Why Are We Still On Spotify?

Written by Allen Hale | December 12, 2o25

I: Introduction

As one oft-quoted adage goes, “old habits die hard.” Shedding them can, in some cases, result in the transformation of individuals’ entire mode of being. We need to retain many of our habits, especially the boring ones. Others can consume us entirely. Building them up and tearing them down is never a simple, straightforward task.

When undergoing this reconstruction, people often defer to the advice of others. Alongside the prominence of self-help books which line the shelves of Barnes & Noble, there is a particular submarket for literature aimed at nurturing discipline and cultivating healthy, routine behavior, demonstrating how to break and reshape our patterns of (in)action. “Atomic Habits,” Good Habit, Bad Habit,” “Tiny Habits,” “Badass Habits,” the titles go on and on. 

Academics and essayists alike are no strangers to the topic. Is the desire for this genre in nations like the U.S. to be explained through a Weberian analysis of the Protestant work ethic? A historical account of therapy and self-help literature, alongside their ties to philosophies of moral and religious improvement? Psychiatric science? Something entirely less high-flung or theoretical?

There are plenty of potential points of emphasis. Broadly, the social phenomena which have themselves produced a continued demand for these works today can potentially be explored along the following contemporary lines: doomscrolling, bedrotting, excessive screen time and general mental malaise tied to social media; distracted consumption, the attention economy and our dwindling ability to focus; the streaming model’s rise and on-demand, constant access to entertainment. These present-day bad habits nearly all of us have grappled with in one form or another.

Spotify is the most prominent way streaming culture captured my attention. I was a longtime participant and, given the app’s prominence, you might be as well. As evidenced by the popularity of self-help literature, engagement in questionable habits despite knowledge of their impact is a seemingly universalizable illness; Spotify is but one current symptom. This much is clear.

Throughout its history, the app has pounced on the aforementioned condition while deftly navigating a variety of controversies and criticism. Despite its immense success, the app has also been attacked relentlessly by disparate groups, which Lauren Boisvert rightly termed a continuous “hate cycle” ceasing to reach resolution. 

Most recently, the rightful outrage which inspired this piece — and has now disappeared from the news cycle — surrounds Spotify co-founder and Executive Chairman (having recently stepped down from his CEO position) Daniel Ek funneling his fortune into defense industries. Ek serves as the founder of an investment fund called Prima Materia, which recently led a round of investment in Helsing; the latter is a defense company that sells AI software aimed at informing and assisting military operations. 

According to The Fader, this revelation and the disgust it prompted have led a variety of notable artists to exit the platform and pull their music from its immense library. The news broke during late July of 2025, a period in which Israel intensified its genocidal military campaign in Gaza, with some bands specifically denouncing Israel’s actions as a reason to break with Spotify; others cited anti-war or pro-peace stances more broadly. 

If Ek’s connection to Helsing is surprising, Spotify’s habitual business practices evince a long pattern of disregard for music’s flourishing. These inadequacies crop up in separate areas of the user experience but remain unified in their pervasive carelessness.

The neglect emerges at the smallest levels of the app’s profit structure. Spotify has been incessantly criticized for paltry payments and the subpar quality of its services. Although the rate per stream is generally minuscule across music platforms, Spotify’s average premium rate ($0.006 - $0.008) sits below both Apple Music ($0.01) and TIDAL ($0.01284). According to Qobuz, they instead pay $0.01873 per stream as of 2024, according to independently verified figures. Despite offering lower payouts, Spotify does not necessarily incentivize users to join through lowered subscription costs. An individual subscription plan on Spotify will run you $11.99 per month, compared to $10.99 with Apple Music and $10.99 with TIDAL. 

Their music’s streaming quality similarly fares no better, falling behind competitors. While occasionally bashed for bugginess, TIDAL and Qobuz offer catalogs that rival Spotify’s while one-upping it on quality and, in the case of Qobuz, editorial content offerings. After continuously promising lossless audio’s eventual incorporation, Spotify finally began rolling it out to Premium listeners in select markets this September, likely in an attempt to prevent dissatisfied consumers from jumping ship; widespread incorporation, however, lags behind other outlets. 

