Why I quit Spotify
A love affair sours.
Last week, I cancelled my paid subscription to Spotify, and I transferred that monthly budget payment – along with all my playlists, and fave songs, artists, and albums - to another, lesser-known streaming service.
My love affair with Spotify played out like something of a teenage love affair with the popular girl [substitute teenage sexual object of your own desire]. It began with feigned disinterest, transformed into admiration, entered a phase of lust and infatuation, soured from a sense of disrespect and lack of loving reciprocation, an increasing awareness that my lover has been fooling round, and has ended, shall we say, acrimoniously and abruptly from my end, though I suspect my spurned lover will not notice my absence, despite the rather pathetic pleas that suggest otherwise, under the account ‘Spotify Cares,’ ironically.
But before considering why I left Spotify, let’s consider why I subscribed in the first place. I can’t remember how far back it was that I was first alerted to Spotify’s specific attractions. But I remember who it was: Ben Wardle asked me in an e-mail if I’d tried it out because, and I paraphrase given that even I don’t hoard e-mails from at least a decade back, it was “incredible” or “amazing” or some other suitably exclamatory adjective.
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Ben is a former A&R manager who signed the likes of Sleeper and the Wannadies and back in the 1990s, moved into music journalism and has written well-received books about Wire’s Pink Flag album and Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis.1 In other words, he is a music obsessive who has always understood the importance of music makers, and he loves records, that physical medium most of us here all grew up on: he would not have recommended anything that he thought was setting out to harm the creative milieu in which he had long immersed himself.
Indeed, one reason Spotify thrived where other nascent platforms faltered was that it secured a ground-breaking deal with the major record companies which had been wary of the streaming concept ever since Napster revealed the appeal of easy access to digital music, securing access to their back catalogues in part by exchanging stock in the company. (Alone of three major record company conglomerates, Universal has held on to its shares, currently 3.5% of Spotify stock and worth over $2billion.) Launched in 2008, Spotify was an overnight sensation, an instant number 1.
Still, I didn’t buy straight into Ben’s enthusiasm for this new streaming platform: I quite like being late to the party, besides which, Spotify felt like more of a European phenomenon, understandably so given that the company is based in Sweden. I carried on digesting music via the records and tapes and CDs that sat on my shelves, along with an increasing volume of MP3s sitting on my hard drive, which I religiously synced up to my various forms of iTunes and iPods and my iPod Touch - still my favourite of the bunch - and eventually an iPhone itself, at least all the way through our world travels in 2016.
But there’s a tipping point for all of us, I duly made the sideways leap from MP3 to streaming – my records and CDs and tapes have not been adversely affected - and subscribed to Spotify. Because, for all that iTunes had served a solid purpose for me, as had my various physical iThings, and despite the fact that Apple Music had launched in 2015, alongside other competitors, it felt too late: Spotify had got it right.
Spotify made streaming easy. They made it fun. They allowed for users to create playlists and share them with other users, which was not just more fun, but also an ingenious business model: our Rock Academy setlists are all created and shared on Spotify, for example, thus guaranteeing that every year, our new students or their parents sign up for some form of subscription. Even now, Spotify makes it easiest to share playlists on a platform like Substack, which is partly why I have done so on such a consistent basis this past year, and have done so once more above, because these are 102 of some favourite songs of 2024 so far that are on the platform and I appreciate they can help me share great music. Feel free to shuffle, and dig!
Spotify also created its own playlists, and I came to appreciate (and may yet come to miss) my weekly Release Radar, which made a point of including new music from the artists that I followed, or had otherwise been playing, and which aggregated information from my listening habits to suggest further new (and too often, more old) music in a similar vein. I especially love it when Spotify puts my own new release top of my Release Radar - wouldn’t you?
I also allowed Spotify to play on automatically when my chosen albums or setlists concluded, and occasionally it produced seismic results: like the day when Young Noel and I were in the car, and after either a Pixies or Radiohead album concluded, Spotify followed on with Placebo, and my 14–15-year-old son fell in love with that band there and then, to the point that he released an EP of Placebo covers, entitled Extended Placebo logically enough, completed just before his 16th birthday. It’s really good. Obviously, it’s on Spotify. You can listen below, and yes, on Spotify:
Noel’s EP did pretty well, but like my own 2020s acts The Dear Boys and Hudson Palace, he has yet to see a penny in income. After all, you’d have to be living under a rock not to be aware that streaming royalties are mere pennies on the penny per play. Looking at my own latest statements for Apocalypse, the 1980s band I was in for which we recently secured the rights and re-released our compilation two years back, and which has generated reasonable play with a couple of tracks on compilations and other playlists, a single stream can result in as little as $0.00007395 (from a Spotify ad-supported track in the Philippines) all the way up to whopping $0.012 (over a cent!) for a subscription track on Apple UK. Unfortunately, as yet, none of my acts has yet reached the $20 threshold at which our digital distributor, Soundrop, pays out to its artists. So I have not made a penny in streaming income for all the hard work put into that process of re-ownership, publication and administration. And yet I persist.
