Wud Records: time to boycott spotify

We Think It’s Time to Boycott Spotify (And Why You Might Agree)

It’s high time to boycott spotify. Over the past decade, spotify has become the biggest name in music streaming. As its influence has grown, so too have the concerns about how it treats artists, listeners, and the value of music itself. Some consider spotify a necessary evil. We would argue it is just… plain evil.

We’ve put together a detailed page outlining why many musicians, producers, and fans are now calling for a boycott of spotify, and we think the arguments deserve to be heard.

The page was originally published as a news post on 6th September 2025. We consider it to be important enough to be made into a web page in its own right, in the Miscellanous section of our website.

At its core, the issue isn’t simply “a platform we don’t like”. It’s about fairness, corruption, transparency, and whether the way music is currently monetised online is sustainable for the people who actually create it.

On the Boycott Spotify page, you’ll find a clear breakdown of some of the key problems. We shall summarise some of the main points below.

Royalty Clawback Fraud

Artists’ tracks are added to playlists on spotify, without their consent, and the artists have no power to prevent it. These playlists are then boosted ‘artificially’, without consent of the artists, and the artists have no power to prevent this from happening either. Then the artists are blamed for the artifical inflation of their stream numbers and subsequently have their music removed from the platform. Finally, the artists are fined, and thus can spotify ‘legitimately’ claw back the royalties they may have paid, thereby improving spotify’s bottom line. Are these playlists curated by spotify? That is unclear. Spotify certainly has no incentive to stop this dodgy practise, because it improves their bottom line.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/03/ai-bot-farms-and-innocent-indie-victims-how-music-streaming-became-a-hotbed-of-and-fakery

User Subscriptions Are Supporting War

Daniel Ek, spotify’s CEO, has used €600 million of his profits – money that could have been paid to help support creative artists – to invest in AI tools for military use, and AI driven robotics. For example, during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, similar AI-powered drones were used to bomb children’s hospitals and kill thousands of innocent civilians. Is that what you want to support with your subscription? Do you want to lure your fans into paying such subscriptions by allowing your music to exist on that platform?

More: https://aimagazine.com/news/why-high-profile-musicians-are-starting-to-boycott-spotify

Low Artist Payouts and Obscure Royalty Calculation Methods

Spotify’s per-stream rates are so small that even thousands of plays translate into only a few euros, which makes it impossible for nearly all artists to earn a living. One €7 album sale at Bandcamp is the equivalent of around 3300 streams, assuming your music receives the higher royalty rate. To earn the minimum wage, you need around 250,000 streams per week. Payouts are not based on who actually listens to your music. Instead, there is an obfuscated and convoluted calculation based on a complex global revenue pool. This heavily favours major label artists. Not only that, any of your tracks that receive under 1000 streams in a year still collect royalties, but they are not paid to you. They are paid to the aforementioned major label artists. And if your tracks do recieve more than 1000 streams in a year, you are taking the royalties of someone who didn’t manage to cross that particular threshold. It’s a dreadful system.

More: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2025/12/spotify-streaming-payouts-explained-is-it-enough.html

The Algorithm Is King

Instead of helping listeners discover new music, spotify’s algorithms reward popular tracks and the music being pushed by the major labels. Spotify recycle the same songs, including AI-generated ‘slop’, crowding out smaller independent voices. AI slop is cheap to make and virtually royalty-free, which is why the major labels and spotify want to promote it. The more the AI slop takes over, the less they have to pay real human artists in royalties and the more they can profit. Fake artists are promoted, while real artists are shadow-banned. As Rockstar Games once said, their policy is “We KNOW what’s good, and WE play it until YOU like it!” It is clear that spotify and the majors would love it if, one day in the future, the only music that existed was AI, royalty free and made by machines. Perhaps they might lobby governments to forbid or even detroy all other types of music. Nobody knows where this is going.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_on_Spotify

Data Ownership Concerns

Spotify controls huge amounts of listening data and uses it for commercial gain, selling user data to marketers and experimenting with emotional profiling systems. Artists, however, get little transparency into who is listening to their work and how. The little information they do receive typically arrives several months after the streaming took place.

More: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/digital-rights-groups-raise-concerns-about-spotifys-surveillance-of-user-activity-incl-co-comments/

Devaluing Music as an Art Form

By treating music primarily as content to be consumed, rather than creative artistic work to be valued and treasured, the entire streaming model shifts power away from creators and towards big tech. Spotify aims to allow listeners to consume music effortlessly, without thinking about it or where the music actually came from, e.g. who made it, why, under what circumstances. Music has become so ubiquitous and cheap that it seems to have lost a lot of its value.

More: https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/spotify-wrapped-is-a-privacy-pitfall-but-we-continue-loving-it-regardless

In Conclusion

There are still more issues with the evil green snot machine, and these are described on the Boycott Spotify page. Whether you agree with every point or not, these are not fringe views. More and more artists are speaking out, removing their catalogues, and demanding change. We certainly believe it is time to boycott spotify.

If you’ve ever wondered why artists complain about streaming, or why independent labels struggle in the digital age, this page explains it in straightforward, logical terms.

Read the full article here: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/miscellaneous/boycott-spotify/

There are many, many links within the page for further reading. We shall no doubt be adding more until the evil has been defeated.

We encourage you to think critically about where your music comes from, how it’s supported, and what power you have as a listener to make a difference.