Top New Zealand musicians like Tiki Taane and The Bats are leaving Spotify behind. Why are they taking their music offline?
One of Aotearoa’s biggest names, Taane announced on social media earlier this month that “it’s time to take my music off Spotify”.
He put what he said is his final song on the platform up Tuesday night – Bye Bye Spotify.
Taane joins several other acts leaving Spotify, including longtime Flying Nun Records band The Bats and other musicians who put out a statement as Boycott Spotify NZ.
“We refuse to be exploited by Spotify any longer,” that statement says.
“Spotify treats the majority of its working artists as free labourers, selling access to their musical output with virtually none of the profit returning to the creators. Generally, each stream generates around 1/20th of 1 NZ cent.”
Green MP for Wellington Central Tamatha Paul, who also left Spotify as a customer, said she was concerned about how the company treated New Zealand creatives.
“New Zealand artists don’t get a fair share of the royalties earned through Spotify,” she said. “So New Zealand Spotify subscribers are simply subsidising big international artists.”
More than a dozen Kiwi bands such as Carb on Carb, Synthetic Children and Recitals have signed the Boycott Spotify NZ statement.
Notable overseas indie bands like Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu and Australia’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have abandoned the platform as well.
RNZ emailed Spotify multiple times to ask about New Zealand musicians’ concerns about the platform, but did not receive a response.
Spotify reported revenue of more than NZ$8.2 billion in its latest reports, and 696 million monthly active users and 276 million subscribers.
So what are artists angry about?
Dissatisfaction with aspects of Spotify’s domination of music streaming has been brewing for a while, but has boiled over in recent months.
Two of the biggest issues are what’s seen as low payment for artists and the platform’s creeping use of music created by AI, such as the non-existent band Velvet Sundown.
The big tipping point, however, for many was the revelation earlier this year that Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek was investing €600 million (NZ$1.2b) in European defence technology company Helsing.
Helsing, which Ek is also the chairman of, specialises in AI software integrated into fighter aircraft, and the company says it is “uniquely positioned with its AI leadership to deliver these critical capabilities in all-domain defence innovation”.
That investment hasn’t gone down well with many musicians.
“Why should our art be the traffic source for military investments?” said Tharushi Bowatte of the Wellington/Auckland band Recitals.
The Bats’ Paul Kean agreed and said it was a key factor in the band’s decision to leave Spotify.
“We’d been considering it for some time but the news that Daniel Ek had invested approximately NZ$1.2 billion in a military weapons company tipped the scales.”
“Music has no place funding military technology that is arming a real time genocide,” Paul said. “When someone like Daniel Ek has the platform and resources to promote peace and create a music ecosystem more favourable and artists and listeners like us, you have to wonder why we are so dependent on someone who uses our money to kill people.”
Do Kiwi musicians make much money on Spotify?
It’s also about the money – or lack of it.
Spotify “paid next to nothing to us for using our recordings”, The Bats posted on their Facebook page in announcing their breakup with the service.
Kean said that streaming services had not lived up to their initial promise.
“Early days of streaming, we were hopeful that returns would equal if not improve on revenue from vinyl and CD sales while increasing our audience but that didn’t last long when streaming services were pretty much stealing our music that they would then profit from.”
Recitals has seen “less than $1000” for its music on all streaming platforms, “before divvying up between our label and seven members”, band member Josh Finegan said.
“Getting a sense of your overall earnings is also quite opaque, at least for small indie artists. Payments from streaming come from various sources, for example mechanical royalties versus songwriting royalties.”
Multiple sources online claim Spotify offers a figure of between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream – but it’s still pretty unclear.
On their website, Spotify says recording royalties and publishing royalties are paid to artists but they do not give a specific figure.
“Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.”
Artists RNZ spoke to said the company was aimed more at promoting bigger acts than building up smaller ones.
“Spotify has advantages for spreading music with a lot of people in the world, and there’s always a chance of an up and coming act going viral,” Kean said. “It’s a gamble and if you’re in luck, it can lead to hitting the huge listener targets where earnings from streaming would be healthier.”
