Real Goblin

I have been a Spotify customer for more than a decade now.  I consume a great deal of music over streaming. It’s something I take for granted. Hundreds of thousands of minutes each year are spent hopping between the Library of Alexandria of recorded audio. I grew up in a time where music wasn’t so easily consumed. I went to school with a CD player in hand. Years later, my dad showed me how to rip songs directly from YouTube, and I would spend hours discovering as much new music as possible and loading it onto some off-brand MP3 player. Eventually, I would discover Pandora, and soon after, Spotify. For years, Spotify has remained the only subscription based product I never think twice about paying for. But lately, I feel a degree of guilt I have been able to push aside in the past.

A few days ago, I watched one of my favorite bands, Hotline TNT, pull their music from Spotify. Hotline TNT, an indie shoegaze outfit from New York City, joins a growing list of artists fleeing the platform. But for me personally, this is the first of those artists that I would listen to on a weekly, if not daily basis. So, I am at last confronted with the same choice made by those bands: should I remain a Spotify customer, as I have loyally for many years, or should I leave in search of an alternative? And why?

Joe Rogan, Neil Young, and COVID-19

In 2020, Joe Rogan signed a $100 million deal with Spotify for exclusive streaming rights to his massively popular podcast. In 2022, as COVID-19 vaccines were rolling out, Rogan began his slow descent into conspiratorial madness. In retaliation for his misinformation, folk rock legend Neil Young offered Spotify a choice: deplatform Rogan for spreading dangerous misinformation, or lose Neil Young’s catalogue. Spotify opted for Rogan. Shortly afterwards, Joni Mitchell followed Young in solidarity. In 2025, they are both back on the platform.

What does leaving Spotify do, from the point of view of the artist? In the case of Neil Young, the 2022 departure from the platform wasn’t his first. In 2015, he pulled his music from all streaming services, citing sound quality as his reasoning. He caved a year later after deciding that access to his music was more important than the quality in which it was consumed.  

When I reflect on all of Neil Young’s wishy-washy feelings on streaming, ultimately I’m left considering the artists who lack the influence to get a few Rolling Stone articles out of a stunt like that. Neil Young is, at the time of writing this, 79 years old. He has sold countless records, won many awards, and inspired more artists than we’ll ever know. But more importantly, Young’s career is behind him. So when Neil Young pulls his music from Spotify, what does he stand to lose besides a few million more in his pocket?

All of this comes to mind as I watch the slow trickle of artists from Spotify’s platform once again. This time, it’s not Joe Rogan–related, but a combination of other factors. Perhaps the strangest of these is some of the off-the-field activities from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Of late, Ek has been investing heavily in a German military company in the business of developing artificially intelligent drones and other new-age weapons of war.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, David Bridie, Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu—a growing list of artists are now exiting the platform because of Ek’s $700 million investment in military tech.

But here’s where I struggle with this. I ask again, what does leaving Spotify do? If you cite this investment in military tech as your reasoning, sure. That seems noble enough. But who are Helsing’s biggest clients? Germany, the UK, Sweden, and the biggest one: Ukraine.

I’m as anti-war as the next guy. But as I am but one man trying to listen to my favorite music, the decision to leave Spotify as a consumer is a tough one for a number of reasons. For one, I find it difficult to justify artists fleeing Spotify claiming that, in the case of Deerhoof, “we don’t want our success tied to AI battle tech.”

Deerhoof has 31,367 monthly listeners at the time of writing this. Whereas Neil Young’s choice to leave Spotify comes from a place of privilege, bands like Deerhoof will also not notice any significant financial decrease from leaving the platform because they already weren’t profiting in any significant way.

When a band like Deerhoof leaves Spotify, why not leave all streaming? Personally, I’m more inclined to support, say, Ukraine’s independence, than I am to give my money to Apple—a company which matches employee donations to organizations like Friends of the IDF, which directly raises funds for the Israeli military and their continued genocide in Gaza, which was recently officially declared as having a famine by FAO, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO.

So, why don’t these bands leave streaming all-together? The bottom line is that streaming is part of the fabric of the music industry now. There is no more clear path to growth as an artist than when some playlist curator (or more likely, an algorithm) scoops you up and drops you into the feeds of thousands of listeners. Lesser known bands are forced to pray to the digital algorithm like a deity and hope it propels them to stardom.

With the exception of a very small number of artists, those who choose to leave Spotify do not also make the choice to leave the next best option for most people, Apple Music. But when you choose to turn around and hand your money to Apple instead of Spotify, you have to understand that you aren’t picking the lesser of two evils. For the consumer, if you want to liken your monthly subscription to pointing the gun at someone and pulling the trigger, you have to understand that you’re just shooting it at a different person in a different country when you hop from major corporation to major corporation.

