Why my new music is not on Spotify
And why it is time for ALL of us to rethink our financial engagement with the big music streaming platforms.
In my last post, I wrote about the new single by my domestic music duo Hudson Palace, a cover of James’ “Miss America” that went from being learned to being released in the space of a week.
While all proceeds from Bandcamp will be going to UIDN, our local immigrant defense network, and we encourage people to listen and support and hopefully purchase/donate on that particular platform, “Miss America” is also available on all the usual streaming services. Except Spotify.
Likewise, the forthcoming single by my transatlantic trio The Dear Boys, entitled “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are” and out on Feb 26th, will not be available on Spotify. Here’s why:
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I soured on Spotify a long time ago, putting out two consecutive posts in June 2024, “Why I Quit Spotify” and “Why I Left Spotify for Qobuz.” For the time being, I am releasing these posts from the archive paywall.
In the first of these articles, I listed and then extrapolated upon eight reasons for leaving. The bold type stated them as: Spotify found $50 million to lure podcast host Joe Rogan, Spotify’s decision to eliminate royalties for songs with less than 1000 plays a year, Spotify’s dubious steps towards artificial muzak content, Spotify’s decision to shift money from songwriters to audio books, Spotify’s obsession with numbers and disregard for quality, Spotify does not actually care much about music, Spotify founder’s recent post on X, Spotify raised its subscription fees an average of 10% a month after posting gross profits of over $1 billion.
It felt somewhat hypocritical continuing to make my new music available on the platform, but I allowed myself the “excuses” that,
I had musical partners who might not feel as strident as myself (indeed, a couple were Spotify subscribers and reluctant to switch),
given that it is the dominant streaming service, exposure on Spotify for my music continued to seem important, especially as,
should any of the music I am involved in ever truly take off, people would be looking for it on Spotify and we would ultimately get paid properly for the streams.
Continuing to compartmentalize my disengagement from Spotify as a subscriber, from my engagement with Spotify as an artist, I even continued to pitch new music by The Dear Boys and Hudson Palace for Spotify playlist consideration.
I was kidding myself.
Most of you ought to be aware of the main news item around Spotify founder Daniel Ek that headlines over the past year, one that has led to a much greater exodus of subscribers and artists from Spotify than when I made my own 20 months ago, and it merits a bold-type revolutionary #9 reason to bolster the precious eight. Daniel Ek’s massive investment in Military AI-drone technology.
Here are the details, painstakingly researched and with credible sources. In June of 2025, Spotify founder and its then-CEO Daniel Ek’s investment company Prima Materia made a (additional) €600 million investment in Helsing, a German company that calls itself “the leading European defence technology company.” Ek would appear to have funded this investment from documented evidence that he withdrew at least $724 million in Spotify shares (near enough equivalent to his Helsing investment) between mid-2023 and March 2025. Bear in mind the previous bold type bullet points, and that’s a hell of a lot of money for one man to make out of Spotify considering that musicians need a million streams at an average of $0.004 per stream to garner just $4000 in royalties.
Ek’s pretext for his investment is the defence of Europe, but the reality, clearly, is a hunger for power far greater than that of a mere music and podcast and audiobook platform. Like Jeff Bezos (more of whom later), Ek will settle for nothing less than the opportunity to rule – and ruin – the world.
Any diversion of money from musical creativity to military technology should make artists (and audiences!) sick to their stomach, but the true sickener here is that Helsing, of which Ek is now chairman, is developing AI-powered military drones and submarines.
To be clear, drones are nothing new – you may own one yourself. The use of drones in warfare is also not new and only getting more prevalent; driving back from Vermont on Monday, listening to the BBC World News, I heard of a devastating drone attack consciously targeting Ukrainian coal miners in the midst of an especially harsh winter in which continued delivery of coal is crucial. The first drone hit the bus they were in, which those who survived understandably vacated. A second drone promptly targeted these now exposed miners. Twelve were killed.
