Why I Quit Spotify After 13 years (And Why it Feels Like a Personal Failure)
Last night, after nearly 13 years as a Spotify user, I canceled my family account and deleted the app from all of my devices. As I told the company in the handy write-in box they provided, I left for a very straightforward reason: I don’t want to pay any more money to a company that spends it supporting Joe Rogan’s disinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Yet, even though I’m totally confident in this decision, it still feels like a failure, and that’s because I’ve been one of Spotify’s staunchest supporters, since long before the company launched in 2006.
Back in the olden times, at the turn of the 21st century, I was an internet business analyst at a now-defunct NYC market research firm and consultancy called Jupiter Research. Among other things, I was the company’s head of digital music research, advising record labels, music publishers, media companies, and retailers about how the internet would fundamentally change the business model for music.
After Napster came along in 1999 and flipped everybody’s heads inside out, it became very clear to me, and to others who understood the music industry, that the classic wholesale/retail business model wasn’t going to work for very much longer. Why would consumers want to keep paying for individual records and albums, when an entire universe of “content” — hundreds of millions of songs — was just a click away? The business model for digital abundance, I argued, was an all-you-can-eat streaming service (or, as we called it at the time, the “subscription model” or the “celestial jukebox”) that guaranteed things like sound quality and cybersecurity in exchange for a small monthly fee.
I had good data to back me up. Even back in 2000 — before Apple’s game-changing iPod had even launched, and long before Spotify was a gleam in Daniel Ek’s eyes — Jupiter fielded surveys showing that a lot of music consumers were already willing to pay for such a service, at the right price and with the right catalog and feature set. I was very adamant about this finding, and I not only published several reports laying out why this model would work and how it would work, I also flogged the idea at major music industry conferences and in the press. For a little while, my professional reputation was synonymous with the idea of a music streaming service.
Back then, I was certain that digital music subscription services were just around the corner. I published market projections showing the subscription model overtaking the “a-la-carte” digital singles model within five years or so. But for reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, the major labels were largely resistant to this idea, dragging their feet on supporting such a model and focusing more on suing digital music startups than on preparing their own businesses for the necessary transition to streaming. For a short while, the major labels launched their own subscription services, called MusicNet and PressPlay, but they were cumbersome and expensive, and each of them only had half of the major label catalog available because their corporate owners wouldn’t license to one another.
Then Apple changed the industry, launching the iPod MP3 player and the iTunes music store, which rapidly became the largest music retailer in the world. The music industry became a digital singles market for a decade, and the streaming model was largely left by the wayside.
This was a bad idea for almost everyone except Apple. It was bad for the labels because, well, singles cost less than albums. And because most albums contain a great deal of what the industry calls “filler” — songs you’ve never heard on the radio, and wouldn’t really want to — this meant that, instead of spending $10–15 on an album, consumers would now spend $2–3 buying only the songs they liked from the album. It was also bad for consumers, though. The iPod was sleek and fancy and amazingly powerful for its time, but its tagline was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Most consumers could do the math — at $1 per song on iTunes, that meant $1,000 just to fill the damned thing up.
These were lean years for the dominant music industry organizations. Sales fell considerably for major label music.* The financial hit caused by the switch from CD albums to digital singles was compounded by a real estate speculative boom, making it impossible for brick-and-mortar music retailers to eke out a profit. Tower Records, HMV, Sam Goody, and other major music retailers closed thousands of stores, driving more and more music buyers to the internet — and digital singles. It was a snowball effect. In the meantime, the major labels were hamstrung because all of their eggs were now in Apple’s basket, and the company was pumping out new iPods like hotcakes. So instead of acknowledging that they’d backed the wrong horse, the major labels started a “public awareness” campaign blaming their consumers, a/k/a “internet pirates,” for their market woes. I published a book about these structural changes in the music industry back in 2013, called The Piracy Crusade. You can read it for free online.
*(Incidentally, these were great years for others in the music industry. The growth of iTunes and other MP3 stores meant that millions of independent artists and labels could finally get easy access to consumers on a global scale and a more level playing field; companies like CDBaby, Tunecore, and BandCamp helped those independent artists manage their sales; and platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and SoundCloud provided both music streaming and marketing capacities for free, making it easier than ever for independent musicians to find their fans. Other markets, such as used music retail, synch licensing, and live events, also thrived during this time.)