The Bats have been together since 1982 and were one of Flying Nun’s biggest success stories.
“We’ve kind of gone beyond any chance of ‘going viral’. It’s more of a younger people’s trending fashion approach that we’re not a part of. And we don’t belong to a major label.”
Website MusicRadar published a deep dive into artist earnings on streaming services by musician Benn Jordan earlier this year. He found Apple Music, TIDAL, Deezer and Amazon Music all paid better than Spotify.
“At the end of the day, Spotify has never served musicians; in fact they are routinely ranked as the worst when it comes to streaming fees for artists, and are considered by many to be the worst, period,” Paul said.
Where will musicians go instead of Spotify?
There are plenty of Spotify rivals such as Apple Music, TIDAL and YouTube, and the online music distribution platform Bandcamp is particularly popular.
“Bandcamp came along and made it a lot easier for us to host our own music site where returns from sales were much higher,” Kean said.
“We have the sense that people engaging with our music through Bandcamp are a lot more connected with the band – it’s like a site where fans are investing in music they love.”
Bowatte of Recitals said Spotify did not align with every musician’s goals.
“A local audience who wants to buy merch and come to live gigs pays us far more than Spotify ever has!
“The problem with Spotify is that its one-size-fits-all model has forced independent musicians to join a rat race we never wanted to join anyway,” Bowatte said.
“All we want is to make enough to tour iconic DIY venues across the country, pay for physical releases like vinyl, and break even when we invest in music equipment, studio hire and recording fees,” she said.
“Being on Spotify does none of that. Spotify’s model expects every musician to want to become a global superstar. What most of us actually want is sustainability and local reach.”
Taane has been sharing his own process of leaving Spotify on social media.
“Over time we at Tikidub have been slowly stacking and building strong foundations so that when I finally step away, I’ve got plenty of income streams to fill the vacuum Spotify leaves behind,” Taane wrote.
He said he gathered up the number of songs featuring his work and that he has control over he could easily remove. For other songs, he has to talk with collaborators about what they want to do.
“We have that conversation about taking the song down – how do you feel, do you want to take it down, do you want to leave it up, how do you feel?
“And some of the artists are like, ‘No, I’d love to leave it up, if that’s OK with you’ and I’m like absolutely, 100%, love you, no dramas.”
Musicians have left Spotify before, although it’s questionable how much their boycotts achieved.
One of the world’s biggest stars, Taylor Swift left Spotify in 2014 for three years in protest over low artist royalties, while Neil Young famously left Spotify in 2022 in a protest over what he called podcaster Joe Rogan’s harmful vaccine and Covid-19 views, but he ended up returning to the platform in 2024.
The Bats’ Kean said they had received no negative feedback about leaving.
“We’ve received a lot of supportive feedback from people through our social media networks.”
“Sustainability without streaming requires a strong and engaged fan base,” Finegan said.
“New Zealand artists found audiences long before Spotify, and they will long after Spotify has been and gone when people opt out of supporting its corrosive practices,” Paul said.
Well, can any big social media or streaming company be ethical these days?
“Personally, I am a bit pessimistic about the paradigm of ‘all you can eat’ buffets of music streaming, such as Spotify and Apple Music,” Finegan of Recitals said.
“There is a conversation emerging around the question of what role streaming may, or may not, play when we look towards a vibrant and sustainable future landscape.”
Bowatte said there needed to be more protection for artists with the looming issues of AI and tech companies based overseas.
“The New Zealand music industry needs a strong regulatory system that protects our rights, data, and intellectual property.”
When she put up an Instagram post about leaving Spotify, Paul noted some other platforms were “just as bad”.
“It’s really disappointing that the mavericks of Silicon Valley who were disrupters, fronting like they were doing things differently have simply replicated the same monopolistic, exploitative tactics,” Paul said. “They can choose to deploy algorithms and tech differently – but they just haven’t.
“It’s down to us as fans and those with basic humanity to put our money elsewhere and demand better.”
By Nik Dirga of rnz.co.nz
