Being an independent musician comes with plenty of challenges, but it also comes with privileges, and one of them is that you’re free to speak your mind. You can live by your beliefs. When necessary, you can kick against the pricks. Today, I am joining a growing number of musicians kicking against one prick in particular. I have decided to remove my music from Spotify.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the positive side of streaming. It’s convenient, like having your own radio station. If you’re in a car and you want to hear Beasley Street by John Cooper Clarke – which I often do – it’s there for you. This ease of access is a great thing for the listener.
And it can be a good thing for the artist too, if, after hearing a song on a streaming platform, the listener then buys the album or pays to see the artist in concert. But it’s not so great if streaming is the listener’s only engagement. Because that accessibility means fewer people now buy music via digital download, vinyl or CD – which would be fine, if streaming royalty rates weren’t atrocious.
Spotify pays artists between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. For independent artists – especially those from the Pacific and First Nations communities, and artists without the machinery of major labels – this is insulting and completely unsustainable.
A royalty model that is not sustainable for artists leads to a situation where only the independently wealthy can create music – an outcome that is neither culturally healthy nor desirable. Of course, that’s assuming the independently wealthy musicians are able to fight off the AI-generated music currently crowding on to the streaming platforms.
Don’t think this situation has come about because times are hard for everybody. The music industry is making as much revenue as it did at its 1990s peak, but little of that money is making it through to those who play the instruments or sing the tunes. As musicians, we have been left with little choice but to hold out our begging bowls and tell ourselves that something is better than nothing.
But leaving Spotify is about more than the money. The Spotify chief executive, Daniel Ek, recently led a €600m ($1.07bn) investment in a German defence company called Helsing, which specialises in AI-driven autonomous weapon systems, through his investment firm Prima Materia. Ek is also the chairman of Helsing, having joined the board in 2021 when his investment fund Prima Materia put €100m into the then-startup.
Ek isn’t paid a salary by Spotify – he takes a share of its stock, last year alone cashing out a reported $345m. So here we are, artists helping to build algorithms to sell our music – and the success of that algorithm determines the flow of wealth to a man who invests in building machines that could kill people.
In recent years, we’ve witnessed the horror of AI drone wars in Ukraine and Gaza – children killed and hospitals destroyed with the press of the space bar. Ek is investing in technology that can cause suffering and death. Spotify used to seem like a necessary evil. By association, it now just seems evil.
So I have decided to remove my music from the platform. Many other artists have done the same thing. The removal of my works won’t make any significant dent in the company’s profits. It won’t change my earnings much either, but I can no longer be complicit. I don’t want my songs – some written with survivors of conflict – to enrich a man who helps to fund weapons.
And I am urging everyone else to quit Spotify. There are alternatives. These platforms (what a soulless word) are not perfect, but at least they aren’t owned by individuals who align themselves with the arms race. If you’re an artist, I ask you to think hard about where your music lives. If you’re a listener, consider where your money goes. And as a music industry, let’s think hard about who we take sponsorship from.
We can’t keep handing our creativity, our loyalty and our cash to amoral tech giants who see music as content and war as business. I’d rather earn nothing than profit from destruction. As Deerhoof succinctly put it in their statement on leaving Spotify: “If the price of ‘discoverability’ is letting oligarchs fill the globe with computerised weaponry, we’re going to pass on the supposed benefit.”
David Bridie is an independent musician, producer and installation artist. Across four decades as a band member, solo artist and composer of film and TV soundtracks, he has released more than 30 albums. He is also the founder and artistic director of Wantok Musik Foundation, a not-for-profit music label that records, releases and promotes culturally infused music from Indigenous Australia, Melanesia and Oceania
