This month, indie musicians in San Francisco gathered for a series of talks called Death to Spotify, where attenders explored “what it means to decentralize music discovery, production and listening from capitalist economies”.
The events, held at Bathers library, featured speakers from indie station KEXP, labels Cherub Dream Records and Dandy Boy Records, and DJ collectives No Bias and Amor Digital. What began as a small run of talks quickly sold out and drew international interest. People as far away as Barcelona and Bengaluru emailed the organizers asking how to host similar events.
The talks come as the global movement against Spotify edges into the mainstream. In January, music journalist Liz Pelly released Mood Machine, a critical history arguing the streaming company has ruined the industry and turned listeners into “passive, uninspired consumers”. Spotify’s model, she writes, depends on paying artists a pittance – less still if they agree to be “playlisted” on its Discovery mode, which rewards the kind of bland, coffee-shop muzak that fades neatly into the background.
Artists have long complained about paltry payouts, but this summer the criticism became personal, targeting Spotify’s billionaire co-founder Daniel Ek for his investment in Helsing, a German firm developing AI for military tech. Groups including Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof and Hotline TNT pulled their music from the service in protest. (Spotify has stressed that “Spotify and Helsing are two separate companies”.)
In Oakland, California, Stephanie Dukich read Mood Machine, heard about the boycotts, and was inspired.
Dukich, who investigates complaints against the city’s police, was part of a reading group about digital media at Bathers library. Though she is not a musician, Dukich describes herself, along with her friend and art gallery worker Manasa Karthikeyan, as “really into sound”.
She and Karthikeyan decided to start similar conversations. “Spotify is enmeshed in how we engage with music,” Dukich says. “We thought it would be great to talk about our relationship to streaming – what it means to actually take our files off and learn how to do that together.” Death to Spotify was born.
The goal, in short, was “down with algorithmic listening, down with royalty theft, down with AI-generated music”.
Karthikeyan says the responsibility of quitting Spotify lies as much with listeners as artists. “You have to accept that you won’t have instant access to everything,” she says. “That makes you think harder about what you support.”
But will either musicians or listeners actually have the nerve to actually boycott the app longterm?
Several famous musicians have pulled their catalogues from Spotify with big, headline-grabbing announcements over the years, only to quietly come crawling back to the platform after some time. One of the app’s most popular artists, Taylor Swift, boycotted the service for three years in protest of its unfair payment practices but returned in 2017. Radiohead’s frontman. Thom Yorke, removed some his solo projects for the same reason in 2013, calling Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”; he later put them back.
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell left the app in 2022, citing the company’s exclusive deal with anti-vax podcast host Joe Rogan; both Canadian singer-songwriters contracted polio as children in the 1950s. They, too, later restored their catalogues on Spotify.
Eric Drott, a professor of music at the University of Texas at Austin, says the new wave of boycotts feels different. “These acts are less famous. For years, artists knew streaming wouldn’t make them rich but needed the visibility. Now there’s so much music out there, people are questioning whether it’s doing much for them.”
Will Anderson, frontman of Hotline TNT, says there’s “a 0% chance” his band will return. “It doesn’t make sense for true music lovers to be on there,” he says. “Spotify’s end game is for you not to think about what’s playing.” When the band sold their new record Raspberry Moon directly through Bandcamp and a 24-hour Twitch stream, they sold hundreds of copies and “generated thousands of dollars”.
Others such as pop-rock songwriter Caroline Rose are experimenting too. Her album Year of the Slug came out only on vinyl and Bandcamp, inspired by Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, which was initially available only on YouTube and the filesharing site Mega. “I find it pretty lame that we put our heart and soul into something and then just put it online for free,” Rose says.
Rose is a member of the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), an advocacy group formed at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to protect music workers. Joey DeFrancesco, a member of the punk rock band Downtown Boys and co-founder of UMAW, says the group “unequivocally supports artists taking agency, holding corporations accountable, and making splashes [such as taking music off Spotify] to push back at the company”. At the same time, DeFrancesco says, that kind of individualized boycotting has its “limits”.
“What we try to do in the labor movement and at UMAW is to act collectively,” he adds. Examples include UMAW’s successful campaign (alongside the Austin for Palestine Coalition) to pressure the music festival South by Southwest to drop the US army and weapons manufacturers as sponsors for the 2025 event, and the Living Wages for Musicians Act, sponsored by representative Rashina Tlaib, a bill that would regulate Spotify payouts to artists.
The Death to Spotify organizers say their goal is not necessarily to shut the app down. “We just want everyone to think a little bit harder about the ways they listen to music,” Karthikeyan says. “It just flattens culture at its core if we only stick to this algorithmically built comfort zone.”