The Guide #206: Indie bands are quitting Spotify, what could it mean for the future of music streaming?
At the moment, the Spotify exodus of 2025 is a trickle rather than a flood.A noticeable trickle, like a leak from the upstairs bathroom dribbling down the living room wall, but nothing existential yet.The five notable bands who have left Spotify in the past month – shoegazers Hotline TNT last week, joining Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – are well liked in indie circles, but aren’t the sorts to rack up billions of listens.Still, it feels significant if only because, well, this sort of thing wasn’t really supposed to happen any more.The Guardian’s journalism is independent.
We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link,Learn more,Plenty of bands and artists refused to play ball with Spotify in its early years, when the streamer still had work to do before achieving total ubiquity,But at some point there seemed to a collective recognition that resistance was futile, that Spotify had won and those bands would have to bend to its less-than-appealing model,That realisation was best summed up by the Black Keys, a legitimately big rock band at the time of Spotify’s emergence who refused to put the albums they released around then – 2011’s El Camino and 2014’s Turn Blue – on the platform.
They relented two years later and say now that “taking a stand definitely hurt us in the long run”.This artist acquiescence happened in tandem – surely not coincidentally – with a closer relationship between Spotify and the record labels that once viewed it as their destroyer.Some of the bigger labels have found a way to make a lot of money from streaming: Spotify paid out $10bn in royalties last year – though many artists would point out that only a small fraction of that reaches them after their label takes its share.Despite those conditions, for artists dealing with Spotify, it has long seemed unavoidable.So why have those five bands departed in quick succession? The trigger was the announcement that Spotify founder Daniel Ek had led a €6oom fundraising push into a German defence company specialising in AI weapons technology.
That was enough to prompt Deerhoof, the veteran San Francisco oddball noise pop band, to jump.“We don’t want our music killing people,” was how they bluntly explained their move on Instagram.That seems to have also been the animating factor for the rest of the departed, though GY!BE, who aren’t on any social media platforms, removed their music from Spotify – and indeed all other platforms aside from Bandcamp – without issuing a statement, while Hotline TNT’s statement seemed to frame it as one big element in a broader ideological schism.“The company that bills itself as the steward of all recorded music has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it does not align with the band’s values in any way,” the statement read.That speaks to a wider artist discontent in a company that has, even by its own standards, had a controversial couple of years.
There was of course the publication of Liz Pelly’s marmalade-dropper of a book Mood Machine, with its blow-by-blow explanation of why Spotify’s model is so deleterious to musicians, including allegations that the streamer is filling its playlists with “ghost artists” to further push down the number of streams, and thus royalty payments, to real artists (Spotify denies this).The streamer continues to amend its model in ways that have caused frustration – demonetising artists with fewer than 1,000 streams, or by introducing a new bundling strategy resulting in lower royalty fees.Meanwhile, the company – along with other streamers – has struggled to police a steady flow of AI-generated tracks and artists on to the platform.So it’s understandable that some bands might have decided that the trade-off is no longer worth it.Of course, it should be noted that the five bands mentioned feel they are established enough to weather a departure from Spotify, and have the backing from their labels to leave.
Not everyone will be in the same position,And removing yourself from such an important platform is highly risky,But if they can pull it off, the sacrifice might just be worth it,“A cooler world is possible,” as Hotline TNT put it in their statement,If that’s true for artists it’s surely true for listeners too – though I have to say I find it really hard to shake the idea of Spotify as anything other than the default mode of listening to music, having been using it since 2009.
It remains a remarkable site of discovery and I’ve encountered bands and genres, across decades and continents, that I probably wouldn’t have found without it.But while it’s broadened my music consumption, it’s also unquestionably flattened it and I don’t give new albums and tracks as many listens as I should.Saying that, this year I’ve definitely found myself spending less and less time on Spotify.I don’t think that’s down to ethics, necessarily, it just doesn’t seem as enticing a prospect as it once did, with the endless lovebombing of artificially generated playlists and moods.I’ve been using Bandcamp more, even – gasp – buying albums (though equally a lot of the time I previously spent listening to music is now being taken up by podcasts instead).
Other options are, of course, available – the Guardian has provided a helpful guide – but they have their own ethical quagmires attached.And ultimately, they are replicating the same broad but shallow model as Spotify (with the exception of Bandcamp, of course).Maybe weaning ourselves off not just Spotify, but the way that Spotify has convinced us to consume music is the only answer.Then a cooler world might be possible.Sign up to The GuideGet our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Fridayafter newsletter promotionIf you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
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