Considering Quitting Spotify? Here’s Why.
Explore ethical concerns, alternatives, and take control of your music streaming experience.
Reasons to Quit
There’s always been some. Now there’s more than ever.
Fair Compensation
Spotify pays 60% less per stream than its competitors’ average.
Non-payment
Spotify won’t pay for most emerging artist and catalog streams at all.
Market Dominance
Because Spotify dominates the market, it treats artists and users unfairly.
Income Inequality
Spotify’s pro-rata royalty share model and minimum threshold funnels money toward the top 1%.
Algorithmic & Design Bias
Spotify pushes users toward popular content & content that it controls.
Audio Quality
Other platforms serve up higher quality audio, album credits, Spatial Audio, and more.
Stream Stealing
Funneling revenues from sidestream to mainstream artists is the new unethical norm in the winner-takes-all Spotify economy.
The top 1.8% of artists take 95% of the money
- Spotify has an estimated 11m artists. In 2022 1060, or .009% of them made over $1m
- 7,000 or .06% of artists made over $10,000
- 200,000 or 1.8% of artists generated 95% of royalty payments in 2022.
The 1000 Stream/Year Threshold Hurts Most Artists
- Spotify funnels revenue from the marginalized artists to mainstream artists. Well over 2/3 of songs on the platform are being commercially cancelled.
- Even for threshold meeting artists, Spotify does not pay for the first up-to-999 streams, depending on when the threshold is reached.
- The threshold is designed to shirk responsibility to pay artists fairly. Even tracks with stream counts in the tens, and hundreds of thousands can be demonetized after being removed from a popular playlist, for example, or following any 12 month period where interest in the track wanes.
I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what’s happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.
– Thom Yorke
Radiohead, The Smile