At $10.83 per month with an annual subscription plan, Qobuz allows you to access hi-res FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec); the format is similar to MP3 files, but without the accompanying loss in quality owing to compression. MP3 and AAC files are instead “lossy,” the latter previously being used by Spotify. Deezer, a French streaming service, is slightly more expensive, but likewise includes FLAC audio streaming at $11.99 per month — the same as Spotify. TIDAL offers comparable hi-res audio, having initiated a transition to FLAC in recent years. Apple Music’s catalog is also in a hi-res lossless format, although the prior three services are among the best audiophile streaming options, as explained by Derrick Gee.

All of these figures culminate in a readily-apparent fact: Spotify is not cheaper for listeners or more rewarding for artists when compared to other popular streaming options. In terms of quality, it has only recently become competitive. On a purely practical level, the app falls flat and fails its users — even before the morality of its business practices is scrutinized.

Nonetheless, we are habitual users, repeat offenders. Spotify sits atop the global charts today in terms of its monthly active userbase, servicing 640 million listeners as of January while eclipsing notables like YouTube Music, Soundcloud, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Pandora. It persists like a phoenix that was never reduced to ashes. Listeners fly like moths to that flame, unable to break free from the pull of our patterned behavior; those habits die hard, scorching us in the process.

Still, when its grave falterings are spelled out, their obviousness makes the app’s continued success increasingly confusing, if not borderline baffling. With its main disadvantages and overt lack of ethical consciousness in mind, a question quickly emerges: Why are we still on Spotify?

II: Spotify’s history and model

Our collectively irrational — yet persistent — allegiance to Spotify needs to be probed. To thoroughly unravel that conundrum, we need to understand Spotify’s historical evolution and success in the face of widespread discontent.

Before Spotify even entered the fray, the music industry suffered a variety of calamitous blows threatening its day-to-day operations and enduring future. Around the turn of the millennium, peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like Napster and LimeWire began to increasingly enable the distribution and download of free, pirated music across vast geographic boundaries. A digital revolution in consumers’ mode of interaction with music had arrived. 

Panic set in quickly, likewise identifiable with previous forms of backlash towards home taping. Observing increased threats to the viability of physical media, a common issue for artists and industry figures alike, Napster was swiftly sued into oblivion by Metallica for copyright infringement and racketeering; a leaked demo by the band had circulated on the platform before its official release. 

In the fallout, Napster filed for bankruptcy roughly three years after its founding. LimeWire shuttered in 2010 after a federal injunction; the Recording Industry Association of America suggested the software had cost them a catastrophic 72 trillion in damages, eventually resulting in a $105 million settlement.

Pandora’s musical box, however, had already been opened. 

Spotify’s inception in Sweden was structured by similar sociohistorical forces. During the early aughts, the Scandinavian nation earned a reputation as a haven for piracy — The Pirate Bay, for example, was started in the country. As one of the largest sources for such content, Sweden’s position in an evolving market for musical goods was understood to be increasingly shrinking. The country came to be viewed as a sort of digital lost cause, possessing a cumbersome consumer base resistant to purchasing music through traditional forms of law-abiding distribution.

Legal struggles and threats remained, though, and stigmas around piracy persisted among both individuals and corporations. Amidst that uncertainty, there was a gap waiting to be filled by a service which promised free access to music alongside a legal, profitable business model for investors. Daniel Ek recognized the opportunity. 

As a co-founder of Spotify and its current CEO, Ek initially seized upon the futility of legislating piracy away, according to a 2010 profile in The Telegraph: “The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry – that gave us Spotify.” 

Armed with a background in IT and open-source technologies while entrenched in a culture replete with file-sharing services, Ek envisioned Spotify as a means of capitalizing on examples set by these networks of exchange, legally replicating their appeal through an advertising-based model. “Instant, simple, free,” proclaimed one tagline, bundled up with a sleek image that out-iOSed iOS.

