Bay Area Musician Event ‘Death to Spotify’ Gains Steam as Daniel Ek Pivots Away — Is This an Emerging Snowball for Spotify?

Spotify’s ‘AI war machine’ problem doesn’t seem to be going away, despite Daniel Ek stepping down as the company’s CEO—musicians still hate Spotify.

Spotify founder and former CEO Daniel Ek’s investments in military technology continue to hover like a grim specter over Spotify’s business. Even as the company does the C-suite shuffle and Ek pivots away from the music streaming business, musicians aren’t ready to forgive or forget. Many artists (mostly indies) have pulled their catalogs from Spotify in the fallout, with seemingly more joining in every week.

Now, a major portion of the San Francisco Bay Area’s music community has converged on a decidedly more poignant stance: “Death to Spotify.” That’s the name selected for a new event series in Oakland in which local musicians, radio hosts, fans, and promoters are gathering to discuss further ways to ditch the music streaming juggernaut.

Although major artists thus far haven’t really stuck to their guns when it comes to pulling their work from Spotify, tickets to the “Death to Spotify” event sold out within 24 hours. Even more impressive, Bathers Library, the community space designated to host the event, has received numerous emails and correspondence from people looking to replicate the event in their own communities. Interested parties have even asked for recordings of the talks, since the event has already hit capacity.

According to event organizers Manasa Karthikeyan and Stephanie Dukich, nearly every speaker they reached out to agreed to participate in the event. “People are really aching to speak about this and how it ties into their work,” said Karthikeyan.

Despite its threatening title, the “Death to Spotify” forum is more akin to a book club or a college lecture series. Each week will feature a panel of speakers from a roster that serves as a cornucopia of the Bay Area music ecosystem. These include DJs from KEXP and Fault Radio, members of DJ collectives No Bias and Amor Digital, and independent labels Cherub Dream Records and Dandy Boy Records.

Dukich and Karthikeyan, both in their twenties, admitted that quitting Spotify isn’t easy. Both have only cancelled their subscriptions within the past month. Their goal, according to a statement to SFGATE, is that participants will think more deliberately about how they spend money on music, whether that means buying records from artists directly or cancelling their Spotify accounts.

The idea for the forum came after Karthikeyan and Dukich read “Mood Machine” by Liz Pelly, a book described as a “savage indictment” of Spotify. The book was required reading for the forum’s first week, as well as a Substack essay titled “What music owes to the war machine.”

It’s not as if artists’ issues with Spotify are anything new; musicians and rights holders have long been decrying the overarching streaming model’s pro rata system. Spotify has been eager to change public opinion in this regard, telling SFGATE in an email that the company “pays nearly 70% of every dollar it earns back to rights holders.” The company says it paid out more than $10 billion in royalties last year.

However, in light of Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s roughly $693.6 million investments in AI-powered military tech company Helsing, artists seem to just be fed up. Acts like Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof, and Xiu Xiu have all pulled their music from the platform. Artist collectives in Seattle and Chicago have all signed open letters agreeing to pull out of the platform over these investments.

Spotify is used to weathering the storm, but is this more than cresting ocean waves? With Goldman Sachs lowering the company’s valuation and events like “Death to Spotify,” it’ll be interesting to see how everything shakes out once the dust clears.