When we started Hearing Things last year, one of the many questions we asked ourselves was: Should we even be on Spotify at all? As longtime music journalists, we had all covered the streaming wars in one way or another, and we knew Spotify was often singled out as the company with the worst track record. According to countless artists and reports, their per-stream rates are pitifully low compared to their competitors. Their playlist-centric strategy takes music out of context and relegated it to the background of people’s lives. Their sound quality is butt. They engage in practices that seem a lot like a modern version of payola. And there was that one time Joanna Newsom called the company a “cynical and musician-hating system” and compared it to a rotting banana. “It just gives off a fume,” she said. “You can just smell that something’s wrong with it.”
Our values as a publication—pro-worker, pro-artist, pro-active listening, anti-villainous corporations—did not align with many of Spotify’s actions and policies. At the same time, more people listen to music on Spotify than any other platform, and we wanted to make any playlists we put together as accessible as possible. So we reluctantly started paying for a Hearing Things Spotify account. But a couple of days ago, we canceled that paid subscription, and we will no longer be making playlists on Spotify or linking to the platform. It feels great.
So what finally pushed us over the edge? Well, a lot of things. For me, chief among them was music journalist Liz Pelly’s incredibly damning—and incredibly well-reported—recent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. It details all the ways Spotify has devalued music through the years, helping to turn the most powerful art form we’ve got into another frictionless commodity controlled by tech oligarchs. Like how Spotify created an entire program—ominously dubbed Perfect Fit Content—in which they pushed more and more faceless muzak onto their popular in-house playlists because it was licensed by the company under cheaper terms, taking money and placements away from genuine artists. Or how its hyper-personalized algorithmic playlists forced listeners to burrow deeper and deeper into their own musical comfort zones, dulling the opportunity for personal exploration. Or how their Discovery Mode introduced a shadowy pay-for-play scheme that all but required many independent artists and labels to lower their own royalty rates in order to surface songs on the platform. Every chapter—practically every page—of Mood Music offers revelations on how Spotify purposely undercut music makers in order to bolster their bottom line. I don’t know how any ardent music fan could read this book and not be moved to cancel their subscription.
Unfortunately, there’s more. In April 2024, Spotify enacted a new policy that denied royalties to songs that collected less than 1,000 streams, causing artists to wonder what would stop the company from arbitrarily increasing that number in the future. The following month, Billboard estimated that Spotify was expected to pay songwriters $150 million less in the ensuing year, even as the company raised their subscription rates, and their market cap hit new highs. This January, no less an authority than Björk declared, “Spotify is probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians.”
Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more reasons to quit Spotify, the brutal news keeps coming. Last month, it was reported that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment firm led a nearly $700 million round of funding for the European defense technology startup Helsing. Which means that when people now pay for Spotify, they are indirectly paying for the manufacturing of A.I. war drones. (What’s more, according to Bloomberg, Helsing’s technology is allegedly overpriced and glitchy, leading me to ask myself: Is it better or worse that the defense startup Daniel Ek invested in is purportedly kind of shitty?! 2025 is so bad, dude.) The disclosure caused veteran experimental rock band Deerhoof to announce plans to remove their music from the platform. “We don’t want our music killing people,” they wrote in a statement. “We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech.”
Speaking of A.I. (sorry), the last few weeks saw the explosion of a 100-percent A.I.-generated band called the Velvet Sundown. As of this writing, the classic-rock entity (which somehow does not sound like a mix between Velvet Revolver and Sunset Rubdown) has more than 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and it doesn’t look like the company is in any rush to completely shut down their page. In fact, this latest abomination feels like both a culmination of Spotify’s anti-artist policies and a precursor of hells yet to come.
So, for those reasons, we’re out. We understand no tech company is perfect, and that the problem is bigger than Spotify. But at the very least, Apple Music and Tidal—where we will be hosting our playlists moving forward—care about sound quality, have higher per-stream rates, and don’t seem to be daring music lovers to hate them every single week. As a liner-notes nerd, I for one really appreciate Tidal’s granular song and album credits. And when I hook up my wired headphones to my digital-to-analog converter and listen to lossless audio on Apple Music, it really is more enveloping. Of course, as Andy recently wrote, the best way to support artists you love is to actually purchase their albums and merch and concert tickets. Streaming isn’t going anywhere, but it should only be a part of any true fan’s music-listening habits. And if you care enough about the culture of music to read this entire story, Spotify doesn’t deserve your money, either.
