The End of the Spotify Era?

Your favourite artist may be on their way to take down their music from Spotify.

If you suddenly can’t seem to find the song you were listening to on Spotify, you may be interested to know that several musicians are in the process of taking down their music from being available on the streaming platform, if they haven't already. Here's Why -

1.     Lowest royalty payout rates for artists – Spotify is infamous in the music industry for being the platform with some of the lowest royalty payout rates for artists. This is particularly important since the payment structure is not a per play per day basis, but on a slice-of-pie basis. Basically, Spotify keeps a percentage of the total revenue it receives and distributes the rest based on the streams generated by the artist on a pro-rated basis. While this appears fair, however, the existence of bot streams (which are ridiculously easy to buy) complicates the matter since bot streams significantly reduce the section of the pie going to actual artists and diverts this to AI generated music.

2.   AI Music and Musicians – Recently, AI generated music has been popping up everywhere, and suddenly there are millions of followers for AI Musicians. The band 'The Velvet Sundown' which debuted on Spotify in June 2025 gained immense popularity, not least because they were releasing music with shocking rapidity. The band initially denied being AI until eventually they were (allegedly) made to reveal their true identity. The Velvet Sundown currently has 3 Albums out on Spotify, with 13 songs each and a single that was released as recently as September 17, 2025 (last week). The most popular song by the AI Band has over 3 million plays.

Let us put that into perspective. For a band that made its debut 3 months ago, it has about 40 songs out in 3 albums. Most HUMAN musicians take 3 months to put together a single album, and we’re talking about professionals signed with big labels here, let alone independent musicians who most often than not, have it much harder and have to do everything from song writing, to composing, to producing all themselves with little to no help.

3.      Remix feature – You may or may not have heard that Spotify has promised to roll out a new feature allowing listeners to remix the songs on the platform and create their own mixes. How can they do that when there should be copyright protections in place? Well, it’s built into the contract! The clickwrap contract that a musician agrees to in order to use Spotify for Artists specifically states on using Spotify for Artists, you provide Spotify the right to modify and create derivative works from your work, among other such rights.  Similar provisions are set out in nearly every single digital distributor agreement – be it DistroKid, CD Baby or TuneCore, which are some of the most popular digital distributors of music. The agreements with such distributors require the copyright holder (musician) to grant the distributor the right to grant others rights to allow the modification or creation of derivative works from the copyright holder’s works.

And we all know how Click wrap contracts work – we either “Accept” or don’t use the service.

Things may be slightly different for artists who have the backing of big labels with better bargaining powers, but as an independent artist, this is as bad as it can possibly get.

4.      Spotify CEO’s personal investments – A fourth and primarily political reason for musicians delisting their music from Spotify is the involvement of Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek’s investment firm Prima Materia in AI Military company Helsing, a German company that develops AI for military use, in addition to his personal investment in the same. Spotify has faced severe backlash in this regard with bands like Massive Attack and Deerhoof removing their music off the platform among a general call for the boycott of the platform by musicians.

So what can YOU do?

For starters, you can migrate to platforms such as Tidal, QoBuz and Deezer. 

If you are an artist, heartbreaking though it may be to delist your music from Spotify, you will be happy to know that these platforms not only pay artists better (Qobuz’s average royalty payout rate is $0.022 per stream, Tidal’s is $0.013 per stream, Apple Music’s is approximately $0.0056-$0.0078 per stream and Spotify’s is the lowest at $0.004 per stream) but are also better suited for the quality of music, since these platforms are committed to providing high resolution lossless audio, as compared to Spotify’s compressed audio (Spotify has, as recently as this week, introduced lossless audio for Premium users, but I have a Premium account and the last time I checked, which was today, I still don’t have that option).

The above reasons also apply to you as a listener if you are an audiophile and want to support smaller artists.

As a lover of music and as someone who knows several independent musicians personally, I understand the frustration of the independent musician community, and these are some solutions that may help protect your creations.

But the larger question that arises is if these are compelling enough reasons to quit the convenience that Spotify as a platform allows. Afterall, you have probably been using it for years and it knows you so well – the ins and outs of your playlists, your guilty pleasures, heck it even curates playlists for you – its like it knows you intimately. Not to mention the fun of the Spotify Wrapped at the end of the year. I know of people who try to curate their listening on Spotify the whole year so their Spotify Wrapped will look a certain way.

Will we, as a Society, choose to stand by our principles, if those principles include supporting the underdog and not knowingly padding the pockets of the big corporations, or will we choose convenience of routine over the hassle of migrating our carefully curated playlists (by the way, you can easily migrate your playlists from Spotify to Tidal and Qobuz, should you wish to do so) and potentially paying slightly more for the content we consume?