The above variations in income are not because one platform pays less of its receipts to the rights-holders: all of them pay out approximately 70%, the same rate that goes to publisher for eBooks. While this page dives deep into each platform’s accounting mechanics and this one appears to explain Spotify’s especially complicated process, most musicians know that Spotify’s lower pre-stream rates are due to its popularity, and the fact that the more time everyone spends on Spotify, the lower the royalty per song that they listen to.
This helps explain why so many of us who bitch about our lack of income in general nonetheless have maintained a paid subscription to Spotify in particular, because we have enjoyed what it’s offered us as consumers. Musicians have also come to cautiously, enthusiastically or cynically appreciate what it offered as artists, who are actively encouraged to post bios, images, tour dates, merch, and even create their own playlists for their landing page. You can read more on this aspect, as well as my general enthusiasm for streaming, from my very first post on Substack, which I have removed from the archive paywall for now.
Of course, I’m not naïve. Spotify is a business. It exists to make money. It makes that money from a combination of paid subscribers and the advertising that come with free subscriptions, and it introduced its various consumer and artist-friendly features in pursuit of ever-increasing market share that would enable it to make ever more money. And there is no question but that Spotify generates income. Jawdropping amounts of income. Twice as big as either of its nearest rivals, Apple Music or Ten Cent Music (owners behind Tik Tok), with 30% market share both in the US and across the globe, Spotify grossed €13.24 billion Euros in 2023, or $14.36 billion. That is approximately 20% more than the biggest music company in the world, Universal Music Group (which has a similar market share as Spotify of its own, recording industry, around 30%), thus confirming, from my layman’s seat, that there is currently more money to be generated from streaming “content” than there is in owning the rights to it.
I guess all of that is a lengthy preamble (sorry!), a justification for my initial infatuation, and a brief explanation of Spotify’s income and payouts. Now it’s time to explain why I quit. If there has been no single incident, there have been enough significant ones, and increasingly frequent ones at that, for me to realize that my loyalty is untenable.
1. Even as the term “professional musician” has become something of an oxymoron for all but the top 1% of music makers, in large part because to the decimation of record sales via streaming, Spotify found $50 million to lure podcast host Joe Rogan. If Spotify had that kind of cash sitting around for investment, imagine all the ways it could have supported those suffering, everyday “working” musicians: indeed, perhaps it could have supported everyday working podcast hosts, people like myself who don’t even get pennies on the penny for their podcast streams. And while funneling that much money to any one individual feels fundamentally wrong, funneling it to someone like Rogan, with his dubious conspiracy theories, felt extra egregious. But hey: Capitalism. So, I held my nose in the name of free speech and the free market. The same free market indulgence of free speech that brought us Donald fucking Trump and may yet do again.
2. Spotify’s decision to eliminate royalties for songs with less than 1000 plays a year. Sad to say, this decision impacts on much of the music with my name on it. But for all that that makes me feel small and unloved, I am at least in very good company, because according to even its own announcement of the royalty change, sandwiched in-between two legitimate attempts to stop scammers trying to game the system, well over two-thirds of the 100,000,000+ songs hosted by Spotify generate less than 1000 plays a year, each song averaging only $0.03 in royalties annually. The company (further) justified its move, announced last November and implemented this April, by noting that financially, the change only applied to 0.5% of its actual royalty payouts, which we can take as evidence that songs garnering billions of plays exponentially over-compensate in income for the tens of millions of songs that garner <1000 plays. Spotify additionally noted, not inaccurately, that the vast majority of rights-holders don’t earn from these <1000 plays anyway, given that, per Soundrop as referenced above, most distributors and record companies have a minimum threshold for royalty pay-outs.
Still, there is something disingenuous about Spotify’s claim that this change is somehow insignificant and indeed, that by diverting the $40,000,000 in question each year towards those already generating income, they would now benefit “those most dependent on streaming revenue.” There are many musicians on the margins, gaining a few hundred plays per song every year, and perhaps for an entire catalogue, who might argue that they, in fact, are most dependent on streaming revenue for mere recognition that their music has financial worth, but that they will now have to fight harder than ever, i.e. self-promote on Spotify harder than ever, to break that 1000-play threshold and actually even see a royalty statement. In the meantime, they feel belittled, rendered irrelevant, and financially considered worthless. It’s an insult.
