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.
Reading this while listening to vinyl…best enjoyable music experience.
To hell with the enshitification of music streaming.
Based. We need to fund european military technology in preparation of a Russian attack on sacred Western European soil.
Yo wtf you don’t need to simp for a company building automatic killing machines. That shits existence is a threat to everyone but the wealthiest and most powerful.
No War But Class War
The wealthiest and the powerful can’t hide forever from a guillotine. But first, we take their money.
What are the Spotify alternatives people recommend?
I have been using Deezer because it was local for me, France. At the beginning you could upload your own collection to share with others, it was fun. Now it’s basically the same as the others, I think it pays artists a little bit more than Spotify. Also just learned that it is now majorly owned by some US investment fund. 🫠 At least it’s not directly funding terminators yet?
Tidal is cheaper and better quality, Deezer is good, too.
This is where I’d have recommended deezer, but they shit the bed on their mobile app.
+1 for tidal
Apple music believe it or not. Nice selection and interface. Works on Apple devices as well as android. Has a high bitrate and supports aptx on android. Don’t think they have a native app for windows or Linux, though, so you’d have to use the web version.
IIRC Tidal and Qobuz should be good alternatives
Thanks.
I was talking to my wife this morning about this thread and the Qobuz recommendation was just what she needed to replace and cancel Spotify. She was able to import her playlists from her Spotify account and she’s been commenting for the past couple hours about how much better the audio quality is.
Qoobuz had the most horrific app I’ve ever experienced.
Couldn’t even search a song in a playlist bad.
I feel it’s been getting better. Like, it isn’t perfectly smooth, but I like what I get on the Frontpage way more than what I did with Spotify.
Oh yeah, I feel qobuz has the right mentality and ethos to really break into the scene and disrupt.
I loved everything about the experience, but the app was shockingly bad. Like, if it just behaved as gen 1 iTunes it would have been an improvement. Really bad at just the basic things. Just bad. And I cannot stress that enough lol.
I’ll keep an eye on them, but whoo-boy! I’ve never been scared off from an app so quickly
Rhisnis kinda funny to me because I was using Apple Music before, and I honestly feel it’s less jank.
I will say I’m still rocking my samsung a71 so, maybe the tech just want up to it… but that experience was bad. Glad it works for you though
If you’re technically inclined, self-host navidrome or jellyfin.
If you just want music and don’t care about the streaming part, bandcamp (although it does have some basic streaming I believe).
If you want streaming and aren’t technically inclined, Tidal.
Qobuz
Napster, bearshare
Funkwhale
Qobuz is great. It’s a french company, they pay the artists well and the music is in high quality
I jumped to Tidal many years ago because Spotify could not be bothered to provide high quality output. Yes, you can ear the difference, even on shitty gear.
For the stuff I could not get on either platform I started buying CDs on Discogs and ripping them to FLAC.
Edit: ear, not eat.
damn people are just learning that spotify is a shitty pro fascist/pro white supremacist company?
There are lots of reasons to boycott Spotify and call out Ek for being a fascism enabler but this is not one. Helsing is a promising project that could give Europe the edge in the face of Russian imperialist aggression. If anything, we need more companies shaking up the crusty MIC. They also provide important military aid to Ukraine.
The Germans can surely be trusted with AI murder tech.
Do you want Germany to take part in the NATO defense quotas or not?
We all know that scene in Robo Cop 2 is going to happen eventually.
Spotify CEO also donated millions to trump campaign.
“Said one user on X.”
Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.
This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts
Israel’s Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn’t work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as “terrorists” after the fact.
I’m doing my part!
Out of every company I would have never expected Spotify to be one of the ones to want that
it will always be and has always been about money
I thought we were already boycotting this shit
I can’t speak for how viable it is for success or whether it’s just a grift (as I haven’t had the time to really research into it) but feels like as good a time as any to mention that, out in Australia, The Pack Music Cooperative is fundraising for a cooperative music streaming service: https://www.thepackaustralia.com.au/
They haven’t raised a lot towards their goal, yet, and could probably use an the help they can get. As a cooperative, they’ll side step a lot of the probably problems a corporation like Spotify or Tidal will have and they already are dedicated to prioritizing artists and their rights.
I’m learning more and more everyday, that essentially all companies worldwide are evil. Because profit and money are what is most important to humans, I 100% want all of humanity to self-terminate and give this planet back to the few species that we didn’t already wipe out! We are a nightmare species. I fear humans more than anything else in life. We are the enemy of this planet.
Seeking profit above all else isn’t human nature. Humans have lived and still live in societies that don’t do this. The socioeconomic system that we find ourselves in currently in a large part of the world does put profit above all else. But this system is just one iteration of how we live. And even it has changed over time where it has gotten worse over the last 50 years. It too would change and likely be replaced by another in the long run. Many believe that would be some form of socialism. Or we could go largely extinct before we abandon it. A better world is possible though.
It is theorized by anthropologists that for most of humanity’s existence (almost 200,000 years), humans operated on gift economies, without keeping any ledgers or IOUs, and also not bartering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
Humanity mostly beat out (kind of, not really, humans mated/bred with neanderthals) neanderthals as a species in evolution because humans cooperated with each other, whereas neanderthals were more individualistic (also not a universal truth).
Greed and profit seeking are a direct result of forming massive civilizations with defined leaders and the possibility to gain power over other people. There are ideas for new economic systems that will eliminate this hierarchal structure, namely anarchism and some other socialist idiologies like forcing all corporations to be worker-owned coops (not all of them).
Great idea! You first, I’ll totally be right behind
It is a great idea. And perhaps you are so disturbed as to reply with this snarkyness, because deep down you know it to be true. We are the ultimate creeping Mold on this rotting ball of hot sewage. We did this to the planet. Fuck humans, we all need to go extinct.
Fuck both y’all, I don’t want to go extinct and it’s fucked up to try and get someone to die. Go touch grass both of you. The planet is going to be fine, it’s a giant rock in the middle of space, life will continue regardless of how bad we fuck it up, life exists in sulfuric lakes for fucks sake. Humans are cool as fuck, we turned rocks and metals into magical devices we can use to be edgelord douchebags on the internet.
Totally agree. Just have someone let me know when you’ve done it. Maybe we could set up a chain or something. You start, have someone that knows notify me, and then I notify the next person.
Now go on and start the change you want to see 🌠
