Earlier this month, an event series launched in Oakland called “Death to Spotify”. The forum sold out in just 24 hours, with interested individuals from Detroit to Bangalore, India inquiring about hosting similar talks in their own cities or receiving recordings of the conversations in the series. This comes shortly after Spotify began running ICE recruitment ads, and Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek invested nearly $700 million dollars in Helsing, a German AI startup developing military technology.
This begs the question: how long has this movement been brewing, and how exactly did we get here?
Let’s rewind a bit. To June 1999, exactly. Napster, a peer-to-peer filesharing application that specialized in MP3 files of music, had just launched. Users could download any song, from any artist that was available on the platform, at any time, for free. The service quickly gained popularity, with 80 million registered users at its peak. CD album sales in the US would reach an all-time high a year later, never to reach the same heights again. The service was shut down in 2001 after a lawsuit by the RIAA, but the damage had been done. Although there was certainly merit in the fact that it made art accessible to so many, Napster irrevocably diminished the value of music for years to come. Not only this, but it altered the ways that we actually discover music.
Pre-streaming, music discoverability happened organically. You might stumble upon an article about an up-and-coming band in a music magazine, hear a new song on the radio, or pick up an album at a record store simply because the cover art looked cool. Early internet spaces such as message boards, MySpace, and LiveJournal became communal ways of sharing music in the digital age. Music wasn’t just presented to you, it was something you had to actively seek. In this way, consumption happened a lot slower. Even if you didn’t purchase a tangible item, the internet was still mostly restricted to computers; you didn’t have endless information in your pocket being served to you.
In 2011, Spotify launched as a free, ad-supported music streaming service, with paid subscription tiers offering unlimited ad-free listening and higher audio quality. It was the perfect product for a post-Napster world. Most didn’t mind the ads, and if they did, $9.99 a month would make them disappear. It didn’t matter that users didn’t actually own any of their music library. As one critic put it that same year, “convenience in the form of access will forever trump actual ownership”.
Today, Spotify controls a whopping 31% of the global streaming market, with over 100 million paying subscribers and more than 15 billion euros in annual revenue. In little more than a decade, the platform has fundamentally changed our relationship with music – how we listen, discover, and even value it as art.
Open Spotify (Or Apple Music. If you’re reading this far you’re probably subscribed to at least one streaming service). You’re immediately greeted with mixes and recommendations that are “expertly tailored” to your music profile. The app doesn’t even give you a chance to think before you decide what to play. Chances are, when you “discover” a new song, it’s not something you sought out, it’s just what the app decided to feed to you in that moment.
In Mood Machine, author Liz Pelly exposes some of Spotify’s hidden practices, like favoring inoffensive, algorithm- friendly music that can populate as many curated playlists as possible, even going as far as to produce their own music that meets these requirements. Lately, AI-generated tracks have begun creeping onto playlists on the platform.
Not only does this eat into earnings from real artists, but it incentivizes them, in an already notoriously underpaid, high-stakes industry, to make music that is as acceptable as possible in order to rack up streams and get a shot at success. And even if those artists try their very hardest to homogenize their catalog, there’s no guarantee they’ll be compensated for their work. As of April 2024, Spotify stopped paying royalties for tracks that receive less than 1,000 annual streams.
These algorithms built into the platform have trained our brains to rely on this lazy, low-effort way of interacting with music. If your music discovery is limited to whatever plate Spotify serves you that day, how often are you eating outside of it? Do you remember the last time you went out of the way to listen to an artist not available on streaming services? We risk missing out on so much good art because god forbid, we might have to open another app! What is the cost of convenience?
An increasingly popular trend on social media is “Media I Consumed This Week/Month,” where users share what movies, music, articles, books, etc. they have “consumed” in a given timeframe. At what point does listening to music differ from actually engaging with art versus mindlessly marking off a box because you’ve technically listened to it? At some point doesn’t it all just become background noise?
As seen recently, musicians and listeners are beginning to push back.
In 2020, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers formed amid the COVID-19 pandemic to demand fairer standards for artists and creative workers in the music industry. One of their ongoing campaigns, the Living Wage for Musicians Act, would regulate and raise the rate that artists are paid for each stream across all platforms to 1 cent – up from the current Spotify payout which stands between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream.
More artists are also pulling out of the platform altogether. In the past, a few major names have boycotted Spotify – Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift – but it’s been few and far between, with no positive outcome. Within just the last few months, there’s been a tidal wave: Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Hotline TNT, and, just while I’m writing this, Saetia. Before, most artists who left eventually circled back. But this time, it seems that won’t be the case. As Hotline TNT member Will Anderson put it in the band’s statement, “The company that bills itself as the steward of all recorded music has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it does not align with the band’s values in any way”.
In another form of rebellion, some individuals are making an effort to convert their digital collection to physical media. Unlike streaming, physical formats require deliberate interaction. You must intentionally engage with the musical vessel in order to experience the art (ex. Taking the CD out of its case, popping it into the CD player, pressing the play button). In 2021, vinyl saw its largest sales week since 1991, and in 2022, CD sales increased for the first time since 2005. Platforms like Bandcamp have also helped fans to engage with the art they love while directly supporting artists in a way that earns them money.
The Death to Spotify movement isn’t simply about getting artists more money. It’s about preserving an entire art form before capitalism and greed eat it alive. Yes, music should be accessible, but that shouldn’t be at the expense of artists and consumers. There are still conversations that need to be had about who owes what to whom, accessibility and fair compensation, and how to balance the two.
This responsibility shouldn’t fall on consumers alone. Change needs to come from policymakers, record labels, and streaming services to ensure artists can actually earn a living wage, freeing them from the financial pressures that distort their creativity.
In the meantime, it’s important to support artists in whatever way we can. Pay-what-you-can Bandcamp downloads, attending shows, buying merch – these all fund artists far more than hours of streaming ever could. Art shouldn’t be free, but it should be valued and accessible.