As author, researcher and music journalist Liz Pelly observes, the point of interest during conversations throughout the company’s early history was never music-specific, with some suggesting the company eventually turned to the medium owing to smaller file sizes when compared with video. In her landmark study of the app published earlier this year, “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of Perfect Playlist,” Pelly swiftly details the company’s changing commitments: 

“Like many other tech companies in the twenty-first century, Spotify spent its first decade claiming to disrupt an archaic industry, scaling up as quickly as possible, and attracting venture capitalists to an unproven business model. In its search for growth and profitability, Spotify reinvented itself repeatedly: as a social-networking platform in 2010, as an app marketplace in 2011, and by the end of 2012, as a hub for what it called ‘music for every moment,’ supplying recommendations for specific moods, activities, and times of day. Spotify made its move into curation the next year, hiring a staff of editors to compile in-house playlists. In 2014, the company was increasing its investment in algorithmic personalization technology. This innovation was intended, as Spotify put it, to ‘level the playing field’ for artists by minimizing the power of major labels, radio stations, and other old-school gatekeepers; in their place, it claimed, would be a system that simply rewarded tracks that streamed well. By the mid-2010s, the service was actively recasting itself as a neutral platform, a data-driven meritocracy that was rewriting the rules of the music business with its playlists and algorithms.” 

Unsurprisingly, Spotify’s shifting character and ambiguous artistic goals have resulted in friction between musicians and Ek’s business aims. Despite being wealthier than any musical artist in history, Ek has displayed a stunning ignorance to the process of creation: “In 2020, for example, Spotify cofounder and CEO Daniel Ek said that musicians need to release more material to create “‘a continuous engagement with their fans’ if they want to thrive on the platform: ‘You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.’”

While promising (and delivering users) with an inexhaustible catalog of albums, Spotify’s monetary viability is driven by subscriptions and ads. You listen, but nothing in your “collection” is actually owned by yourself in a tangible sense.

As a tech company lacking any veritable allegiance to the interests and pursuits of musicians, Spotify’s mode of all-encompassing participation smoothes over distinct behavioral forms of engagement among unique genre communities and scenes, reducing musical practices — think college radio rock or bloghouse — to a one-size-fits-all model which offers little referent to their histories during listening; the music is presented in a floaty manner, devoid of context or editorial explanation. Regardless of the umbrage one might take with the commodity fetishism tied to physical music ownership, Spotify’s practices seem detached from the interests of both listeners and musicians alike, hardly by or for either group. Upon closer inspection, a litany of related scandals only reinforces this intuition.

III: Spotify’s controversies and endurance

As previously mentioned, Spotify’s poor payment of artists was a consistent point of criticism faced by Ek. While they benefit from exposure to a massive user base, smaller artists fail to reap the benefits conducive to their future pursuits. Spotify’s seeming ability to level the playing field has, rather than producing a musical meritocracy, resulted in a skewed terrain that maintains only an image of fairness. Instead of turning the industry upside down entirely, familiar faces latched onto the opportunity: per Pelly’s “Mood Machine,” “Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start.”

The situation has not improved over time. Senior staff writer for Chicago Reader, Leor Galil, notes that: “Last year, Spotify further tilted its playing field toward big stars by instituting a policy withholding payouts entirely on songs streamed fewer than 1,000 times in a 12-month period.” Although Spotify’s curated playlists have become an appealing draw for fans and artists alike, their return on success is often fleeting, failing to encourage deeper engagement with those who occupy prized spots on such tracklists. Despite possessing tools for discovery, Spotify — like TikTok’s and its ability to capitalize on dwindling attention spans — appears unable to fully furnish thorough habits of sustained listener engagement. 

Similarly, Pelly’s investigation in “Mood Machine” laboriously highlights the degradation of Spotify’s curation efforts over time, limiting the app’s ability to function as an exploratory or informative music platform. Playlist-based discovery is especially key for smaller musicians looking to make the most of Spotify’s streaming features. Discovery Mode, introduced in 2020, even encourages labels to accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion. Furthering one’s career as a musician via Spotify involves a reliance upon these recommendation features and their downstream impact on merch and concert ticket sales, as opposed to the money earned through those streams themselves.

