A rising tide of musicians is removing their songs from Spotify, with artists from Australian rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard to post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor is spearheading a mass departure from the service. The trigger? Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s massive €600 million stake in AI weaponry research.
The row revolves around Ek’s investment bank Prima Materia channelling hundreds of millions into Helsing, a German defence firm that deals in AI-led military technology.
With a valuation of around $12 billion, Helsing creates artificial intelligence technologies for military purposes, such as drone warfare technologies. Even though he was aware that his investment would ignite controversy, Ek justified his move and said that he was “100 percent convinced that this is right for Europe.”
The response has been rapid and definitive. American experimental groups Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu took their catalogues off altogether, Xiu Xiu simply describing Spotify as a “garbage hole Armageddon portal.”
Artists Abandon Spotify, The “Perfect Storm” of Controversy
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, known for their prolific output and dedicated fanbase, joined the boycott alongside Netherlands-based label Kalahari Cult Music. The label issued a statement explaining they refused to support “a platform led by someone backing tools of war, surveillance, and violence.”
The band members were especially outspoken, releasing a statement that said in part: “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success to be tied to AI battle tech.” Their resignation spotlights the moral challenge many artists must navigate when their artistic product finds its way into companies they disagree with.
Although Ek’s expenditure on defense made these mass departures happen, frustrations with Spotify among musicians go far beyond that.
The service has long been criticized for its notoriously low royalty rates to artists, with many artists being able to receive little or no worthwhile income from plays. And with Spotify increasingly promoting songs generated by artificial intelligence, many worry that their service might begin to substitute human art with AI-synthesia creations.
Its market leadership has also come under fire, with commentators claiming that Spotify’s virtually monopolistic status affords it unacceptable dominance over how music is discovered and enjoyed around the world.
These wider industry worries have come together to produce a Perfect Storm when allied with the controversy over the XTB/WE.Source investment.
Artists, Content, and Principles on Spotify
It’s not the first time that big-name artists have quit Spotify for reasons of principle. Back in 2022, rock legend Neil Young famously removed his whole catalog from it after objecting to misinformation about COVID-19 being promoted on Joe Rogan’s hit podcast. Young’s retirement was symptomatic of a problem for the platform of balancing freedom of speech and responsibility for content.
Rogan’s show, exclusively hosted on Spotify through a reported $100 million deal, has frequently featured guests who questioned vaccine efficacy and promoted anti-vaccination viewpoints.
Young’s protest led many of his fans to choose between listening to his songs and supporting the platform.
These investments coincide with rising conflicts across the world, specifically the Russia-Ukraine war, rendering Ek’s investment in military AI technology particularly contentious.
The AI War and the Artist Boycott
Now that warfighting more regularly integrates artificial intelligence and autonomous platforms, most artists do not feel right creating for platforms that monetize such platforms.
The musician boycotts are legitimate concerns about corporate accountability and rights for artists in the streaming world. Individual artist exits do not necessarily undermine Spotify’s business model, but collectively it shows that creators are becoming increasingly conscious of having their work carried and how their fortunes potentially indirectly finance something that they do not approve of.
With more artists forgoing their options, this scandal might prove to be a harbinger of larger changes in how artists consider their relationships with streaming services.
The mass departure would indicate that for many artists, moral concerns presently trump the convenience and access that market-leading platforms like Spotify offer.
Whether it will trigger policy shifts at Spotify or merely redistribute these artists to other platforms remains to be seen, but it most definitely shows that artists are becoming more willing to forego possible income in order to uphold their artistic integrity.
