Cancel Your Spotify You Coward!

I know the title of this one is rather direct, but full disclosure, it is not my intent to blame or shame you or anyone for using Spotify or other subscription based content streaming platforms. They are all evil and they have us by the throat. Rather my intent with this article is to encourage you to cut streaming out of your life or at the very least reduce your subscriptions. You also save money by doing this. There will be some critiques, I will provide alternatives, and I will complain about Spotify. Spotify was a service I was super attached to. I listen to a lot of music, but trust me, if I was able to quit so can you. The grass is actually greener.

We Have Gotten Too Comfortable

I quit Spotify in October back when it came out that the CEO was using company revenue to invest in AI kill drones. A few weeks after that, Spotify started playing ICE ads. I have always known Spotify and companies like it are evil. That’s not going to change and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but that is not an excuse. There comes a point when we are made aware of certain things that corporations do where we need to draw the line, and this is such a case.

I want to be clear that the actions of Spotify and their CEO is not a mistake, it’s not bad policy, it’s not bad leadership, it’s very much intentional and by design. They know what they are doing and they are making money doing it. We know all of the aforementioned things are true, but you see Spotify is a business that has a duty to maximize share holder value through the pursuit of infinite growth and profits. They do not care what our ethics and morals are. It is not within their interests as capitalists to do so.

When it was revealed that the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, was investing Spotify revenue into military-industrial projects people rightfully called the CEO and the company out. This started a “shit test.” Will the consumer take action with their dollar, or can the company get away with it by ignoring the issue and accepting some loses in the short term? Now, in the beginning it seemed that things were going well, people were quitting Spotify and moving to other platforms and the company was feeling the hurt, so much so that now to save face, the CEO has announced his plan to resign (Spotify said it was planned but with that kind of timing? Hmmmm). I think that is important, there is no democratic victory too small. I want to emphasize that; however, since then Spotify has been running ads for ICE and has continued doing so up until recently (time of writing 01/08/2026) In my opinion this is all theater and PR. It is very likely that the CEO will continue to invest in AI kill drones, and Ek will likely keep all of his equity and stock options in the company (Ek will remain on the executive board, according to Forbes and BBC links below). You see they don’t really care, all of the actions in response to the backlash is very telling of their interests. If they were really remorseful then the CEO would have been ousted with no equity and stock options, investments in military-industrial projects would have ceased and there would have been actionable changes and we are letting them get away with it. They want to see what they can get away with and they are getting away with a lot. Our dollar has more power than you think and it shows. Yeah sure, there were some small loses in the beginning, but they are ignoring the problem, doing some performative things in the short term to lessen the impacts which in theory will still guarantee long term profits or at the very least a speedy recover from loses in the near future. This is how companies think. When we continue to do things out of comfort we demonstrate to corporations that the things they do are not deal breakers. We need to turn complaints into actions and radical analysis that challenges corporate interests.

Critics might make the following arguments: this is pointless, they are going to be evil anyway, that I pointed out that it’s all within their interests, therefor it doesn’t matter, blah, blah, blah. Just because we know these things to be true doesn’t mean we stand by and allow it. Yes, they are going to do evil anyway whether we pay them or not. That doesn’t mean we roll over and let it happen. We also should not bankroll or enable them to do the evil things that they want to do by giving them our hard earned wages. Those who smugly voice the opinion that “it doesn’t matter” simply want to project their views and rationalize their comfort. They don’t want to do things the hard way. You still get to listen to the music that you love, even when you forgo your comforts. No one is asking you to give up the content you enjoy, but all of this information that has come to light on how streaming companies make their money, pay their workers terribly, their artists terribly, skim from the top, take and steal, demonstrates that we need to abandon them. We need moments like this to inspire us to do the uncomfortable and to take action against their interests so that we may protect ours. Our wages should not be used to fuel their corporate greed and evil investment endeavors.

We have agency over whether or not we use Spotify and we do not need Spotify or streaming services to survive. Alternatives exist and they are accessible, maybe not as accessible in our perception, but in reality, quite accessible and more accessible than you have been led to believe. This is by design. The easy thing to do is to keep your subscriptions to Spotify or whatever service, but now is the time we need to choose to do things the hard way. This constant access to content is making us far too comfortable and it is nulling our ability to make actionable changes. Again, this is by design. They want us comfortable and satiated. Companies like Spotify want to sell you the idea that you cannot live without their service. Why? because they need US to make money. They may not need YOU but they need US. If Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (referenced as BDS from here on out) didn’t work corporate lobbies and politicians from both political parties wouldn’t support legislation that tries to stop BDS efforts.

