Oh, Spotify...
Crissi Cochrane
Note as of February 14, 2022: I’ve decided to keep my music on Spotify because I’ve unfortunately come to the conclusion that it would be too financially injurious for me to take it down at this point. But I love that we’re having more discussions about Spotify’s role in shaping our culture since Neil Young and Joni Mitchell made their departures from the platform.
It’s that time of year again: Spotify Wrapped posts are populating our social feeds, from creators and listeners alike. And alongside those conversations, plenty of posts are also appearing, criticizing the annual exercise as a distraction from the fact that Spotify is part of the culture of platforms that exploit artists, paying very little for streaming and making it much harder for artists to survive.
As in years past, I doggedly navigated the eye-sore of Spotify Wrapped’s presentation for my own music, feeling very conflicted - grateful about some numbers, sad about others, and doubtful that certain ones were really accurate. Overall, a nice diversion from remembering that I only make $0.004 per stream.
I tend to fall asleep while scrolling through Twitter at night. I’m one of those weirdly flawed people who looks at their phone every night before bed, right up until I fall asleep with the phone in my hand. The night after looking at my Wrapped stats, I saw this tweet pop up in my feed:
The tweet shared the news story about Spotify CEO Daniel Ek investing $145M into defence company Helsing, an artificial intelligence defence company, and joining the board. The company plans to use AI to conduct battlefield assessments in warfare.
I felt utterly disgusted reading this. I’ve been directly contributing to Ek’s bottom line, both as a Premium user of Spotify and as a creator who distributes music on the platform. If I’ve earned only a tiny portion (that $0.004 per listen) of the earnings generated by my 13 million streams, what share did Ek take? What percentage of that military investment money was actually generated by my own music?
The fact that artists are inadvertently funding the military industrial complex has to be one of the most injurious ironies I can conceive of - that artists, who form one of the largest blocks of anti-war ideologists in the world, would be exploited for the purpose of making more war, is a gross and villainous scheme.
So, I cancelled my subscription to Spotify. It’s not much, but it’s $143 less that they’ll make from me every year, and I’m not alone - many others are doing the same. I’ve signed up with Deezer, which is actually cheaper per month, and as far as I can tell, it seems like Deezer isn’t run by an egomaniacal super-villain. (Apple, Amazon Music, and YouTube/Google don’t strike me as being much better when it comes to global responsibility.)
I promptly edited my bio everywhere it exists online to remove any mention of my past success on Spotify. It used to be one of the first, if not the very first, line of my biography, but it feels gross to laud that statistic now.
As for my role in this scheme as an artist, I’m seriously considering removing my music from the platform, and others too. I make about $1000/year on streaming platforms, which is not a completely insignificant sum to me, but I’m not sure that it’s worth being complicit in funding literal super-villains. Would it be weird to make my music only available on Deezer, of all streaming platforms? Is Deezer even that much better? It’s hard - a lot of great opportunities have come my way because of Spotify, specifically - I was able to afford the downpayment on my home because of my viral breakout in 2016 on Spotify. But the landscape is so different now - a whopping 90,000 new songs are released every day on Spotify. It’s impossible to stand out in such an endless crush of music. Trying to get on a Spotify-curated playlist is harder than winning the lottery. It’s become a rat race, a losing game, and one of the worst, most soul-crushing parts of being an artist.
I do like the thought of editing my biographies once more, to say instead of “available now on all streaming platforms”, “available now on SELECT streaming platforms”. Time will tell…