🔗 Why We Quit Spotify:

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.

None of the streaming services is great, but Spotify is a terrible company run by petty crummy people. They don’t give a shit about music. It is 100% a commodity for them, and they are actively and consistently working toward being able to pump out background music as cheaply as possible to keep people engaged on their platform. To say that musicians are an afterthought to Spotify actually overstates it. The company appears to view people who make music as a nuisance to be gotten rid of.

And working in the tech business, I am constantly hearing about how Spotify organizes their teams and builds software. Given what I know about them as a company, I’m pretty deeply suspicious about anything coming out of their organization. I think the correct response to any suggestion involving “That’s how Spotify does it” is to note that they are terrible and we ought not to emulate anything that they do.