Against Spotify: A Manifesto

How streaming companies are eating music alive — and what to do about it.

You should stop thinking of music-streaming businesses like Spotify as services in any normal sense. They aren’t. They’re parasites. Specifically, parasitic wasps. 

You don’t know about those? You should. They explain perfectly what is happening to music. First, a parasitic wasp lays eggs inside the body of the caterpillar. Once the wasp larvae hatch, they begin to eat the caterpillar alive from the inside. The zombie caterpillar is still alive, sort of — it might even look healthy, at least at first — but it’s been taken over by wasp larvae. The caterpillar has only one purpose now: to feed and protect the larvae that are growing and eating and fattening inside it. The larvae that are killing it. The larvae that, when they’re finished growing, will chew their way out of the caterpillar’s body and wriggle out as wasps, leaving an empty husk. When they’re done, the caterpillar is dead. The wasps don’t care.

It’s horrifying. It’s nauseating. It’s what’s happening to music. 

Spotify — I’m using Spotify as a shorthand for any of these streaming companies — is that wasp. It is a parasite that has laid its eggs inside music. Like every other algorithmically driven streaming company, it is eating alive its host — our culture. The culture we share. When it’s finished, nothing but a husk will remain. And these streaming businesses do not care. 

The streaming services are not interested in HUMAN MEANING in anything like the sense that you are. Their creators and the rest of the billionaire tech class do not share your values. Do your values include TESCREAL? I DIDN’T THINK SO!

Spotify is waging war against culture on two fronts:

First, they’re fighting YOU, THE LISTENER. They certainly use some sly tactics. “For a negligible fee, we’ll give you all the music. It’ll be cheap! You only have to give us your sense of agency, the relationships you’d otherwise have around the art you love, and your blankest, most deadened state of acquiescence.” This is an old story! It’s Mephistopheles and Faust! Satan and Jesus in the temple! Rumpelstiltskin! FUCK THAT!

Secondly, they’re aiming at ME, THE ARTIST. They don’t like human activity they can’t reduce to binary code because it terrifies them. It flies in the face of everything they value. Their long-term project is reducing all art to the grayest imaginable average so that it can never threaten their specious anti-human worldview again.

• Brass tacks: Let’s say you pay your $10 a month and use it to listen exclusively to my music. How much of your $10 does Spotify pay me? ZERO. It pays most of your $10 to one of three megacorporations representing famous pop stars. They could change this pro rata payout system to a user-centric one at any time, but they don’t. Also, did you know they’ve stopped paying anything at all to artists with fewer than 1,000 streams? Well, they have! Being an artist was never easy. Spotify, with its anti-human and anti-art values, is making it impossible. 

• The streaming companies will use artificial intelligence to parse all of the 80 million-plus songs in their databases and replace musicians with bots churning out middling simulacra of popular music from the past. That music may provide nice vibes while you’re doing something else, but it will MEAN NOTHING to anyone. My life’s work — and that of every artist you currently admire who is not among the 1% — will basically vanish.

Right now, Spotify is winning this war because YOU DON’T KNOW you’re in it. It’s time to get in the fight, people! It’s time to DROP OUT AND OPT IN.

1. DROP OUT. Stop giving in to algorithmically-selected cultural content. 

• Music fans: If you want to keep your streaming accounts, that’s your choice to make. But before you use them, DECIDE what you want to listen to. If you’re not sure, ask a friend. Never follow the algorithm’s shuffling path into oblivion. Just stop. Now. Never again. YOU DECIDE what you want to hear. THEY (Daniel Ek and the other oligarchs) do NOT decide.

• Artists: Drop out of the streamers. Stop streaming your work. Believe me, I understand the arguments about “having to be there.” I really do. I am with you. I feel nothing but solidarity with you whether you heed my warning or not. But still — please stop. It’s killing you. It’s killing us. In time, what you will gain (even in obscurity) from treating your work with respect will justify your decision. Subjecting your work to the garbage disposal of streaming represents a tragic devaluation of your gifts.

2. OPT IN. Buy music, don’t just stream it.

• Start today. If you find music you admire or love, buy it. Get a CD or an LP or buy a download. You can afford it. You probably used to spend a fair amount of money on records and CDs, and back then, you felt closer to something you loved! You can have that again. So if you love music, buy it. That’s the simplest, most direct way to build a stronger culture. If you buy a CD or an LP, you own the music, not a streaming service. Spotify may well win this war, but it won’t have any power over those of us who have dropped out of its dystopian blandscape. All you have to do is opt in to a niche audience, a microculture, a human community.

We plan to live out the credo we’ve laid out here. Join us. 

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This post originally appeared with the following introductory note:

Today’s post comes from a place of anger, the emotion that says No! It’s an essential part of love — sometimes nourishing love means saying no to the forces that wound it.

Three sources of love have sustained me through my bouts of hopeless madness: the love of humans, the love of dogs, and the love transmitted across time and space through art. 

Music has been my literal salvation from a death of despair on several occasions. Without Bill Frisell, Arvo Pärt, and a short list of others, I’d have jumped instead of stepping back from the ledge.

Music is an essential force in my life. It is a force for life. That’s why I can’t stand it being reduced to “content” by technologists whose values plainly favor death again and again. The role of music in human life is among my core values. And I know I’m not alone. I know that music matters this much to a lot of us. To you. 

With that in mind, I hope you’ll give this manifesto your most considered attention — and I hope you have steam coming out of your ears once you have. 

Here is this manifesto’s main point. Streaming kills music.