I had left the market research world for academia by this point, and was busy writing my PhD thesis about remix music (which would eventually be adapted into my first book, Mashed Up). But I still did some consulting and punditry, and was consistently disappointed to see the music industry stalled in its development, when the streaming model was clearly more viable than ever. Once smartphones emerged as a popular platform (thanks in large part to Apple, again, which launched the iPhone in 2007), it was clear that the writing was on the wall for digital singles; consumers with two, three, or more digital devices wouldn’t want to move their libraries from place to place every time they listened to a song. Far better to keep it all in the cloud, and stream their workout playlists at the gym, their Sunday morning playlists from their living rooms, their midnight oil playlists from their work laptops.
This is why I was so happy when Spotify first launched. Though the company was founded in 2006, it was a small regional service until it expanded into new markets including the UK, in 2009, finally launching to great fanfare (and a much-vaunted Facebook integration) in the US and elsewhere in 2011.
I got a complimentary premium subscription to the service in 2009, and started paying for it several years later, upgrading to a family plan once my kids got old enough to own their own devices and express their own musical tastes. I’ve always loved it; although there have been several other rival services predating and contemporary with Spotify, I’ve always thought it stood out for its ease of use, as well as its tech agnosticism (as an independent company, untethered to Apple, Google, or Amazon). I was also happy to see the business model I’d so vociferously supported finally bearing fruit a decade later. The numbers bear it out, as well; music sales stopped falling when Spotify launched in the US, and have grown precipitously in recent years as the streaming model has become dominant.
Although this was a nice turn of affairs for consumers and major labels alike, not everyone was happy about the rise of Spotify. Some artist advocates mistakenly claimed that streaming services paid too little to artists, misleadingly comparing the fraction of a penny in royalties paid per stream to the more substantial return from the sale of a CD. I believed, and still believe, that this unfairly maligns digital music service providers like Spotify (other researchers agreed with me). First of all, a stream is not equivalent to a CD sale. It’s more similar to a consumer listening to a track once on a CD they’ve already bought. And if you do the math (which I did, in a 2016 book chapter), it’s clear that the amount of money generated for the artist in each case is roughly equivalent. Furthermore, companies like Spotify were paying the majority of their revenue to rights holders; it was the record labels themselves that were often the chokepoints in the flow of revenues to artists, keeping the lion’s share of Spotify payments for themselves, and only paying a single-digit percentage of what they collected to their artists.
So I continued to be a vocal booster, and enthusiastic paying customer, for Spotify throughout the 2010s. But during these years, it became increasingly clear that the company was changing, in ways I wasn’t necessarily happy about. There were four reasons for this. First, Spotify was becoming a global market leader, nearly as important to the music industry as Apple had been a decade earlier. This gave them a lot more clout to set terms and a lot more weight to throw around in general. Second, Spotify was in a perennial cash crunch, due to the fact that, as I mentioned, it paid the vast majority of its revenues back to rights holders, especially the three major labels and the three major music publishers. That meant they needed to start finding other sources of revenue, that didn’t cost them so much up front or take such a bite out of the back end. Third, in part due to the first two factors, Spotify was morphing from a music distributor into a data broker, refocusing its business model more and more on surveillance capitalism. And finally, the company spent the years 2015–2018 preparing for its IPO, finally debuting on the NYSE at a value of $28 billion.
Increasingly, the decisions Spotify made as a result of these factors cast a shadow over the company’s reputation. A 2015 revision to their privacy policy had civil liberties watchdogs up in arms. There were widespread accusations that the company was padding genre playlists with “fake” artists in order to avoid paying royalties to real ones. There were complaints that the company was soliciting millions of dollars in “playlist payola” to include songs on their popular playlists, which currently make up the majority of streams on the platform. And they filed a series of “creepy” patents which collectively paint a pretty dystopian portrait of the future of music streaming services.
