Let's sabotage Spotify

What’s the best and easiest way to use Spotify if you’re a musician or an independent label? Don’t.

What’s the most strategic way to use Spotify if you’re a musician or a label? Arguably, sabotage. At least that’s what I’m arguing!

As UMAW shared yesterday, Luminate’s annual report on Spotify says the 88% of all tracks on the platform have been demonetized. In a best case scenario, that means you’re getting paid for 1 out of every 8 tracks you have uploaded there.

Why are (again, at best) seven of those tracks demonetized? Well, unlike YouTube or Twitch demonetizing harmful or copyright infringing content, Spotify plain old demonetizes any track that gets less than 1,000 plays in a given month. And demonetized in this case simply means, yeah hey, maybe those tracks are worth money, you just won’t see any of it. Any potential monthly royalties from tracks with fewer than 1,000 streams are put into a pool and split up among the tracks that did get at least 1,000 streams. Royalties from 88% of the tracks on Spotify flow to the top 12%.

If Spotify is going to pay for 12% of our music, we should only be giving them 12% of our music. We can enshittify Spotify from the bottom up. Let’s call it enSpotification.

What they’re doing is communism in the wrong direction. It’s wealth extraction. It’s theft. It’s sabotage. 

When the top 12% gets the bottom 88%’s money, that’s money the bottom 88% no longer has to do stuff like go on tour, pay for studio time, buy health insurance, blow on crummy power drugs, and so on and so forth. That’s the top of the industry sabotaging the working musician.

My decision a long time ago was to boycott Spotify. You can’t find any of my music on the platform, even on the labels that do have other releases up there. But I now wonder if the time for boycott has passed, if the time for sabotage has arrived.

If Spotify is going to pay for 12% of our music, we should only be giving them 12% of our music. Enshittify from the bottom up. EnSpotify. Just disappearing from the platform means that to all the users who think nothing exists that isn’t on Spotify, our music doesn’t exist. Spotify’s coercive lie is that our music needs their platform in order to matter to people.

If we sabotage instead of boycott, we send a message to the listeners who are there that they need to come find us elsewhere. And that Spotify sucks.

I see three methods of sabotage.

Method 1: If Spotify is going to pay for 12% of our music, we should only be giving them 12% of a body of work. The smartest use of Spotify might be treating it like a place to give out free samples. Back in the day when Barnes & Nobel had a CD section, they had listening stations where you could hear to one or two of the most fires tracks from the new Norah Jones and Nickelback and Michael Bublé albums. And you’d go, goddamn I’ve got a hot date this week I need this in my car. Hear a sample, buy a CD, get to third base with the help of Chad Kroeger’s vocal fried yarl in the PT Cruiser you inherited from Grandma. Those really were the good old days!

Adjusted for inflation, a CD 20 years ago used to cost $20. Spotify, after instituting a price hike, charges individuals $12.99/month for a premium subscription. I do not think we owe listeners full albums for giving Spotify $12.99 every month. Music fans, we would be so thrilled if instead you got those albums at our Bandcamp pages, our merch tables, or even a record store.

So, a track or two from an album. If you have a track gaining over 1,000 streams, that’s the one!

Method 2: If Spotify is going to pay for 12% of our music, we should only be giving them our music 12% of the time. Maybe your music is only up on Spotify 44 days a year. Maybe it’s seasonal, or tied to your promo cycle. Movies and TV shows disappear from streaming all the time. Why should all of our music be up there at all times?

Method 3: If Spotify is going to pay for 12% of our music, we should only be giving them 12% of a track. Admittedly I like this one best because it’s way more mischievous. We replace all of our tracks on Spotify with, uhh, “remixes.” These remixes are the first 12% of each track. Maybe these remixes are named something like the “Sabotage Spotify Remix” or “Cancel Your Subscription Remix” or “My Track Was Demonetized So That This Company’s Founder Can Go Start Sweden’s Palantir REMIXXX.”

Sabotage has a rich history in labor struggle, which us musicians are currently embroiled in. It was a tool of anti-imperialists protesting British Petroleum’s incursion into the Middle East, which as Timothy Mitchell demonstrates in his incredible history Carbon Democracy, drove Britain to think about how a militarized Zionist state situated in Palestine could help protect its supply chain. “Sabotage” is one of the lesser-but-still-really-good Beastie Boys hits.

Could be fun! To paraphrase a noble bard, “Dream of enSpotificay-ay-shun.”

Hi, me here. Same writer as above, just in italics. I’m feeling freed up to do some light shitposting because my job wrapped up at the university lab I was working in. Just a contract ending and funding shortfalls—we’re all still friends. Anyway, on top of posting malcontent agitations, I’m offering mercenary web and computer services for hire at Jazz Strategies: improvised solutions for your computer blues. Help me help you!