It's Time to Quit Spotify

Why I broke up with the streaming behemoth and you should too.

In June of 2024, I broke up with Spotify after a 10+ year relationship. The signs kept piling up until they simply could no longer be ignored. In the half-year since, I haven’t really looked back. I even forgot to transfer or back up my saved songs. Oh well. Perhaps a clean break was for the best: no need to go over to Spotify’s house to collect my toothbrush and the “for when you’re sad” playlist I made as a college sophomore. I kept waiting for the weight of the break-up to circle around and crush me, but I feel my life is all the better for it.

I don’t seem to be alone in my complete disillusionment with the Swedish streaming service. In July of last year, Kyle Chayka wrote in The New Yorker about his own decision to quit Spotify due to the platform’s over-conditioning of his listening and the gradual “enshittification” of the user experience. He imports the term from fellow writer Cory Doctorow, who when interviewed in the piece likens Spotify to Walmart: a “monopolistic intermediary with little creative input of its own that nevertheless exerts enormous influence on the array of products we can access.”

In December, Chayka’s colleague and Pulitzer-winner Hua Hsu disassembled Spotify as a morally bankrupt and craven enterprise. His piece was in theory a review of the author Liz Pelly’s new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, but music being a subject Hsu covers and cares deeply about, he doesn’t withhold his own searing sentiments. He hones in on the pervasiveness and popularity of “chill” music on Spotify which feeds the behavioral trend of “lean-back” or passive listening. A fascinating character in the article is a Swedish guy named Johan Röhr, who has used more than six hundred aliases to release thousands of songs on Spotify and amass over 15 billion streams, technically making him one of the most popular recording artists in the world. All of these songs are mellow soundscapes, what most would consider background music, and Röhr’s creations often end up on Spotify editorial playlists like “Stress Relief.” The bizarre case of this single person operating under the guise of multiple monikers forces us to consider the existential question, “does it even matter who is making this stuff?”

Around the same time Hsu’s piece ran in the magazine, music critic and historian Ted Gioia published a detailed account of a year-long investigation into the Johan Röhr-type phenomenon. Gioia found that some of the most popular music on the service originates from a handful of creators using multiple aliases, residing in Spotify’s home country of Sweden. The confluence of all this reporting has raised suspicion of collusion and counterfeit on the part of the company. Is the streaming giant working with a group of white-label musicians to keep more of their own money in-house? Or even worse, are they employing artificial intelligence to create fake songs and seed them into company-curated playlists, effectively bypassing the need to pay streaming royalties to real people?

Simon & Schuster (2025)

Another review of Pelly’s book, this one by the writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones for the heady online magazine 4Columns, spares no ire for what he refers to as a “data-mining company.” He takes precise aim at Spotify’s founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, who is “interested in music approximately as much as Jeff Bezos is interested in [poet and writer] Bernadette Meyer.” In a relatively short time, Ek has ascended to Public Enemy No. 1 status for anyone currently frustrated with the state of the music industry. He once fashioned himself a “punk” (in a clean-cut Scandinavian sense) for being against the traditional model of paying for music on a per-song, per-album basis. Frere-Jones is wise to not pin all music streaming wrongdoing on one man, although Ek makes for a very flammable effigy. He broadens the argument to the material conditions that Spotify helped to create and continues to prop up: by making music free and virtually bottomless you have completely changed the perception of what the art form, and the labor of people who make it, is worth.

Frere-Jones cites YouTube as a “music is free” disruption that predated Spotify, and Hsu spends time in his piece reminding us about the initial wave of file-sharing via Napster, Limewire, and the like in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This form of digital piracy scrambled the music industry, but it didn’t break it - through lawsuits and anti-piracy propaganda the major music companies clawed their way back to power and profitability. I grew up buying songs on iTunes at the family desktop to burn them onto CDs and later uploading them to a big white thumb drive called the iPod Shuffle. Spotify emerged at an incredibly crucial time: when they launched in 2008, the idea was to replace the lawlessness of Napsteresque file-sharing with a buttoned-up and strictly legal service where you could still listen to all the music you want for free, you just need to hand over your personal data and endure the constant stream of advertisements that it would inform.

Charting Spotify’s revenue growth. Source: Business of Apps® Music Business App Report 2024

Presently, Spotify has over 640 million active users and north of 250 million premium subscribers. The 12% year-over-year subscriber growth helped the company finally reach its first full year of profitability in 2024. At the close of New York Stock Exchange trading in December, Spotify’s market cap (valuation of a public company) sat at just over $90 billion. While they were at it, they got FC Barcelona to rename their iconic stadium. Alongside this world-dominating growth, one of the most widely known things about Spotify in recent years is how little artists are paid in return for hosting their songs on the service.

The issue of how musicians get paid by Spotify is naturally quite complex, and for anyone who really wants to understand it I’d recommend an explanation written by Chris Dalla Riva for his newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher. Contrary to popular understanding, Spotify doesn’t pay on a per-stream basis. Most of the company’s net revenue (from subscriptions and advertising $ on its free version) as calculated on a monthly basis goes into a pool referred to as “streamshare.” An artist is paid based on the percentage that their streams make up of that big pool. For example, let’s generously assume the total number of streams for my own music on Spotify makes up .000000000001% of all music streamed on the service in the month of December. Multiply the company’s net revenue by that percentage and that’s the money allocated for me.

