Should artists remove their music from Spotify?
Despite concerns over AI music, low payouts, and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s defense investments, removing your music from Spotify is generally not advisable for professional artists seeking broad exposure and revenue.
By Andrew Southworth
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With AI music, defense investments and low payouts several popular artists including King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have pulled their music from Spotify – should you? Probably not.
If you’re looking for some context here, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has invested nearly $1 billion into AI defense company Helsing. To clarify further, Ek sold shares of his ownership of Spotify and used his personal money for these investments – Spotify itself has not invested any money into defense companies.
For many artists however this was really just the final straw. Daniel Ek has made previous statements saying that the cost of creating music is ‘close to zero’. AI music is allowed on Spotify and has been thriving algorithmically on the platform as of late, and artists have always been complaining about payouts on Spotify.
While the average payment per stream on Spotify is typically about half that of Apple Music, most artists actually make most of their streaming money from Spotify due to the volume of users the platform has. This is why pulling your music from Spotify is such a bad idea.
Some artists have pulled their music from Spotify, or even all streaming platforms, and advocated for the use of Bandcamp instead. My opinion is if you’re trying to be a professional music artist this is a horrible idea, and will kill your music career before it even starts. If you’re a casual artist or just simply don’t care about the business side of things, then feel free to ignore this point.
But the reality is most music listeners don’t use Bandcamp, in fact most haven’t even heard of it.
For more information on this topic check out my video:
I love Bandcamp though. IMO every artist should be on Bandcamp because it’s free to list your music there, and it offers super fans a way to support you in a simple way. If you have a website and online store, sell there too, but Bandcamp has a handy app and ecosystem that some fans just love too.
This way you keep the discoverability benefits of streaming platforms (Spotify especially) but allow your most die-hard fans to support you if they wish.
I launched a podcast called ‘My .4 Cents’ with Jesse Cannon, Matt Bacon and Dustin Boyer where we also discussed this topic. Check it out here:
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