Spotify’s recommendation features also fester with less visible threats, capitalizing on already-low payout rates for musicians. To continue squeezing out a profit, Spotify has increasingly filled its curated playlists with “ghost artists.” In 2022, an investigation by Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter revealed that “around twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred ‘artists,’ and that thousands of their tracks were on Spotify and had been streamed millions of times,” as recounted by Pelly. She goes on to demonstrate how Spotify maintains, “partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with ‘music we benefited from financially,’ but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform,” with Spotify curators increasingly forced by their superiors to include such songs on their playlists.

The music is largely cannon fodder for playlists, making the unique promise of discoverability entirely compromised and rendered hollow. Some of these providers promoting cheap stock music have similarly furnished partnerships with Apple Music and Amazon Music; streaming platforms are subsequently able to enrich themselves by paying less in royalties to these ghost musicians than they would otherwise. Without ownership over any part of the master recordings or their publishing rights, ghost musicians themselves generate far more revenue for Spotify and ghost labels than they would ever see; “I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially peanuts,” one asserted to Pelly. If those who indirectly limit the algorithmic or playlist-based discovery of others’ work are themselves being shoddily compensated, does any musician see benefits?

If that sounds egregious, it can still worsen. As AI continues to encroach on the arts, the degradation of Spotify’s curation may be increasingly supplemented with generative content churned out at breakneck paces — the Velvet Sundown incident, in which a fake band with AI generated music garnered thousands of listeners, serves as one warning sign. 

Pelly argues that Spotify has been readily open about its AI-related intentions, a technology which entirely aligns with the company’s model for success: “During a 2023 conference call, Daniel Ek noted that the boom in AI-generated content could be ‘great culturally’ and allow Spotify to ‘grow engagement and revenue,’” an unsurprising stance given the pride placed in their platform’s machine-learning-powered recommendations. Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier has instead opined that they intend to “lead the way in minimising any negative impact for artists and fans alike” following a notable uptick in AI-generated content on their platform, as monitored by a detection tool installed at the start of the year. In February, 10,000 AI-generated songs were being added to Deezer each day; the daily totals had increased to 30,000 by February. 

If the app initially earned its stay by capitalizing on a niche unfulfilled by potential then-competitors like YouTube or iTunes, how has it maintained this position while routinely disservicing musicians and fans every step of the way?

In my estimation, Spotify endures owing partly to its sociality and UI, alongside its core model’s early entrenchment relative to competitors — the announcement of direct messages being added to the app is the most recent development in this vein. By offering free modes engagement alongside subscription-based services, the app lowers barriers to initial use and encourages sustained loyalty through features like family or student plans. 

These features are not uncommon for streaming services. However, Spotify’s early identification of this model’s feasibility — an image and service placed somewhere between piracy and pricy corporate distribution — cemented its preeminence among interconnected, mutually reliant base of users. In recognizing the general mode for their enduring viability and appeal comparatively early historically, Spotify has retained subscribers with deep legacies on the app, initially earned before a swarm of competitors could also catch on. User-to-user interactions like friends lists, blended playlists and shared listening queues in the form of “jams” likewise dissuade interest in non-compatible platforms, or everything that is not Spotify, the listener version of green text bubbles on your iPhone. 

By possessing an early grip on a listener base eager for free, streamed music, Spotify has subsequently persisted like a black hole of discouragement; using an alternative involves dropping a variety of conferred social benefits. Once the consumer habit sufficiently deepens, abandoning a preference grows cumbersome, even in light of its evidently lacking areas. While other platforms have caught up — such as by delivering their own versions of Spotify’s famed (yet increasingly enshittified) Wrapped feature — having an instinctual jump from the get-go is no small historical advantage for Ek’s empire, a vision for the future of social media-ified music listening conceived in an opportune time and place. 