But Spotify doesn’t cut me a check directly. The money is allocated for the “rightsholder” aka whoever owns the rights to the music, but it’s paid to the “distributor” aka whoever brought the digital music files to Spotify. In my case is the digital distribution service DistroKid. Streaming royalties get paid to the distributor who then turns around and pays the artist. Services like DistroKid, CD Baby, TuneCore, etc. are for-profit businesses and they take a cut. Many of the services require the streaming royalties in your digital “wallet” to exceed a certain minimum to allow you to withdraw any money. And for myself, and many other independent musicians without a record label or other dedicated go-between, the figures are so paltry I just don’t bother. It’s not worth the trouble to withdraw $0.94.

Payment minimums for withdrawal from DistroKid

Back in 2018, Spotify announced it would be testing a beta version of direct distribution: a select few artists were granted the ability to publish their music directly to Spotify via their Artist profile (“Spotify For Artists” had been and remains free for anyone whose music is on the service). While many were quick to speculate this was nothing more than a data collection scheme, I recall it as a fleeting moment of optimism. If Spotify could offer artists digital distribution at scale, it would be a game changer and certainly a better deterrent against artificial streaming and the nefarious distribution houses than policing across the fence. Owning distribution could have earned the company a great deal of goodwill amongst independent artists as a rare move toward fairness and transparency in the streaming economy. Unsurprisingly, the company shelved the idea after a year. Why? Maybe wide distribution would have required more resources than the multibillion dollar corporation could give it. They almost certainly feared monopolistic accusations and FTC scrutiny. Or perhaps they found that doing something helpful just didn’t square with their bottom line.

Spotify’s percentage-based or “pro-rata” payment model means the highest-performing artists get paid the most money, a free-market arrangement that would be logical if only in theory. In practice, Spotify has slowly but surely been squeezing the bottom and ensuring as much money as possible flows upward. In 2023, the company announced it would begin a practice that’s become known as the “1,000 stream” rule. In an effort to combat what the company considers “bad actors” it requires any song on its service to receive at least 1,000 genuine streams in a span of 12 months for it to qualify for the streamshare royalty. If it does not get over that threshold, it is essentially demonetized. Spotify’s rationale is that the rule will combat the shady practice of “stream-farming” or creating artificial listenership. There’s a version of stream-farming that involves uploading a massive number of songs under a fake artist's profile and artificially streaming them at relatively low numbers to remain undetected while collecting inflated royalties.

The 1,000 stream rule might help prevent certain so-called bad actors from siphoning unearned money out of the royalty pool, but the rule blindly shuts out a not-uncommon and good-faith practice of artists uploading a lot of songs simply because they make a lot of songs. I’ve encountered plenty of very real weirdos with 100-song albums of bizarre music that likely won’t cross Spotify’s arbitrary threshold and therefore will be completely shut out of the streaming economy. It’s a difference of very little money on the individual artist level, but taken at scale that extra money has to go somewhere and in this case it will flow back up to the top performers. In my view, this amounts to hypocritical cruelty. Spotify has played a significant role in the re-discovery and resurgence of many a niche, outsider artist: The Space Lady, Arthur Russell, Mamman Sani, Michael Hurley, among others. If a contemporary version of any of these luminaries exists, the platform will see to it that while their songs languish in obscurity, they might as well not generate any income.

From the Spotify for Artists “Discovery Mode” page, featuring Canadian indie rock artist Men I Trust

One of the tools made available to artists via the proprietary Spotify for Artists platform is called Discovery Mode. Turning on this feature gives one’s songs a platform-approved boost, algorithmically prioritizing them for placement in one of many coveted editorial playlists (curated by Spotify playlist editors), and increasing the likelihood of a song making it into a subscriber’s personalized playlist (i.e. Discover Weekly, Release Radar, etc.) And in return? Spotify retains 30% of the eventual rights holder streamshare as a commission.

I agree with those that have condemned Discovery Mode as a sort of inverted form of payola, whereby an independent artist lacking a label to do the dirty work for them is coerced into having their wages suppressed in the hopes that their song will “pop” and garner them greater success. It’s betting the farm to buy some attention. But like the issue of streaming royalties, Spotify is not acting as some lone wolf villain here. They’re participating in the well-trod territory of “pay for play” schemes which have existed for years and pervade in music criticism (paid services like SubmitHub charge artists money to send their songs to blogs and playlist curators for consideration) and live concerts, wherein a promoter or venue will book an inexperienced artist on the condition that the performer sell a minimum number of tickets to their own show or eat the cost themselves.