One presumes that in this instance the military drones were operated by someone in a Russian HQ, far away. But companies like Helsing serve to render this human engagement unnecessary. The generation of drones Ek has invested in, the company he has put himself in charge of, can make decisions for itself. At a time that we are questioning giving AI the option to make any decisions on our behalf,1 the notion of allowing it to wage its own wars takes the levels of human short-sightedness into new levels of irresponsibility.2
Of course, given that Spotfy is heavily laden with AI-generated music to begin with it, and that the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to come up with ways to minimize paying royalties on playlists it creates and promotes, Ek’s enthusiasm for AI should come as no surprise. But every one of us who subscribes to Spotify – paid or ad-supported – and every act that allows its music to generate profits for Ek, is ultimately contributing to this horrifying new war machine. And for all that Ek may point out that he is no longer CEO at Spotify, in his new role as chairman, he “will focus on long-term strategy, capital allocation, and regulatory matters,” with the founder seeking to assure his own investors that “I’ll remain deeply involved in shaping Spotify’s future.”
Meantime, the complaint I put first (if not necessarily top) of my list some 20 months ago has only become all the more profound and insulting with the news that Spotify recently struck a deal worth a reported $250,000,000 to keep Joe Rogan as a podcaster on a non-exclusive deal in which Spotify produces and shares in ad revenue. (And you thought soccer players were overpaid?) This is the same Joe Rogan whose fawning hosting of DJT shortly before the 2024 election is cited by many as a key reason that Rogan’s considerable young male audience leaned to Trump on election day. This is also the same Joe Rogan whose views on Covid seemed so close to conspiracy theory BS that all I can say in hindsight is… Neil Young was right.3
Many have also protested Spotify allowing ads for ICE on its free subscriptions. However, I have to note that the same ads run on YouTube, for which I refuse to take a paid subscription, and I have not boycotted YouTube. Ads are tricky: if you are a mainstream commercial entity that is built on ad income, it is almost impossible to pick and choose those that might alienate one section of your mainstream audience from another; as long as the ads don’t break fundamental broadcasting laws, you kind of have to allow them.
My problem would be less to do with these platforms allowing ICE ads than with their leadership enabling the re-election of the President who has militarized ICE against the American public, continually bending over in public to do his will, contributing to his inauguration fund-drive and queuing up to attend that inauguration in person. This inability to pick and choose positive ads (if they exist) from negative ones is also the reason NONE OF MY PODCASTS TAKE ADS. Crossed Channels is available to paid subscribers of my Substack account or that of Dan Epstein and otherwise remains ad-free. (Sample episode below.)
Next to Ek’s investment in killing machines and its contribution to the re-election of a man who would be king, the second reason I listed 20 months ago, Spotify’s decision to eliminate royalties for songs with less than 1000 plays a year – estimated to be as much 88% of the music on the platform – seems minor. But as someone whose three acts (The Dear Boys, Apocalypse 1980-82 and Hudson Palace) typically fall into this category –all three get ongoing traction, but it is minor in the scheme of things – the company’s self-mandated decision to render my music financially worthless makes me feel… yes, worthless.
It doesn’t matter that Spotify states that the money is not hoarded but rather, is paid out to those whose music sits above the 1000-play minimum, but actually… yes it does matter, because it’s a classic case of Robin Hood in Reverse: stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Does Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny or even Pete Townshend really need the paltry few dollars that my music generates every year at Spotify’s pathetic per-stream rates? Of course not. Would I get rich if it was credited to my account on Soundrop? Of course I wouldn’t; I’d need 10,000,000 streams (ten million) just to generate $40,000 in gross income – to then be split anywhere between two and six ways depending on the act. (And all three of the acts I oversee own our music; others may see only 50% or less of gross income.)
Every time I open a Soundrop monthly statement and see that while other platforms have credited every stream and download as something with monetary value, Spotify lists my songs as “unqualified,” I feel another kick in the teeth. I don’t make music for money – few people can do do these days – but I expect the music to be valued. If Spotify asserts no value to my music – not even the Apocalypse track “Nobody But Me” that I composed as a teenager, which gets several hundred plays a year but has yet to break the 1000-stream-a-year mark – then why should I assert any value to Spotify? Or to put it another way, if I already get nothing from someone listening to my music on Spotify, what do I serve to lose by not making the music available in the first place?