3. Spotify’s dubious steps towards artificial muzak content. For this, I invite you to view Ted Gioia’s recent conversation with Rick Beato (it should start at the relevant moment), in which Gioia notes that a single Swedish producer, Johann Röhr, has achieved 15 billion streams on Spotify, more than Michael Jackson, Elton John or Abba. But across some 656 aliases.
Pointing out that Spotify is itself Swedish, that the producer’s music shows up regularly on Spotify-generated playlists, 144 of them at last count, sometimes occupying as much as 40% of a single Spotify-generated playlist, Gioia suggests that Spotify is hiring said producer to create modern muzak for which it need not pay royalties, via whatever deal it may have struck with said producer (and potentially others).
There is every likelihood this is true. Spotify offers hundreds of playlists, one for every sub-mood, and for every music fan like you and I who searches out new releases for something exciting, there are those who simply hit the ‘Chill playlist’ at their workplace and let Spotify do the rest. Indeed, it would be interesting to know what percentage of Spotify stream-time is actively chosen by music-hungry consumers and what percentage is simply absorbed via the platform’s playlists by passive consumers. Given what we have seen so far, Spotify seems quite eager to create owning, controlling and therefore earning more from and paying out less for its content. It’s business, and it may be legal. But it feels artistically and financially immoral.
4) Spotify’s decision to shift money from songwriters to audio books. It’s logical that a company which found $50,000,000 for Joe Rogan alone would want to expand into audio books, potentially eating into Amazon, Audible and Apple’s shares of this ever-growing market. But by playing with the legalese, and “bundling” the books into the premium subscription service that I held until last weekend, Spotify was able to engage in some creative accountancy, and reduce payments to songwriters in the process. Billboard angrily called out the streaming platform for the blunt ledger-shifting that just went into effect, and for once, and unlike those millions of artists generating <1000 plays who feel voiceless, rights holders are fighting back. Just this very week, the National Music Publishers’ Association filed a lawsuit with the FTC in the States, claiming that the bundle is unlawful and will reduce payments to songwriters by the tune of some $150,000,000 a year.
5. Spotify’s obsession with numbers and disregard for quality. I will delve into these aspects in my next post, about which platform I have transferred to. These were not deciding factors, as I have always had my own fascination with chart positions and sales - I used to be able run off from memory an entire act’s British track record on both - and having grown up on Radio 1 Medium Wave only, I am used to listening to top-notch audio through shitty systems. And yet I know the numbers game is dangerous, and it supersedes our interest in quality these days, while at home, I play all my music through top-notch systems, with Tannoy Reveal monitor speakers on my desk and some booming Infinity tall speakers by the TV. I can tell the difference the moment I run a remastered CD through the system and compare it to Spotify; it seems a shame to indulge in less than the best. And FWIW, I have set my Substack so that you are not meant to see how many subscribers I have; I’d prefer you are here just because you want to be.
6. Spotify does not actually care much about music. Remember when Amazon started out, with books? Books were a revered form of culture, there were millions more of them than even the biggest Barnes & Noble or Waterstones could ever hope to stock, someone somewhere was always looking for one of those obscure back catalogue items and they would happily use a mail-order service that made them easy to find. Additionally, books were a cultural product that could generate discussion (i.e. online reviews), and authors and publishers alike proved eager to self-promote once Amazon started printing charts and sub-charts that revealed a book’s apparent popularity. (I fell for that one too.) In short: Amazon was able to offer subjective and objective data, and universal access, to the one product nobody wants to ban or burn. Well, almost nobody; we live in difficult times.
But books were merely a gateway drug. As we now know, Jeff Bezos had his eyes set on bigger prizes: selling us toilet paper, screwdrivers, digital music and films, and purchasing the Washington Post, Whole Foods and his own spaceship, all while paying minimum wage under industrial revolution-like conditions, putting independent stores out of business, and wrecking the planet with all his shipping waste and delivery trucks in the meantime.
It is certainly not too far a stretch to suggest that Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek is, at this point in the game, looking similarly far afield. From podcasts to audiobooks, to financing its own Muzak productions, all while chipping away at lowly songwriter and recording artist incomes, Ek appears to have his eyes set on other prizes, ones we may not yet be able to contemplate. We should all be afraid.
7. Talking of Ek, you may be aware of the Spotify founder’s recent post on X, the perfect platform for over-opinionated billionaires given that its owned by one. It’s the one that began with this apparent musician-trolling line:
“Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.”
