Why I’m not on Spotify
I was one of those weirdos who was low-key OBSESSED with his Zune. I know, I know. I still stand by that decision though! Before streaming really took off it was a great bridge to that ecosystem. $15 a month and you could stream any song in the world, plus every month you got to legally download ten songs that you could keep forever! That meant every other month I was burning a new mix CD of my latest favorite tracks to listen to in my Mustang.
The Zune party ended for me in late 2012 when Microsoft started to divest of its Zune infrastructure and I switched to my first iPhone. That ecosystem shift brought me to Spotify. My bi-monthly mix CDs turned into seasonal playlists, along with a MASSIVE “Master Mixtape” playlist that I continued to build for the next decade. Through Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and curated playlists I discovered bands I quickly fell in love with. Artists like MNDR, and The Cinema. I also associate that period of my life with a new album from one of existing favorite artists, Kesha’s Warrior! (Because yes, my love life was a struggle in my mid-late 20s.)
Fast forward to 2023, when I self-released my first EP, “Chaotic Neutral” under the artist name Stewart Isabella Gardner. I was so excited to have my art out there in the world, I didn’t care that I would be lucky to earn $2 from streaming with that release. I didn’t come here for the money. But with being a published artist came a new attention to the music industry, and a crash course for me. At the end of that year I saw three concurrent headlines about Spotify that really gave me the ick!
All in the span of a few months, Spotify allegedly cut a significant portion of its staff—mostly their taste-makers and playlist curators—with the specific intent of replacing them with Ai. Around this same time they raised subscription rates from customers. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they also made the decision to completely de-monetize smaller artists like myself who make less than 1,000 streams per-month.
The common thread here was obvious. Less staff equals more profit. Raising subscription rates equals more profit. Paying artists less also equals more profit.
By this point, my opinion of the user experience of Spotify also began to sour. The Release Radar playlist that I used to love was getting flooded with remixes that I didn't particularly care for of songs that I had already heard. My Discover Weekly playlist was getting less exciting too. Overall, I was noticing that I was discovering fewer new artists that I actually liked from Spotify.
So what did I do? I cancelled my subscription!
That’s a decision I can easily stand behind. And since I cut ties with Spotify as a customer, it’s been announced that their CEO is allegedly using significant portions of that aforementioned additional profit to invest in autonomous military drones. Then earlier this year they had yet another scandal where they were platforming a deluge of recruitment ads for ICE. No thank you!
Now I’m at a point where I’m getting ready to put more music out there into the world. And I’m at a bit of a dilemma about how I want to do this. Because let’s be honest, there is no real ethical way to stream music. No matter how you slice up the profits, smaller artists are always going to get screwed. I recently heard a statistic that an artist who owns 100% of their royalties needs to hit approximately 6 Million streams in a year just to make the equivalent of working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job.
There’s no perfect streaming platform either. Amazon Music is a subsidiary of what in my opinion is the most evil and harmful corporation in America. Youtube Music is owned by Google, who creepily follows you all over the internet and scrapes every micro-interaction you have in order to train it’s Ai platforms that are actively dismantling our sense of what is real in every picture and video we see in the world. Apple’s Tim Cook keeps showing up at meetings with the current administration and paying deference to their political whims in a way that makes it hard to get behind their ecosystem. etc.
So what’s a gay to do? I’m just one girl!
But I’m also at a position of immense privilege. I don’t rely on my music to pay my bills. That means that I don’t have to put myself under the thumbs of any of these platforms. And what’s the point of having and acknowledging privilege if you’re not going to leverage it for good? I can choose where I have a web presence, and where I’m a ghost. Spotify and Amazon are out! That’s an easy decision for me. Apple and YouTube, you’re on notice.
I want to have an online presence so that I can find people with whom my music will resonate. But I want to create that as a real, physical space.
In an era where streaming platforms are making human artists compete with cheap Ai SlopPop, I have to double down on offering what those sloppabotammuses will never be able to provide: That feeling of connection when a musician and their fans are in a room together, singing/screaming/crying/laughing their little hearts out! So building that will be my focus. Not maximizing streams. Not amassing followers. Social media isn’t social, it’s just a fucking store. I want community!