We have beef with Spotify.

It’s that time of year again… Spotify Wrapped season. For those of you who remain blissfully unaware of the greedy corporate monstrosity that is Spotify, at the end of each year the streaming service lets you see your end of year stats, packaged in such a fun and shareable way that it’s bound to gain them a ton of free marketing. 

Now, as listeners, our stats are always very silly. We use Spotify to learn other people’s music, so our top songs are usually someone’s wedding processional or first dance song that we learned that year. This year, both of us had the same top album - The Lullafrights by The Rough & Tumble - because we were learning our parts for a very spooktacular weekend. (But also, it’s a superb album.)

As artists… well. Perhaps it’s time to share our beef with Spotify. 

We’ve always had a contentious relationship with the streaming giant. They pay creators next to nothing, and they work really hard to pay smaller artists less and less as time goes on. Their playlists have some questionable practices and a lot of hypocrisy - pay for play allegedly possible for big labels, but not allowed for indie artists, AI music allowed (and monetized) but no bots allowed to artificially inflate listening numbers (more on that later). Running ads for ICE, funding defense technology, the list goes on.

From its conception we’ve understood Spotify to be a necessary evil for us as musicians. It’s just a marketing platform, we reasoned. Just like paying for business cards. But where do we draw the line?

A few months ago, our latest album “The Earth Turns and So Do We” was removed from Spotify without warning, and without recourse. I attempted to contact Spotify. I chatted with an automated chatbot that told me the album had been removed by our distributor, and that Spotify couldn’t do anything about it. Convenient. I emailed our distributor, CD Baby. (Sidenote: a distributor is who we pay to upload our music all over the internet, and who collects royalties for us. Hypothetically.) We heard nothing from CD Baby. I emailed again. Nothing. I harassed their Instagram just a bit. Finally, a month after our music was taken down, we got a canned response email: “Removing content from a digital partner is never a decision we take lightly. However, the quantity of identified artificial streams violated the terms of service of many digital partners, including Spotify. For that reason, we made the decision to remove the release to avoid further complaints or financial penalties.”

Translation: Spotify was going to fine us and our bottom line is what matters the most, so the easiest thing to do is to remove your music.

And here’s what really happened, to the best of my knowledge. Months before the album was removed, our song “Blueberry Wine” randomly got thousands of streams in one day. That’s unusual for us, so I immediately tried to look into it, knowing that the most likely scenario is that it got put on a playlist with a bunch of bots as listeners. Spotify makes it really difficult to see what playlist a specific song is on, or where the streams came from, so I had no luck finding or reporting anything. By the next day the streaming numbers had gone back to normal, so I figured Spotify had done its job and taken down the playlist.

We don’t pay for playlist placement or anything that could be considered “artificial streams”, so this is just my best guess at what happened. And the reason I’m just guessing? Neither CD Baby nor Spotify will give up any specific information about the instances of “identified artificial streams”, and as soon as the album was removed, there was no way to access any stats or details about it.

Here’s another little tidbit from the CD Baby response: “We understand that these streams may have occurred without your permission. You may choose to re-release the content as a new submission.” (Translation: pay us again to redistribute the same album you already paid us to distribute.)

“If you choose to go this route, please keep the following things in mind:

This will not reinstate your previous stream count

We cannot guarantee that the release will go live at Spotify

We cannot guarantee that it will not be taken down again

Refunds will not be offered.”

I flip flop between believing different possibilities: conspiracy theories where Spotify and the distributors are working together to squeeze as much money as they can out of specifically smaller artists who are steadily growing their following, and the much more likely scenario - they just don’t care. Neither power is there to support the artist, but just to secure their own bottom line.

Let’s shift the focus a little bit. We spent some time crunching numbers, and to be honest it was way too much time staring at spreadsheets, so now we’re going to force these numbers upon you.

For 23,152 streams, Spotify paid us $34.52 in 2025. When artists say we get paid a tenth of a penny per stream we are really not kidding. It’s brutal out here. But for some positivity - we actually are very well compensated by listeners in other ways. In fact, streams and sales of our recorded music makes up almost 10% of our income. That’s our groceries for the year, babes. We are so very lucky. 2% of that comes from digital distribution (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, social media, etc.), 4.7% from Bandcamp sales, and a whopping 93.3% from physical media sales (CDs and vinyl). I know it’s not quite a one to one comparison, but it’s just impossible to overstate how incredibly supportive it is to purchase an artist’s music. The money is helpful, of course, but it’s also an affirmation that art has value. Purchasing an artist’s work is intentionally choosing it, securing its place in your world. 

We don’t mean to place any judgement on folks using streaming services, and we’re not necessarily here to tell you to boycott. Streaming seems here to stay whether we like it or not. We pay for a Spotify premium account ourselves (though we're currently questioning this). But we wanted to give you a glimpse of the complicated relationship we have with streaming, where smaller artists are not fairly compensated, and visible metrics lead to seeking quantity of engagement vs quality of listenership. We are endlessly grateful to our listeners who buy our music, whether digitally or physically, and embrace music as an art and an experience instead of just background noise.

We have not yet decided if we will put our latest album back up on Spotify. But in the meantime, come find us at a show. Or find us on Bandcamp, where you can download our music, or purchase a physical copy on CD or vinyl. There’s a few hours left in Bandcamp Friday (12/5) where Bandcamp waives their fees and gives artists the full cut.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading our Spotify/streaming rant. We believe that art and creating are key parts of being human, and boy do we need our humanity right now. No matter how you listen to music, we hope you keep on listening.