understanding Ek's background, his vision for Spotify, and his controversial investments would give readers deeper insight into the company's leadership and values.
Happy Thanksgiving break to all my friends, comrades, coders, and luddites. Thankful for all of you readers fighting for the user out there. With that, here’s a special Black Friday edition of Blood in the Machine.
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 who 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, has 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
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