Beyond listeners, major players across music labels, A&R and PR have increasingly relied upon Spotify’s metrics as a barometer for industry health and trends, sustained by nearly a decade of the company’s continuous growth. It functions as a resource of inestimable value for powerful players seeking to navigate the techno-cultural disruption of traditional media wrought by the online streaming services, hence major labels’ willingness to partner with Spotify. 

On a macro level, Spotify’s success is subsequently reinforced by other monied interests. The algorithm might deliver more of what you like, but it has no reason to exhaustively provide what you might love by probing the deep recesses of less commercializable sound cultures.

While leaving the app also involves leaving money on the table, the recent exodus among large names in independent music has expanded the question of Spotify’s worth beyond purely musical or economic concerns. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Hotline TNT and others have all left owing to Ek’s monetary investments in Helsing, with the visibility of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza serving as an unignorable inflection point for some. In leaving, these bands sacrifice access to a massive audience in order to distance themselves from any connection with a platform producing profits that are rechanneled into defense industries; like-minded listeners ought to weigh the benefits offered by the app in the same light. 

Spotify navigated past controversies owing partly to the lack of visible harm stemming from its use. Artists have always been underserved by corporations like Spotify, functioning as the rule rather than the exception. Being shortchanged in a new manner, despite worsening these existing problems, did little to place consumers into a new or pronounced category of blame with regard to their listening. 

However, even if the overt cruelty of Spotify’s practices has rarely been this explicitly evil in the past — only shady or avaricious by comparison  — the causal distance between our actions as listeners and their monetary impact on industries of death remains dispersed and somewhat out of sight. Like the burning of fossil fuels, the effects of Spotify’s continued success results in destruction that is temporally and geographically separated from the harmful action of streaming itself, which — like driving cars or running AC — is deceptively innocuous, normal and habitual in our daily lives. Spotify especially encourages a related form of disconcerted, lean-back consumption via algorithmic programming, background music with playlists for any mood or activity; Pelly emphasizes that the genre playlists seen as most conducive to distracted listening are also those most likely to be plagued by ghost artists’ filler recordings. 

Because Spotify is accepted to be a socially paradigmatic form of digital life by its users, the app’s faults have been continually dismissed as unfortunate yet inevitable circumstances; marginally better outcomes promised for musicians by other streaming platforms have not been worth the switch for some. 

For anyone with a conscience, though, that can no longer be the case; recent events have obliterated any validity behind this refusal to correct our habits.

With the indifference long shown towards the suffering of fellow humans despite the visible interconnectedness of our online world, the latent danger of apps we use is yet another dilemma wherein it the ordinary is easy to turn a blind eye, more so than the never-ending feed of pronounced crises we are broadcast. If Spotify itself relies on fulfilling the promise of frictionless, inactive forms of enjoyment, challenging their appeal involves undermining societally pervasive forms of cruelty’s passive acceptance, which we have all been socialized to accept. In other words, we are acclimated to the normality of small deeds which, in isolation, appear mild; cumulatively, their impact can instead be linked to calamitous results, such as Ek redirecting his wealth into industries that profit from death. 

IV: What is to be done?

Despite these issues, Spotify will inevitably continue to be used. Aside from the difficulty for many of breaking an old habit or emotional attachment, the departures thus far represent a mere blip for the app, currently unable to ultimately tip the balance of power, even if it sets an inspiring precedent that others may follow. Dozens of artists on the level of Taylor Swift or Drake, for example, would have to leave in order to notably impact the app’s revenue. Leaving itself similarly takes time for musicians to pursue, owing to the web of negotiations regarding their contractual label duties and musicians’ ownership over their work itself; leaving Spotify is not always a choice entirely in the hands of these figures. 

The obligation increasingly lies with listeners themselves, then. Even if this particular hate cycle is more effective, it remains to be seen if it breaks any sort of adherence we maintain to the platform. Reacting and condemning is not enough: Unshackling ourselves from daily use of Spotify and decreasing the size of the app’s potential audience is a choice only directly enactable by its millions of users. Simply caring is our impetus.

