Breaking Up with the Billionaires: On Leaving Spotify
by Evelyn Homan
When I downloaded Spotify in 2019, I was enthralled by it. Having previously been on Slacker (now LiveOne) for nearly all of high school, I was excited by the ability to have as many playlists as I wanted most of all — this was very important to me, as at the time all the playlists I curated for my novels solely existed on YouTube. Even though I had only been on Spotify for a few months before I received my first-ever Wrapped, I remember the nostalgic feeling that comes with any retrospective, no matter how brief of a time period it’s analyzing. I even remember my most-played artist from that first year: blink-182, who had dropped an album in September and had quickly become a favorite.
When the frightening rush of the pandemic hit soon after, it was safe to say that I was a Spotify fangirl. I loved being able to connect with faraway friends through the medium of music. When I first met my husband, we swapped Spotify links back and forth like there was no tomorrow and created playlists of our favorite music for each other to listen to. It felt like a worthy cause to upgrade to Spotify Premium — it got rid of the obnoxious ads, most importantly. But like any ideal consumer, I never questioned where exactly that money was going, and I was unfortunately in the belated class of folks realizing that Spotify just isn’t that great.
For the chokehold it has on the music industry and “discoverability” (a term I use very loosely, as anyone who has ever listened to their Discover playlist will know it normally will just serve you covers of songs you already like), the platform, to use the technical term, sucks shit. And not just for surface level reasons like the amount of AI-generated music and the general audio quality — which, by the way, they tried to throw a band-aid on the latter with “lossless listening” which they only implemented in late 2025, and only for Premium users, of course. It’s for a host of other reasons that organizations like United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) have been working to expose for a very long time, from the streaming platform paying an average of $0.00318 per stream as of 2025 to the CEO’s investments in artificial intelligence that is actively helping militaries around the world commit genocides.
In an age of people trying to be more conscious about their consumption, Spotify by and large seems to keep being given a pass. I’m guilty of this too; I cancelled my Spotify Premium in the autumn of 2025, but I used it on and off, figuring that as long as I wasn’t paying for it, it wasn’t that bad. If the bullshit alarm bells are going off in your head, don’t worry, they did in mine too, and I finally stopped using Spotify following the release of my 2025 Wrapped — a soulless, depressing Wrapped at that.
As silly as it sounds now, it felt almost unimaginable just a few years ago to get off of Spotify. Spotify’s branding, as many with many corporations, tries to sell the facade of being your friend, and it only keeps trying to keep up that image. Its unusual vibes-based playlists packed full of weird adjectives and contradictory ideas (pink pilates goth dommy mommy coachella mosh pit, anyone?) tries to sell you own taste back to you in a neat, overly wordy package. Their algorithm is trying to say, see how well we know you? How we know that you like to listen to classic rock while you’re making breakfast, how you have the late shift every Thursday night that makes you want to listen to the hip-hop your dad raised you on? Don’t you like that we remembered that you’re in charge of the school run on Tuesdays? We made a pre-selected list of all the Laurie Berkner and Raffi songs that make your kids giggle. What seems like an almost touching individualized smorgasbord of our favorite jams is actually dystopian as fuck. Which leads us to Spotify’s weird tracking algorithm.
For as quirky and whimsical as Spotify Wrapped once was, it was very astutely observed in a post I can no longer locate that it was strange that Spotify has so effectively managed to make keeping tabs on our personal data something that everyone so willingly opts into — and indeed gets so excited about that they are willing to share it with others. Tracking things can be fine if it’s more voluntary — the Storygraph app, for instance, certainly does not feel nearly as algorithmically bent as Spotify or Instagram. But when a corporation is consuming something so human as listening to and enjoying music in order to barf it back up at us in the form of “For You” playlists, things feel much more eerie.
Let’s face it: Spotify is a clever machine that gobbles up the work of artists, pays them a pittance, and then uses quirky marketing tactics to collect data. An app being able to pinpoint the rhythms of our days is just weird, and we’ve allowed it into our homes and let it feast on our blood. It’s made something as beautiful and life-affirming as making and listening to music and turned it corporate.
When I vowed to give up Spotify last December, my new goal was to instead turn my attention back to my CD collection. Don’t get me wrong, the environmental impact of making physical media also is not the greatest, but considering the gallons of water sucked up by the AI that Daniel Ek loves so much, it’s at least better than that. And coming back to my collection reminded me exactly how much I love it. My CD collection has long been a point of pride for me; even before I invested in artists I actually liked, I treasured my childhood CDs featuring classic lullabies and music from The Backyardigans. The first CD I ever bought for myself as a tween was Katy Perry’s Prism. Over the years, my collection of CDs has reflected my taste at many different points in my life, from Taylor Swift (all of which I have very happily gotten rid of — bye-bye, billionaires) to Burning Brides. Physical media collections are — or at least should be — deeply personal to the person who owns them. When I was little, I remember catching a glimpse of my mom’s father’s record collection and being awed by the sheer amount of music there was in the world.
Many people have spoken much more poetically as well about how nice it is to just own the thing that you want to access at any given time, as we live in an age where the show you’re in the middle of can simply be removed from a platform you pay for to one you don’t.
But there’s a point of the conversation that I feel often goes overlooked, and that is that physical music sales still benefit the artists far more than streaming does. It’s an investment in a band and their label, which can be especially huge for bands who are on independent labels like Wax Bodega or Run For Cover. For as cool as it is to have access to nearly every human song ever made, I personally think that actually investing money into supporting artists is just cooler, and it ensures that their music made with a human touch can continue to be made. Regardless of what is being asked of artists, they will find ways to adapt, but actually buying their stuff straight from them is one of the best ways that you can support the bands you love.
This brings me to Bandcamp, which I have fallen in love with in the last few months. Being able to buy both physical and digital copies of my favorite albums from bands like Dogma, Modern Baseball, and Silverstein and knowing that the money will be going nearly entirely to the bands I love feels so much better than Spotify chucking a vague vibe playlist my way. There is slightly more ethical consumption under capitalism, and we should all be pursuing it in any way possible.
Honestly, breaking away from Spotify feels good. I haven’t deleted my account — mostly because I want to catalogue all my albums saved on there so I can eventually buy physical copies — but it feels good to have one less expense in my life, and intentionally doing things the “hard way” to better support the art I love. And this isn’t to say that I am perfect; I still use YouTube for listening to certain songs I love while I’m going about my day. I still have to take the time to transfer my Google account to a somewhat more ethical platform. Taking the time to remove these billionaires from our daily lives is a lot of work, but in many ways it is worthwhile to put in the effort for a more sustainable outcome.
It is naive to say that we can de-billionaire our lives overnight, but taking the time to pursue alternatives is worthwhile to help preserve the human soul behind art and culture. Human ingenuity simply cannot be chewed up and spat out by a Large Language Model bot. And if it can, then I refuse to participate.
