Why I Deleted My Spotify Account

Saturday, February 1, 2025

In the beginning record companies took advantage of older artists’ contracts that did not mention streaming or subscriptions by becoming stakeholders in Spotify. This way, they could collect 100% of the streaming revenue and take a chunk of the subscription.

Now that artists have finally started writing streaming and subscription royalties into their contracts, the record companies sold their stake in the company and the industry has settled back into just plain old toxic and no more.

Except no, it turns out new lows are being mined.

Spotify has been accused of recording original music and stuffing popular playlists with their fake (verified) artists in order to deny real artists royalties. In response, the company said it was 100% false, “hard no.”

That denial turns out to be 99% false. According to Harper’s a major VC that raises funds for Spotify, also raises $450 million for a company called Epidemic, which whaddayou know is one of the biggest suppliers of generic, factory-produced fake (verified) artists’ music that is played on Spotify. 

Meanwhile Suno  is an app where you can generate music using AI without any humans involved. The music sounds… great. I prefer to make music that is rougher and “sloppier” than what it does, but just as a hobby, I would love to have the discipline to produce music as clean and consistent as Suno.

Benn Jordan scraped 560 songs from Suno and found that 549 of them had been posted to Spotify, etc., including as verified artists. (YouTube) Benn had previously made the case that Spotify  can only make a profit by increasing subscription rates and decreasing royalty payouts. In other words, it can only succeed, their entire business model depends on screwing the artists.