I have used Spotify almost every day for nearly a decade, emotionally attached despite my knowledge of its glaring contradictions. It enabled my growth as a music fan by offering a way to enjoy songs without keeping a YouTube page open, a way to make playlists efficiently, a way to partake in music with others. In the past, imagining the end of Spotify was tantamount to imagining the end of streamlined digital music listening itself. For years, it had never been easier to give my music an accessible home. 

Thankfully, if remaining on Spotify was always simple, it has also never been easier to abandon the app entirely. 

Although switching to Apple Music involves its own set of ethical concerns, its superior services at a lower cost trounce Spotify on all fronts. With a less scandalous reputation and a newly-released feature that allows users to import playlists from Spotify, Apple has made switching incredibly seamless, a task that once appeared exhausting for those with large libraries. For users looking to immediately change platforms and test the waters, it is likely the simplest option. Those interested in exploring platforms like Deezer, Qobuz and TIDAL can look to services such as Soundiiz or Songshift in order to port their playlists.

Furthermore, Spotify’s failures may have enticed you to consider abandoning music streaming platforms altogether. The payout rates that competitors provide are an improvement over Spotify, to be sure. Still, these amounts remain microscopic in the long run, imperfect halfway solutions to broader problems facing the economic survival of working musicians today.

To thoroughly support your favorite artists, consider buying from services that monetarily support their output in a direct fashion. Nina Protocol and Bandcamp are two platforms that have succeeded along these lines, in addition to offering great editorial content. If you can afford an $11.99 per month Spotify subscription, buying one LP during the same time duration at the same price point should not be considered an excessive or unrealistic investment. 

My hope for this piece was not to simply admonish the Spotify users I have routinely identified in this essay, since I belong to the group myself. Rather, having recently transferred my library to Deezer, I hope to offer some starting points for those in a similar position, a way to productively and responsibly channel any internal guilt. As I have hinted, breaking free from streaming entirely could constitute its own article and, given the near-ubiquity of its modus operandi for young music fans especially, I wanted to discuss some options that may feel more familiar for an initial switch away from Spotify — even if buying only physical media or digital downloads, for instance, rewards artists more properly. 

On both practical and ethical fronts, there is little incentive to continue using Spotify, despite its convenience often trumping these concerns. Breaking a bad habit is never easy, but in doing so, there lies something beyond view worth pursuing. Compared to other perpetual struggles we attempt to correct, abandoning an app which funnels its wealth into AI-powered killing mechanisms is, plainly, no one’s choice but your own — a readily imperative one at that. In a world filled with overwhelming displays of chaos and violence from which we feel disconnected and powerless, staking our claim as devoted listeners is but one minute area where we must begin to push back. It is a small step, but if we cannot muster up the effort, how will we fare when courage is actually demanded of us?

Disclaimer: The views, analysis, and opinions expressed in this op-ed are of the writer. All information is for commentary and informational purposes only and is not intended as legal, professional, or investment advice. References to third-party sources and public figures are made for illustrative purposes and do not imply endorsement or verification by HAZZE MEDIA.

Source list:

1. Rebecca Richardson, “Ambition, monomania and the seeds of self-help,” bps.org 

2. “Speaking of Psychology: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD,” apa.org 

3. Lauren Boisvert, “Spotify Criticism Is Louder Than Ever, But Will It Make A Real Difference This Time?,” vice.com 

4. Natalie Sherman, “Spotify founder Daniel Ek to step down as chief executive,” bbc.com 

5. Walden Green and Matthew Strauss, “Deerhoof to Remove Music From Spotify,” pitchfork.com 

6. Nora Wang, “All the artists leaving Spotify,” thefader.com 

7. Aya Batrawy, Anas Baba, and Abu Bakr Bashir, “As Israel turns its focus to Iran, the death toll mounts in Gaza — and hunger deepens,” npr.org 

8. “Israel intensifies Gaza City attacks, forcing starving Palestinians to flee,” aljazeera.com 

9. “BYE SPOTIFY,” deerhoof.com 

10. Matthew Strauss “King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Leave Spotify,” pitchfork.com 

11.  “How Music Streaming Platforms Calculate Payouts Per Stream 2025,” royaltyexchange.com 

