the try

baby it's getting hot but I'm not afraid to die
and we could save ourselves if we'd gather up the try

I have no idea why I waited this long, but as of this week, I'm finally free of Spotify!

For now, all of my music is still available to be streamed on other platforms — Bandcamp, Tidal, Apple Music, etc, and of course you can purchase it via my website in digital form. More on streaming and the ethics of our daily choices below.

As most of you know, I have never been happy about being on Spotify, nor have I been thrilled about streaming in general (see my TedX talk from 2014, I've been talking about this for more than a decade). I fought it for a long time at the outset and then one day just caved. I jumped off the bridge because everyone else did. But they are not a company with which I want to be associated. The list of ways in which they have abused the music community is long. The list of ways in which they have benefited the music community is much shorter and at the end of the day, the pros don’t outweigh the cons for me, not by a longshot.

Their CEO would rather take his stolen billions — stolen, because he earned it from music that was stolen at the outset (Spotify launched without ever obtaining the rights to their catalog) and continue to steal by not paying the artists on their platform — and invest that money in making weapons. I'm not ok with that.  Their decision to demonetize tracks that get fewer than 1000 streams per calendar year is, again, theft. Their pay rates are absurdly low. And most recently, their announcement that essentially they can take any song on their platform, remix it, and then monetize the remix without owing the original artist a dime, is, well, bullshit.

I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about inertia, apathy, and how in general it is easier to not rock the boat, and how easy it is to let willingness to go-along-to-get-along become just the way things are… forever. I’ve been dragging my heels on removing my music from Spotify because I thought it would be hard — it took less than 5 minutes for me to remove my entire catalog — and because it seemed like something I could just do one day in the future. Except that every time a new album gets ready to come out, I’m confronted with, "well, I guess I’ll go ahead and release this one there too, everything else is already there" and so instead of inching towards freedom, I could feel myself just kind of slink down into the muck and quicksand with every new release.

As a note to my fellow indie artists who are struggling with this decision: the toxicity of their platform has convinced you that you can’t get free.  But you can. It really doesn’t matter AT. ALL. if your songs are on Spotify, or on any another streaming service for that matter. It’s a convenience we’ve told ourselves we can’t do without — both as listeners and as creators — but at least for me, once I really started to question the price, to question what it is costing me both in terms of creativity and energy consumption and loss of revenue, it was an easy decision to pull the plug. There’s so much more out there in which to invest my time and energy, rather than worry about my metrics on a bullshit, super-gamed, algorithm-driven platform that has never given a damn about supporting independent artists. Your music is worth its independence from all of that nonsense, and I really appreciate Erv at Idol Records giving me the freedom to cut that cord.

Related side note: I’m not sure about you, but I’ve noticed a trend for a while now of some media just disappearing. Movies you can’t buy or rent online, books that are no longer at the library... I'm not referring to censorship, I’m talking more about licenses expiring, or companies deciding it isn’t worth the cost to provide the media. It should be a wake up call to all of us that the digital world IS ephemeral, and is unfortunately in the hands of a very few tech oligarchs. As much as we like to think something will always be there, there’s a very real chance that one day it will just be gone. It’s a good reminder that if you value you something, it would behoove you to try and keep a physical or local copy of it.  And if you subscribe to a streaming platform, please think long and hard about where you want your money to go. There are many services out there that are superior to Spotify, both in terms of the quality of the stream and in terms of what they pay artists.