Articles Supporting My Claims:

Spotify founder Daniel Ek to step down as chief executive - BBC

• Mentions the boycott but offers no analysis
• Claims resignation was planned.

Why Spotify CEO Is Stepping Down After Nearly Two Decades - Forbes

• Mentions Investments in Helsing and rationalizes the investment as “Protecting Europe”. From what?
• No mention of boycott
• Claims that Spotify pays 70% revenue to musicians and rights holders. Lets get real, it goes to the rights holders.
• Claims resignation was planned.

Spotify Confirms ICE Recruitment Ads Are No Longer Running on Platform - yahoo

• It takes a woman getting murdered in cold blood by ICE agents
• BDS works, the backlash is important and does play a role.

Music Has Gotten Too Cheap

The harder it is to get the final product, the more value it has, once getting the final product is easy, its value sinks accordingly. This is the relation a commodity has to its value. Our perception of Spotify is only acknowledged and accepted by an exchange (money). We have been convinced that the service that Spotify provides (music delivery) has value that is only recognized through social processes. These social processes are the consumption of music and art to enrich oneself and to appear cultured.

Here are some definitions that aided me:

Commodity: any good or service (“products” or “activities”) produced by human labor and offered as a product for general sale on the market.

Commodity fetishism: In the economics of the marketplace, producers and consumers perceive each other by means of the money and goods that they exchange.

Social Value: value something has in a society (i.e. thing has value simply because people want it and it costs money). The value-form of a commodity.

Labor Value: Time and Labor it takes to produce a commodity.

“The quantity of value of a commodity varies directly as the quantum, and inversely as the productive power of the labor embodying itself in the commodity.” - Marx (Commodities Essay from Capital)

Streaming only reduces the value of the music an artist/band produces. Because of the nature of streaming, once you upload your music to a streaming service, say Spotify, you are now competing with every single artist on that platform against your will. Spotify has now turned your band’s music into a product, a commodity with social value and labor value. Due to the sheer amount of music that Spotify can deliver to people and the near limitless supply, your music becomes a commodity that has its value reduced to a fraction, of fraction, of a fraction of its worth. Why do you think Spotify pays fractions of a penny for streams? They have so much music on their platform that to them, that is what your music is worth. You don’t like it? They don’t care. They are making a killing on subscriptions because people still want to stream T-Swift, Kanye and Drake. They also double that money when they run ICE ads and invest in AI kill bots to “…protect Europe.”, to paraphrase former CEO Daniel Ek.

Also, in the early days Spotify literally built out their library by pirating music. Rasmus Fleischer maintains that Spotify built out their service by pirating music from The Pirate Bay. Fleischer found his music on the service back in the beta days despite never giving Spotify his music. In fact, the only place he uploaded his music to was The Pirate Bay. Fleischer said the following after finding his music in the beta: “I thought that was funny. So I emailed Spotify and asked how they obtained it. They said that ‘now, during the test period, we will use music that we find’”. Hmmmm. Source

Spotify’s main product is not music, its the access they give to music and the speed in which they can deliver that music. Spotify is a middle-man and they can virtually charge whatever they want. Why? because music is now a commodity that has become an object of unreasonable excessive attention. That is the definition for a “fetish” in a non-sexual context. When a market’s view of a commodity becomes a fetish this is what is known as “Commodity Fetishism”. Commodity fetishism is when producers and consumers perceive each other only by means of exchange, money. We do not interact with Spotify and their service, and vice-versa, until we pay. Now, you can listen to music on Spotify for free, but you have to listen to ads and many of the applications features are limited. What you pay for, and what they sell, is unlimited, uninterrupted access to a vast library of music with a ton of features for interacting with that music.