The absence of new music by The Dear Boys and Hudson Palace going forwards will be irrelevant to Spotify’s bottom line, which is all it cares about. But a growing number of artists have made similar decisions of late. I would like to give special credit to Laura Burhenn a.k.a. The Mynabirds for leading a grass roots movement under the umbrella of “Disarm Spotify” and invite you to hear her talk about it on the Drowned In Sound podcast here and here. She is far from alone: others to remove their music include Deer Hoof, Cindy Lee, Massive Attack, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizzard, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Xiu Xiu, and Particle Kid, and many others choose only to make their latest offerings available on Bandcamp oor suchlike to beghin with. One can only hope that the shrinking pool of credible, interesting new music will hopefully encourage more subscribers likewise to realize that there are better streaming platforms out there with a lesser degree of true malfeasance and disregard for creativity
Are there any streaming platforms out there with no degree of true malfeasance and disregard for creativity? When Cut Off The Spigot ran the various music streaming companies through its rigorous research process, only one passed the no-BS test, Qobuz. My support for Qobuz has been prominent since first writing about it back in June 2024, and I am happy to see more and more people gravitating towards it: even though there are still some bugs in its system, the human curation behind its weekly playlists, its magazine stories and its reviews, and the quality of the audio it can provide (especially when plugged in via ethernet at a desktop, at which most tracks exceed CD quality) – along with its independent financial structure - renders it unsurpassable.
However, I recognize the potential degrees of hypocrisy in making music unavailable to Spotify but available on Facebook and Amazon and Apple Music and more.
Certainly, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Instagram/Meta are their own degree of horrible. Serving not to promote friendship as per its original promise of social media, but to keep us hooked on the platform so as to further mine our data and sell us advertising, Facebook allows its algorithms to determine what comes up in our feed, which often means less of the interesting personal and work updates from the far-flung friends we originally hoped to reconnect with, but assertive and argumentative and often political memes.
This can have deadly consequences. In the book Nexus, author Yuval Noah Harari details how it was less Facebook management’s inattentiveness to Myanmar’s volatile political /ethnic situation that resulted in the genocide of thousands of Rohingya and the displacement of a further 700,000 during the 2010s (though it didn’t help that they lacked for a moderator who spoke the language). It was that Facebook actively allowed it algorithms – its AI – to make autonomous decisions about what people should see as they “discussed” what was promoted by supremacists as an ethnic “problem.” Though moderate voices abounded in Mynamar, Facebook’s AI found that it was the extreme voices that kept people on the platform, and so those were the posts that were promoted. (For more detailed and sourced history about this ethnic calamity and its deadly results, read the article How AI Kills, on Medium.)
As for Amazon, is Jeff Bezos any better than Daniel Ek? No, they are just different degrees of terrible human beings. I have a personal bone to pick with Bezos because he heavily reduced author royalties by convincing us all, in Amazon’s early days, that he actually cared for books, the same way Ek managed to convince us Spotify was it for the music. For Bezos, books were in actuality nothing more than a calculated entry drug, and once he perfected and then perpetuated the eBook model and set his mass discount demands upon every publisher who in turn passed them on to authors, our income went down even as Bezos became a billionaire building “rocket ships to Mars” as his own escape strategy. This is not to even touch on the impact of Amazon on small businesses, mom and pop/high street shops, and the environment.
In recent weeks, however, Bezos’ attempt to out stink even Elon Musk as the world’s most simultaneously rich and evil inhuman being has reached new lows. Coincidentally, the day of editing this post, the Guardian summed it up for me in a pitch e-mail complete with links.
“Jeff Bezos’s continued decimation of the Washington Post this week was just the latest example of billionaire media ownership endangering America’s free press – at the moment our country needs it most.
Mere days after Amazon premiered its $75m Melania Trump documentary [truly, this is political arse-licking of proportions that would be comical in its commercial failure if not for the financial sums involved including the further enrichment of the Trump family] its CEO – worth around $250bn – laid off 300 Post reporters, including the journalist tasked with scrutinizing Amazon itself.
You can read more about this decimation of what was, until its acquisition by Bezos, arguably the USA’s greatest and most fiercely independent newspaper, here and here. As one quote from the first of these Bulwark articles notes, Bezos can hardly claim the firings are financially necessary:
This past weekend he chose to lose about $60 million on a worshipful film about Melania Trump. In 2019 he spent $5 million on a 30-second ad for the Washington Post during the Super Bowl.2 He has spent $40 million building a clock inside a mountain that will supposedly keep time for 10,000 years.3 A man like Jeff Bezos does not do anything because he has to… What happened to the Washington Post over the last three years happened for one reason and one reason only: Because Jeff Bezos wanted it to be so.