There was also some debate about Spotify’s ethical responsibilities regarding the artists whose work it promoted. In 2018, this debate came to a head when the company rolled out a new “Hate Content & Hateful Conduct” policy, promising to erase content from playlists, or even from the platform altogether, if a song “incites hatred or violence against a group or individual” based on their race, religion, sexual orientation or other sensitive aspect of their identity. This policy was immediately enforced against R&B superstar R. Kelly because, well, all the things.
As I wrote in a Daily Beast article at the time, I was concerned about this decision, both because I think it’s dangerous to give a single company the power to sink an artist’s career, especially based on the vicissitudes of public opinion (Kelly had not yet been convicted of the crimes in question), and because it seemed to me that the edict was not being universally enforced. As I argued, “songs like “Animals” by Maroon 5 and “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, both of which are songs by white artists explicitly celebrating sexual violence, are available on Spotify, [and] Spotify has yet to purge white artists who have been convicted of sexual assault or domestic abuse, including Gene Simmons, Ozzy Osbourne, and Nick Carter.”
That brings us to Joe Rogan. In large part due to the changes in its strategic vision I described above, Spotify pivoted hard to podcasts in recent years. Despite paying large up-front fees for this kind of content, it’s still much less expensive for the company over time than paying royalties on every song it streams. Although Spotify acquired a massive podcast library including millions of shows, The Joe Rogan Experience rapidly became its most popular podcast, and remains so to this day.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, Joe Rogan is a lying, racist asshat who peddles harmful disinformation about COVID-19 and the January 6th, 2021 coup attempt, And Spotify is stuck with him — not only because he’s so popular on the platform, but also because, as poker players say, they’re “pot committed,” having spent $100 million to lure him into an exclusive deal in 2020.
I’ve been on the fence about Spotify for a while, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned in the past few paragraphs. In addition to being a music researcher, I’m also a (mostly) independent musician, and my own bands are still available on the platform, and frankly, I’m still grateful that the platform gives us access to a global audience without the need for major label representation.
But as a consumer, I think this week was a make-or-break moment. It all came to a head on Monday, when boomer superstar Neil Young, who still pulls over 6 million monthly listeners on the platform (compared to Rogan’s ~11 million), issued a public ultimatum. He demanded that Spotify remove Rogan’s podcast immediately, or he would pull his own music from the service. In his words, “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
As I told KCBS Radio in an interview yesterday, I didn’t see any world in which Spotify would throw out their most popular podcast, especially given their sunken costs. I also told them I don’t think Young has the power to arbitrarily remove his content from the service, given that Warner Music Group controls his masters and Hipgnosis has 50% of his publishing. But as it turns out, what Young lacks in legal authority he still has in clout, and sure enough before a few more hours had elapsed, the service agreed to remove almost all of his content from their library.
This was, for me, the last straw. I can’t continue to pay my $20/month to a company that has cast its lot for Joe Rogan, even though I completely understand Spotify’s bind, and its economic rationale. And, yes, I realize that this may seem to fly in the face of the “slippery slope” argument I made in 2018 regarding R. Kelly, and maybe it does. But to me, there’s a world of difference between: a) providing a platform for an artist who’s done horrible things (and lord knows there’s plenty of those, including some of my favorites, like Miles Davis and David Bowie); and b) actively paying hundreds of millions of dollars to amplify disinformative propaganda that kills thousands of people and undermines American democracy.
Thank goodness for the bravery of Neil Young, who was willing to forego the majority of his streaming income to support his principles. And props to the folks who were quicker on the uptake than me and left Spotify the moment they wrote that giant check to Rogan. And kudos to the artists who have followed suit.
I’m not happy about leaving Spotify. I loved the service as a consumer, and I always viewed the company’s success as evidence that, way back in the olden days, I was right about the future of the music industry, and about the viability of the subscription model. It’s going to take me a while to reproduce my playlists and replace all my embedded links with Apple Music (which I’ve been using for about a year already). But leaving Spotify was the only ethical choice I could make, and maybe —as unlikely as it seems— if enough people make the same choice, Spotify will rethink its commitment to Rogan and to the toxic content and policies the company has hitched its future to.