When I follow along with the online discourse surrounding these issues, I see a lot of people seeking alternatives to Spotify. What pays the artists more? Where can I go to ethically stream music? What are the different platforms doing to combat false streams or artificial artists?

And on and on we go.

Part of the problem, and the one I tend to sympathize with more, is the AI of it all. Spotify is doubling down on AI music. For years now, people have suspected that some of the more generic instrumental playlists curated by Spotify were odd. Artists on your typical background jazz mixes were thought to be fake, AI music created by Spotify themselves to avoid paying money to real artists. But recently, Spotify was forced to respond to a far more egregious AI situation. Cult country-folk artist Blaze Foley died in 1989. Last month, a new song was uploaded to his artist page. Foley’s representation was furious, and Spotify removed the song after the backlash occurred. But even so, they are no less committed to the use of AI on their platform than they were before. They roll out new AI features every year. In June, a band that had amassed a quick and substantial following revealed themselves to be entirely AI generated. “The Velvet Sundown”, as the band was called, had already been featured heavily on a number of official Spotify playlists. In fairness, this band wasn’t a Spotify-sponsored project, but rather a product of Spotify’s growing AI troubles. This isn’t the only AI artist on the platform, and Blaze Foley isn’t the only artist to have AI music released in their name.

AI plagues nearly all platforms. Apple Music famously had an AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd song blow up in 2023. In April of this year, Deezer reported that bots upload more than 20,000 AI tracks every day. Tidal and Amazon Music have also reported fraudulent activity. AI is just an unfortunate byproduct of the music streaming world. Credit where credit is due, Deezer is taking great strides toward hunting down fraudulent music on their platform, more so than Spotify, for example.

I will now be retracting that credit, as Deezer is among the worst paying platforms for artist per stream. Tidal stands above the rest as perhaps the only service to pay more than a single penny per stream, with Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube Music, and Pandora trailing behind in that order.

Spotify, in 2023, paid $0.00318 per stream. If we can go back to Deerhoof for a moment, their most popular song has about 3.1 million streams. The math on that comes out to about $10,000. Deerhoof is a band consisting of multiple members, and presumably that money is split amongst them. This, of course, doesn’t take into account an artist’s record label, which likely gets the larger cut of that money. Dilute that more for taxes and fees, etc., etc.

I’ll stop picking on Deerhoof. The reality, for musicians, is that streaming just doesn’t pay anything worth getting excited about if you aren’t a Taylor Swift or an Ed Sheeran or so on and so forth. And those top 100, or even top 1000 artists, really don’t need the Spotify money because the real profit comes from touring (which is a whole separate issue for another time).

So, what about the ethically minded consumer? Well, frankly, there is no ethical consumption of music streaming. And if you feel like going “big picture” about it, there’s no ethical consumption at all under capitalism. If you really want to grandstand, take the phone, laptop, or tablet that you’re reading this on and throw it into the ocean, because there is a nearly one-hundred-percent chance that some component, or possibly even the whole thing, was made in a sweatshop with borderline slave labor. And if you’re concerned about polluting the oceans with your e-waste when you toss your phone away, don’t be, because recycling is largely a myth as well. A vast amount of “recycled” products just end up in a landfill anyway. Tear off your cheap H&M synthetic t-shirt and run into the forest to live off the land, so long as that land isn’t stolen from some native population that lived there long before it was colonized.

Now what?

I could say, “use Bandcamp” or “buy physical media” or something. And sure, knock yourself out. But at the end of the day, all of this stuff is a lot easier when you don’t think about it too hard.

I love music more than I love food or sex or liquor or sleep, or any other kind of vice or life-sustaining necessity. And I don’t know what it says about me that I coupled all of those together like they’re on the same level. But regardless, I don’t think there is any going back for myself as a consumer of music streaming. And I think a lot of people are probably in a similar place at the current moment.

Look at me. I was content to embrace ignorance on this whole issue until a band that I personally enjoy on a frequent basis became slightly less convenient for me to listen to in the same few taps on my phone screen as the other millions of songs I can access on a whim. It’s hardly a matter of principle, it’s a matter of convenience. It would be frustrating for me to switch to Apple Music (something I can do in an afternoon using various third-party programs to transfer my library and playlists), so I instead toss and turn and bitch and moan until I’m blue in the face.

There’s no lesson here. At the end of the day, despite Neil Young’s protesting, his music went back on Spotify after Joe Rogan signed a deal that let other platforms host his podcast. Is he any less conspiratorial now? Is he doing any less harm?

I have never listened to an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. But I have sung along to “Old Man” in my car. And that’s all that it really comes down to.

There Is No Such Thing as AI “Art”