And as the Guardian’s pitch continues and then concludes,
“don’t forget the tech CEOs whose black-box algorithms control which news stories tens of millions of Americans even see. Apple, Facebook, TikTok, Google – all run or owned by ultra-rich men who have kissed Trump’s ring (Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was even at the Melania White House screening).”
In my ideal world, we – meaning all musicians - wouldn’t need Facebook’s exposure to promote our music, nor would we feel any loss for making it unavailable on Amazon Music. Or Apple Music. In an ideal world, everyone would listen to new music via platforms like Bandcamp, where artists control their home pages and receive money from sales immediately; or via a streaming service that cares, like Qobuz. (Ironically, due to a miscommunication, the incredible Chris Coco remixes of The Dear Boys “Put It Down” are NOT on Qobuz. They are, however, on Bandcamp, and shameless self-promotion follows.)
But the truth is, the vast majority of people reading this post will either have an iPhone, an account with Apple Music, a profile on Facebook and/or Instagram, a subscription to Spotify, and/or a subscription to Amazon Prime, which gives them access to Amazon Music. (I am guilty on two counts.)
This does not make us all hypocrites, as much as it indicates how beholden we all are to a highly limited number of tech companies that almost completely control the vast dissemination of popular culture and indeed, the hardware on which we access it. (I have not referenced Google as yet, which owns YouTube and is behind Android software. It is hardly immune from accusations of skullduggery, its founders are equally guilty of sucking up to Trump, its music royalty rates are equally pathetic, and the quality of snake-oil ads by which it makes vast profits on YouTube are doing incredible damage to the culture at large.)
But for all that I might wish to have nothing to do with any of them, I can at least allow that Apple, Facebook and Amazon Music attach a financial value to all the music that streams through their system. It’s not enough, and sometimes it falls under “subscription tracks” but at least it doesn’t smack of Spotify’s outright refusal to even credit the people behind 87% of the music it streams.
Spotify won’t notice my individual absence from its platform any more than Amazon missed my online orders or Walmart has noticed I don’t ever step foot within its doors. The point is that I sleep better knowing my own small, everyday decisions are made with as much socially positive forethought as possible. I vote with my wallet, and to the extent that I can, I boycott with my limited means of artistic control. And the more of us who do so, the more artists who decide to Disarm Spotify, the more subscribers who move away from the platform, the better we can all sleep at night, and maybe, within that growing force, we do serve to make the world a little better.
Writing this has been more than cathartic. It has forced me to consider whether I can countenance making my music available on Amazon Music either, given Jeff Bezos’ increasingly destructive uses of his personal wealth. [I would be happy for my books to be unavailable, but publishers are beholden to the company for up to 50% of their sales and none want to be the canary in the coalmine.] For now, that’s conversations to have with my musical partners. And I also wish to state now: There is a possible Dear Boys song forthcoming that would benefit from being placed on these very platforms I abhor and I reserve to right to do so should that moment arise.
In the meantime, I hope readers will look at the reasons why some platforms are more evil than others and agree: Spotify users and music producers, you have nothing to lose from quitting the platform but your guilt.
AI has its uses, it can be helpful for research if you insist it provides sources. We used it for the sleeve image to accompany “Miss America” as we were in a hurry; frankly, I regret doing so and am hoping to change the image soon.
I understand and acknowledge that some of Helsing’s drones are being used by Ukraine in its fight for its continued sovereignty. The problem is a) war, b) people who make money out of our love of music using that money to military ends, and c) the encroachment of AI “algorithms” in making battlefield decisions, with its myriad opportunities for future disasters and needless killing.
Neil Young took his music off Spotify in protest at the original $50,000,000 deal with Rogan, but few artists followed him and his music is now back on the platform.
Thanks for this Tony. I haven't pulled out of Spotify yet but your article more than makes the case to do so.
Thank you for sharing my work and I appreciate the "rigorous" compliment! Qobuz is definitely the best option, I use it personally :)