Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ek’s announcement of a €600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones and military software.
The move, announced on 17 June, has sparked widespread outrage from musicians, activists and social media users who accuse Ek of funnelling profits from music streaming into the military industry.
Many have started calling on users to cancel their subscriptions to the service.
“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.
said one user on X.
The irony.
shouldve boycotted the moment they housed joe rogan on the platform.
@cm0002 enshittify
How about just boycott it because it’s terrible for artists? It pays four tenths of a tenth of a cent per stream ($0.004), while raking in billions of profit each year.
Spotify’s whole business model is exploitation.
Listen to music on whatever service, then if you like the artists music - buy the album, or the track / single. Sure, you may support fewer artists this way, but each artist gets paid literally 2500 times as much (album averages 9.99).
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Didn’t confuse them with anyone, they put out a quarterly report as all publicly-traded companies do, and they’re on track to do over $2 billion in profit this year ($17b revenue).
What I didn’t go into depths to describe is that the vast majority of their money goes to big labels and several big artists they have less-favourable (to Spotify) contracts with, because those big labels and artists know they can pressure Spotify to get a bigger slice.
So, they continue to give most artists, especially small/new artists next to nothing, exploiting them.
Nothing I said is innacurate IMO.
Quarterly earnings and projections for 2025: https://musically.com/2025/04/29/spotify-q1-2025-financial-results-reveal-it-now-has-268m-paid-subscribers/ (And as you said they already turned a profit last year, which was over a billion).
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Favorite spotify alternatives?
Qobuz is a good one!
Compact discs
I have cassette tapes
At least it’s German… I guess. Any alternatives that I can download onto my Xbox?
Idk about Xbox but deezer works in a browser
Similar interface? Any ads or anything (don’t have premium so that’s an upgrade)? Easy enough to use? Can I make a 6k song playlist?
Its pretty much a clone, but faster / more responsive. Good dynamic playlists. Free version has ads. https://www.deezer.com/en/offers/free
You can make and migrate your playlists, but you have to use their cross sign in api. I would prefer CSV or json export import myself.
Oh it also has lyrics in most apps. I actually like it better and wish I had signed up sooner instead of fucking with Pandora for so long
All those musicians singing about love and peace are indirectly supporting the war. How fucked up is that?
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