Spotify simply places artificial limits on music and this in term creates artificial supply. When the supply of music is nearly infinite and the means of delivery is instantaneous the value of music plummets because they don’t care if you listen to a given artist or not and they don’t care if a given artist puts their music on their service or not. They have a near infinite amount of other artists and songs. This is the main operation of commodity fetishism, where the owners of the algorithms and data actively ignore or maintain an indifference to the relational whole that produces the commodity. Meaning, Spotify is indifferent to what goes into making the music and is indifferent to the artist that labors to make said music. Spotify merely grants access to music and they are indifferent to the value, the social labor and social relations that come with making music. They get to charge whatever they want because we will pay for it and because we need it. They get to pay artists whatever they want because they are in a position where they are obfuscated from the artist’s relation to their own work. The more people that cancel their subscriptions and the more artists that pull their music from the service, the less they can obfuscate themselves because their service is nothing without us and the music we give them. Hence eradicating their indifference.

I want to emphasize that we are in unique position to take collective action against Spotify and other streaming services as we do not need them to live. This isn’t a situation where they are the only food supplier and we have no one else to buy food from to eat and survive. Alternatives exist and they are good. We have a choice and we do not need Spotify and streaming to access and share content.

Please refer to Marx on Commodities and Commodity Fetishism or watch a YouTube videos about it. Reading that shit is hard (but do it anyway when you have the time).

Do We Actually Need So Much Access To Content?

No, we don’t. I recently came across a study conducted by PNAS Nexus that aimed to explore how constant internet access via smartphones really affects our minds. Without even diving into this paper, I can confidently say that we know very well that these damn phones, social media, etc, is messing us up, but there are researchers who are really exploring this and the results are still quite fascinating. The paper focuses less on how constant social media access affects our minds (which is the hot topic right now) and more on how limiting mobile internet access can improve attention span, cognitive reasoning, mental health, and subjective well being. No surprise, subjects that had their smart phone features limited to only call and text saw improvements to their mental health, subjective well-being, and attention span. The study also found that 91% of participants improved on at least one of the aforementioned outcomes. Additionally, participants could still use the internet as much as they as liked as long as it was through a desktop computer. The participants didn’t really have to give up a whole lot, all that really changed was their access and habits, because now they had to think about what they were doing. This creates friction. It makes you think more about what you are doing and why. This is very compelling because the biggest issue with social media, doom-scrolling, constant content consumption, is that you do it without even thinking about it. It might feel passive in the moment, but trust me, your brain is working constantly to keep up and the study suggests that is not a good thing.

Ok, phone bad, so groundbreaking right? We already knew this, and yet we keep going back for more. When life can feel boring or mundane having a soundtrack for your day or your life can make things more interesting. Now, the PNAS Nexus study didn’t focus on music consumption; however, I would make the argument that unlimited access to music via content streaming still falls into the realm of online content consumption. It’s different for everyone, but putting our brains in a state of constant consumption is very taxing. It has an affect on dopamine, regardless of the nature or medium of the content. I would argue different types of content will have different affects on different people, but there are affects nonetheless.

Looking at music consumption as a means of escapism, I found a study on music consumption and potential music addiction which suggests that for most people, listening to music is simply a lifestyle enhancement. Few people experienced negative adverse affects when they limited their consumption or cut it out right. With those who experienced adverse affects, the research suggests that those individuals were turning to music to cope, out of compulsion and to deal with boredom. Whereas those who did not experience adverse affects only experienced some changes in daily habits but they likely just found something else to do. I think separation and friction when it comes to content is important. You need to be able to be bored. To sit with your own thoughts. Boredom is the key to adventure and creativity. The more bored you are today, the less bored you will be tomorrow because you will get inspiration to do something. Avoiding boredom at all costs is a vicious cycle especially when you are going through a tough time and experiencing mental health issues, I think we can all understand the need to have some distractions when we are going through a tough time, but I would argue we should not shy away from boredom in those tough times. Ideally, we should use boredom to fuel inspiration to pursue our hobbies. Boredom helps you think and process the things you need to process. Music can be another escape on top of a bunch of other stimuli. Additionally music can be comforting when we are experiencing discomfort but also music can induce certain emotions that may not be good for us when we are having a tough time and need to process tough experiences and emotions because it can hijack our current emotional state and thoughts like any other type of content. It can be comforting but also harmful. Mindful consumption with intention is valuable.