12.  Carrie Marshall, “Qobuz reveals how much it really pays per stream, and I want to see more of this transparency to help us spend money more ethically,” techradar.com 

13.  spotify.com 

14.  apple.com 

15.  tidal.com 

16.  tidal.com 

17.  qobuz.com 

18.  newsroom.spotify.com 

19.  “The Best Music Streaming Services in 2025,” audioadvice.com 

20.  support.spotify.com 

21.  deezer.com 

22.  “The Best Music Streaming Services in 2025,” audioadvice.com

23.  “The Best Music Streaming Services in 2025,” audioadvice.com

24. instagram.com

25.  Tom Newman, “Top 10 music streaming platforms by monthly active users in 2025,” routenote.com 

26. Sam Law, “Metallica vs. Napster: The lawsuit that redefined how we listen to music,” kerrang.com  

27. Kirsten Acuna, “The RIAA Claimed LimeWire Owed Them 72 TRILLION Dollars,” businessinsider.com 

28. Stephen Heyman, “Sweden's Notorious Distinction as a Haven for Online Pirates,” nytimes.com 

29.  Eric Alper, “Learning to Listen,” thebaffler.com 

30.  Stephen Heyman, “Sweden's Notorious Distinction as a Haven for Online Pirates,” nytimes.com 

31.  Eric Alper, “Learning to Listen,” thebaffler.com 

32.  Rupert Neate, “Daniel Ek profile: 'Spotify will be worth tens of billions,'” telegraph.co.uk 

33.  Eric Alper, “Learning to Listen,” thebaffler.com 

34.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

35.  Eric Alper, “Learning to Listen,” thebaffler.com 

36.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

37.  Daniel Griffiths, “What the Ek? Spotify founder is richer than any musical artist, ever,” yahoo.com 

38.  Leor Galil, “Time to dump Spotify,” chicagoreader.com 

39.  Stuart Dredge, “Spotify CEO talks Covid-19, artist incomes and podcasting (interview),” musically.com 

40.  Eric Alper, “Learning to Listen,” thebaffler.com 

41.  Megan De Mar and Mikayla Price, “Chicago artists pulling music off Spotify over concerns about pay and AI-generated content,” cbsnews.com 

42.  Geoff Bennett and Jackson Hudgins, “Musicians push back on dwindling payments from streaming service,” pbs.org 

43.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

44.  Leor Galil, “Time to dump Spotify,” chicagoreader.com 

45.  Leor Galil, “Time to dump Spotify,” chicagoreader.com 

46.  “How Music Streaming Platforms Calculate Payouts Per Stream 2025,” royaltyexchange.com 

47.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

48.  “DN avslöjar: Svenska fejkartisterna som tog över på Spotify – större än Robyn,” dn.se 

49.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

50.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

51.  Tara Bellucci, “The Velvet Sundown: The AI Band Controversy Explained,” berklee.edu 

52.  Aneesa Ahmed, “Deezer reveal that 28 per cent of music uploaded to platform is fully AI-generated,” nme.com

53.  Aneesa Ahmed, “Deezer reveal that 28 per cent of music uploaded to platform is fully AI-generated,” nme.com 

54.  “Introducing Messages, A New Way To Share What You Love on Spotify with Friends and Family,” newsroom.spotify.com 

55.  Hua Hsu, “Is there any escape from the Spotify syndrome?,” newyorker.com 

56.  Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” harpers.org 

57.  Hua Hsu, “Is there any escape from the Spotify syndrome?,” newyorker.com 

58.   “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” amnesty.ca 

59.  Emma Graham-Harrison, “Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say Israel-based human rights groups,” theguardian.com 

60. Tatiana Cirisano, “Some artists are leaving Spotify (again). Here’s what’s different now,” midiaresearch.com 

61.  Bernd Debusmann Jr. and Natalie Sherman, “Apple lawsuit: US accuses tech giant of monopolising smartphone market,” bbc.com 

 Jazz Monroe, “Apple Music Now Lets You Import Playlists From Spotify and Other Streaming Services,” pitchfork.com