Discovery Mode also indicates a narrowing direction for how Spotify wants artists to use their platform. The name of the game is relentless self-promotion, and Spotify has carefully rolled out plenty of bells and whistles via the Artists platform that can help capture attention and engagement. You can post videos, you can sell merch, you can post concert dates, and you can have a “tip jar” on your profile (a Covid-era artifact that feels insulting in retrospect.) The result is a sort of high-fructose relationship between artist and listener, extracting too much from one end and feeding too much to the other without real substance or material gain.

It’s hard to feel either side stands to benefit.

From the Spotify for Artists “Discovery Mode” page.

The 4Columns review of Mood Machine shares an example Pelly herself uses in the book: the artist Goth Babe. The solo project of Griiffen Washburn (described as “a fella who sings and wears Carhartt”) is apparently, according to the book, a model Spotify artist. Washburn makes music, but he’s just as well known as a lifestyle influencer: on social media, he documents his digitally nomadic and outdoorsy lifestyle as accessory to his songs, which he can be seen recording on a laptop in the back of his van before carrying his surfboard down some cliffs to paddle out into the Pacific, his dog trailing behind him. I’ll admit to getting a kick out of the prod at Washburn, having at one time enjoyed his music before becoming suspicious of him. My criticism may too easily reveal jealousy though: he’s handsome, successful, and does seem to lead a very cool and unique life which he likely just enjoys sharing over the internet. I suppose what irks me is the “model artist” classification and the idea that the platform will demand that our artists share more of themselves and forfeit any of the mystique and idiosyncrasy that makes them actually compelling.

Daniel Ek considers “keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans” to be the new path to success. In a 2020 interview, he was responding to criticism by those who still cling to “the old model” of releasing music every few years and leveraging the output to make a living through a combination of touring, licensing, and merchandising. That no longer works for Spotify, nor its famished subscribers who supposedly demand near-constant engagement. The subscriber base may soon get more than they bargained for: it’s not so far-fetched to think that the death or dissolution of TikTok will inspire Spotify to concoct some sort of video-forward offering to lure “creators” and drive user engagement across the board. Otherwise subscribers might begin to pull their heads out of the black-and-green stream and encounter what Ek once quipped is Spotify’s only true competitor: silence.

Spotiify Founder and CEO Daniel Ek. Image: Magnus Höij (Wikimedia Commons)

I stopped using Spotify because I felt the app had progressively drained every ounce of fun out of listening to music. The experience came to feel like being in a giant continuous loop: safe and comfortable but predictable and ultimately suffocating. The algorithm is designed to serve you only things it thinks that you’ll like and shield you from anything you won’t. But how do you develop any sense of personal taste with a frictionless palate?

Since cancelling my subscription I have tried alternatives. YouTube Music is perplexing and limited and notably owned by Google. Apple Music looks nice and runs quite smoothly but I’d argue 2010s-era Pandora had a better recommendation engine. The answer, the difficult one, is that music streaming is simply not the way. Spotify succeeded in sewing together a fractured music consumer experience and selling it to us as a bulk-buy option. While we were distracted by the value of all the music in the world at our fingertips for a monthly fee, the company became a vertically-integrated cartel where the money only flows upward.

I plan to try out life without traditional music streaming this year. I’d encourage anyone who is feeling in any way frustrated by the experience of using Spotify to simply log into your account and cancel your subscription. Your instinct to listen to music won’t go away, and you’ll find a different avenue for it. From my recent experience, the absence of an endless stream of music is a relief. It has allowed for some empty space to encounter music in some unexpected and gratifying ways. And I say all this without any real moral standing - my songs are still able to be streamed on Spotify if anyone cares to look. I’ll just give the simplest endorsement I can: in the era of unfettered capitalism and an incoming technocracy, canceling my Spotify subscription felt good, if nothing else.

Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee (Superior Viaduct/W25th 2024)

My favorite album of the past few years came out in early 2024 and famously was not available on any streaming service. Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee, the stage name of Canadian songwriter and drag performer Patrick Flegel, was available in only two formats upon its release: as a single YouTube video without song breaks, and as a composite audio file available for download (with suggested donation) on a Geocities-hosted web page. I credit the album for opening my mind to the possibility of a work of art having a longer and more resonant life when it cannot be consumed on-demand. Diamond Jubilee is a symbolic defiance of the harmful system of consumption that Spotify has propagated for the enrichment of its shareholders.

From Realistik Studios website.

On the website where Diamond Jubilee was first made available for download, the above note mentioning Spotify CEO Daniel Ek by name has since been deleted, for reasons unknown. In 2020, Ek pledged €1 billion over 10 years to an “Artificial Intelligence Defense start-up” called Helsing AI. In 2022, the start-up began a partnership with the German company Rheinmetall Group, a manufacturer of military vehicles, ammunition, and arms. The partnership would, according to the press release, “provide the armed forces with advanced and future-proof capabilities, enabling them to meet current and future challenges.” In November 2023, it was reported that the German government had approved an order of 10,000 units of tank ammunition manufactured by Rheinmetall to be supplied to Israel for its war against Gaza and its attempts to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people.

Rheinmetall AG’s stock had increased by 5% that month, likely signaling to Daniel Ek a wise investment.