I’m not saying to stop listening to music, but its time we really reconsider whether or not we need so much access to it. We do not need to listen to everything. We should to the best of our ability try to not treat music as something that needs to be consumed in order to be “in the know” or because of “FOMO” or whatever. I find that those who have some of the best taste arrived at that point because they prioritized curating over consumption and they have separation and things that create friction in their lives so that they approach content with intention. They do not rely on an algorithms they rely on their tastes and experimenting with those tastes. It is good for us to listen to stillness, it is good for us to listen to nature and to appreciate the natural sounds around us. Nature grounds us, and so do the sounds of nature. It is important to be able to hear when a car is about to run us over when we are walking down the street in this car dependent hell-scape. Music is wonderful and important, and giving up spotify or other streaming services does not mean you have to give up music and we really need to stop treating it that way.

Studies Referenced:

I am too lazy to do a proper citation. Who cares. I am some idiot on the internet.

• Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being

• Music consumption: Lifestyle choice or addiction

How I Left Streaming

I have been collecting physical media for some time. I got into buying CDs in High School, because I liked vinyl but it was an expensive hobby that I did not have the money for. For the price of one record I could get a ton of used CDs with excellent sound quality. I also had a CD player in my car. When I was in high school my parents didn’t understand Spotify and it was always a battle to convince them to let me keep it (maybe they were onto something hmmmm). We also had a really crappy data plan, so streaming wasn’t always an option. Streaming was still a very new thing when I was in high school and the 3G/4G networks at the time could barely keep up. CDs meant I’d always have music I could enjoy in the car. I also liked the idea of ownership. I’m going to have this CD until it’s rendered function-less, there is no guarantee that I will have Spotify tomorrow or that the artist I like will keep their music on the platform. I understood and valued ownership at a young age. I am old enough to remember owning things and in my teens I saw the trend of streaming, licensed products, and licensed software, and how that was going to change things even if I lacked the vocabulary to express why that was a bad thing.

10 years later, I have come full circle. I never stopped buying records, CDs and music digitally off of Bandcamp. In fact, bandcamp is a pretty decent platform and a competitive alternative. Now, Bandcamp still takes a percentage of sales, it is a business, but its buy once and keep forever and most of the artists I follow prefer it and they encourage supporting them via Bandcamp. There are some people who dislike the cut they take (I think its 10%), and I respect and understand that; however, at least on Bandcamp the money is going to the artist and its buy once and keep forever. Bandcamp for better or worse is just a middle-man. I want to be clear, I don’t think Bandcamp is the final solution, or the best solution, I just think its decent one. You can disagree. The point I want to make here is buying music physically and digitally is a viable solution. It can seem daunting because starting a collection from scratch can be challenging and at a glance it can seem expensive, but when you spread the costs out over time you will save in the long run. I am confident in that, because when you own something forever you don’t have to pay for it again. Think about the amount of music that you have listened to before vs. the amount of new music you listen to on Spotify. Imagine if you just owned the music you replay often and then used the savings from not using a service like Spotify to then go out and purchase a new record that you really like. I bet you, worst case scenario, over time the costs of slowly curating and purchasing music would be equal to your subscription fees, with the costs gradually decreasing over time as you build your collection. The key is to reduce costs over time, especially as inflation eats our wages.

Here are the things I have done to free myself that you can do too:

• Prioritizing ownership - buying albums digitally
  • I spend about $15/month on music
  • Spotify cost me $13.
  • this could be lower but I like music.
  • $15-$20/month is fine when I own it.
• Buying CDs & Vinyl
  • I hunt like crazy for second hand CDs they are so cheap!
  • Some of the my favorite records I got for like 5 bucks because I was willing to dig and be patient
    • I got a wonderful mint condition vintage press of Kind of Blue - Miles Davis on vinyl for 10 bucks some years ago.
• Storage
  • Digital Albums are also very cheap and the easiest to store.
    • I store them on a external SSD that I back up to a hard drive on my computer regularly.
    • SSD prices have gone up like crazy because of AI companies, but AI companies are not interested in external USB based drives those appear to be stable (or atleast they haven’t gone up as much).
    • Regular hard drives (HDD) are also totally viable, cheaper and fast enough for reading music files. In fact for music and photos HDD is the way to go because you can get crazy amounts of storage for cheap.
  • I transfer all of my music to my phone regularly
    • For android I recommend an app called musicolet for listening to your music. Really great app.
    • Android phones can connect to your computer directly via USB and you can drag and drop music files into the music folder on your phone and apps like musicolet can find all of your music once you transfer it to the music folder w/ a computer.
    • Android supports FLAC ; iPhone does not.
    • Apple is stupid and you have to use apple music.
      • On windows you also need to use an application called Apple Device Manager - fuck you apple and your proprietary shit.
  • CDs are stupid easy to store.
    • Burn your own CDs
    • Don’t listen to audiophiles, CD quality is quite good. Better than streaming.
    • It is not immoral to burn music you own onto CDs for your personal use.
    • There are a lot of YouTube tutorials on how to do that.
      • Windows 10 and lower have built in burning tools in Windows Media Player. IDK about Windows 11.
      • There is also open source software out there that does this well - brasero is a good one
  • Cassettes are stupid easy to store.
    • There are a lot of good cassette players that can be purchased for less than 60 bucks that have mp3 audio jacks that can be hooked up to stereo systems.
    • It is not immoral to record music you own onto tapes for your personal use.
    • You can also make your own cassettes tapes and its really easy actually, there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube on how to do that.

On Piracy

Now, let’s talk about piracy. Sailing the seven seas is moral. End of story. Obviously if your favorite indie artist is starving and needs to pay bills, go and buy their album you shit. The artists who have multi-million dollar record deals and the artists who are old and have made their money, whose master recordings probably belong to a record company, are not making shit off their music anymore. They probably do receive some residuals (usually this is a strategic move by record companies to avoid lawsuits, the record companies still get all the cream) but trust me those residuals are shit. You can pirate that music. In fact, more and more artists are just like “yeah I don’t care” (this is anecdotal, but come on now). Any artist that has “fuck you” levels of money that gives a shit about some fucking kid downloading their music for free is a fucking hack anyway. Look at Metallica, their music is shit, I don’t care, and they are fucking shitty people with their legal bullshit. They can go fuck themselves. Go look at their legal history and it will radicalize you and reinforce my arguments here.

On the question of access. Companies remove movies, music, tv shows all the time because they weren’t profitable and decided to remove them or cancel them for tax right off purposes. In a lot of cases this kind of content is usually very artistic and profound and because of that doesn’t have mass appeal but the company views it as a product and asset and it is treated as such. Pirate that shit for art preservation. If somebody, or some company won’t give me access, in other words I want to buy it but they won’t sell it, then I will pirate it. Why? because if its not for sale and its not available but it exists and should be accessible, it is not stealing.

If an album is like 30 years old and the artist does not rely on sales to live, then I pirate it. If an artist has fuck you money and is doing their own thing, I pirate it. If an artist’s work is tied up in corporate ownership, I pirate it. If an artist depends on merch and album sales to sustain themselves and their art. I buy it. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, piracy is not a question of ethics. The ethics are made up to protect corporate interests. Free yourself from being a corporate lackey and pirate dammit (lovingly & respectfully).

Source? Me, and because I said so.

BDS Is Imperfect But Works

By no means am I perfect. I too am guilty of doing the things I have criticized in this essay. I am not trying to position myself above anyone else. I want my arguments and criticisms to inspire others to make arguments and criticisms of their own. I want to have a discussion about these things in good faith. Most importantly, I want people to know that they can choose something different, and it is within our interests to do so. I want to inspire people to abandon streaming, or at the very least reduce dependency on streaming and hopefully Spotify can be one of the services that people drop. There is very little one person can do, but together we can achieve a lot and it is the only way anything will get done. History and movements are made by the people. Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions may not greatly alter or re-structure society into a society that works for us overnight, but if we want to build a society that works for us we must continue to educate, agitate, and organize, so that we may continue to develop our conscious politically. When the masses are politically conscious we can re-structure society into a society that works for us and not billionaire-corporate interests. BDS movements and similar movements work, if they didn’t then the ruling class wouldn’t try and stop it. Democratic movements, like BDS, are necessary for building mass movements that will enable us to make meaningful change. There is no democratic victory too small. The people is all we have, and the people together are capable of shaping the future.

If you actually managed to read all of this, thank you. You are very appreciated. Cancel your Spotify.