And which concluded, after wondering off into some netherland where Ek posited himself as a student of philosophy, by asking
“what are we creating now that will still be valued and discussed hundreds or thousands of years from today?”
The pushback from musicians was understandably immediate and venomous, much of it centered around the fact that creating content for Spotify does not cost anywhere near close to zero. You can read some choice choices via the NME’s write-ups, all of which provide further links to Spotify’s finances. But in the meantime, to fight back personally about the cost of content, let’s take my band The Dear Boys. We pay for rehearsals, for recording studios and mixing, all of which has to be coordinated with people living in different cities in different countries. Then there is our equipment: guitars and drums and amps don’t grow on trees. Even for the music I make with Hudson Palace, all of which has been recorded at home, we are still paying for those guitars, and their upkeep, for the quality microphones, and for my Digital Audio Workstation. For my podcasting, there is some of this same equipment, other costs and an Adobe subscription for the audio software.
But then there is the question of time. For those of us who “create content,” as Ek puts it, it comes at the expense of so much else in our lives: family, outings, nature, and more, though hopefully, also television and scrolling. We engage in it out of free will because we want to use this time we were given on God’s beautiful earth to be “creative,” as we might prefer to call content creation. Yet in Ek’s world, our time is a limitless resource: it costs “close to zero,” or cheap enough to enrich him to the tune of a net worth standing at $4.9 billion as of June 14, according to Forbes’ daily updates on such key businesspeople. Yes, people $4.9 billion as of last Friday.
Ek has, inevitably, been forced to walk back his comments, or at least elaborate upon them. But I’m glad he put his foot in it. He revealed his hand, confirmed that he is happy seeing millions of people go unpaid for their labours, because from his vantage point as a multi-billionaire, the work they do is for free in the first place, and therefore ripe for the profiting.
You can argue it was always thus, that record companies of yesterday were equally concerned about the bottom dollar and equally focused on numbers. And yes, all companies have to make money and every executive wants a hit record, a hit film, a hit book. But those companies used to be run by mavericks – actually, I worked with loads of them, and the term madmen would be better suited – who made their industries fun. And at the end of the day, they saw creativity in success; they believed that there was a worthwhile, exciting product waiting to be marketed, sold, reach its potential audience. The industries were more that mere fun, like assembling a playlist, they were playgrounds for reprobates and svengalis, and because they were run by such people who, even at worst, typically used their most commercial successes to finance their least commercial ones, and at best, they were able to offer long-term investment in artists and artistic projects in the hope of long-term gain.
But back then, the stock market and their investors allowed them to do so: companies were encouraged to grow steadily, surely, slowly even. In our modern hyper-capitalist stock-driven world, companies have to post constant quarterly gains to maintain investor faith; nobody is allowed to stay still and work on being better. Hence Spotify’s endless moves into other content areas and its increasing disrespect towards those that built the platform on music.
8. Still, if Ek’s statement was a final straw, there was this: the very next day, Spotify raised its subscription fees an average of 10%, this just a month after posting gross profits of over $1 billion, and a few months after laying off 17% of its workforce. Consider it insult to injury, the final slap in the face to someone feeling increasingly abused anyway. Why should anyone want to pay more for a service that is doing so little to reward anyone but its biggest stockholders? Even allowing that Spotify had previously been operating at a loss, knowing that business has to do what business has to do, there is no doubt that I have been subscribing to a platform that increasingly chips away at artistic integrity and value while enriching its major stockholders beyond common sense.
We can all blame modern capitalism, in which public companies are like giant monsters from a 1950s B-movie, constantly hungry, forever rapacious, ever-growing to unimaginable size and commensurate threat, but that doesn’t mean we have to contribute to it. I have always prided myself on “voting with my wallet,” supporting independents over majors in every aspect of my spending and my beliefs, trying to keep money in communities, in nature, in minimal damage to the environment, and in people and companies who at least aspire to do good. I also aspire to quality. I can no longer, with good conscience, consider my subscription to Spotify in line with those values.
I will end with some quick math. It’s not a hard sum to compute. With his $4.9 billion, Daniel Ek could compensate 96,000 individual musicians with a one-time payment of $50,000 each and STILL have $100 million left over. And that, frankly, is itself far more than any one person needs in this world.
Serendipitously, he’s about to host some events for the latter book, which has just been republished. Cheers Ben!
I keep seeing musicians say they are making music they don’t like in order to please the streaming gods. That’s an unsustainable situation.
I don’t always stream, but when I do, I’ve used Apple Music all along. I’ve never cared for Spotify. I wish Substack would allow Apple to be embedded. Kinda odd they don’t.
Great piece.