The Sabres Of Paradise - supported by the estate of one third of the group, the late producer and DJ Andrew Weatherall - have joined the Spotify boycott. They have pulled their music from the streaming service in protest over its business model, and investments made by Spotify founder and outgoing CEO Daniel Ek in AI weapons company Helsing.
They join a number of other mainly independent artists in removing their music from Spotify, and in doing so become part of a movement that is encouraging music fans to access their music via other platforms.
While the movement continues to gain momentum, so far it is not having a significant impact on Spotify subscriber numbers. The steaming company recently reported further subscriber growth in the last financial quarter, reaching 713 million users overall, of which 281 million are paying subscribers.
In a statement, Weatherall’s estate and his former bandmates Gary Burns and Jagz Kooner say, “Spotify’s algorithmic business model undervalues artists and underserves fans”.
Meanwhile, they add, “its leadership’s financial involvement in AI-driven weapon technologies directly contradicts our belief that music should exist to inspire, connect and uplift - not to fund or align with industries that stand against those values”.
The electronic music group’s three albums were released in the early 1990s by indie label Warp. Still in control of those recordings, the label has respected the wishes of The Sabres Of Paradise and taken their music off Spotify. The group’s statement also thanks the label for “supporting our choice with full integrity”.
An increasing number of artists are now boycotting Spotify, usually citing both its business model and Ek’s investments in Helsing. Recently the steaming service has also come under fire for carrying recruitment adverts for the US government’s increasingly controversial Immigration And Customs Enforcement agency, better known as ICE.
When Massive Attack became the highest profile artist to join the boycott in September, Spotify did put out a statement regarding Ek’s Helsing investments.
It stressed that Spotify itself has no direct connection with the weapons manufacturer, which - it was keen to add - has had no involvement in the conflict in Gaza and is instead “focused on Europe defending itself in Ukraine”. The implicit message being that Helsing’s AI weaponry is - currently - only used for more politically palatable warfare.
Later that month Ek also announced he was stepping down as CEO at Spotify, which will likely reduce his public facing role at the company, although he is staying on as Executive Chair.
When criticised about the ICE recruitment advert, a spokesperson for Spotify insisted that it was “part of a wider campaign from the US government running across multiple platforms, including television, streaming and online channels”. They then added that “users can provide feedback on ads” within the Spotify app, “such as liking or disliking them, to help manage their ad experience”.
As for criticism of Spotify’s “algorithmic business model”, all the music streaming services operate on more or less the same business model, although there are differences in how each service uses its algorithm to push and recommend tracks, with Spotify’s algorithm often being more heavily criticised than most.
There is also a common narrative that Spotify pays much lower royalties into the music industry than its competitors, although that's not really true, and is usually based on simplistic and misleading charts that show average per-stream payouts for each service.
Music streaming is a revenue share business and most platforms make similar revenue share commitments to their licensing partners in the music industry - such as record labels, music distributors, music publishers and collecting societies - in total paying over 65-70% of revenues each month.
When averaged out across the entire platform, Spotify average per stream payouts will look considerably lower than, say Apple Music, but that’s mainly because Spotify has an ad-funded free tier, and there is a lot less advertising income to share when compared to subscription income.
Spotify is also bigger in many developing markets where subscription prices are lower, and Spotify listeners on average listen to more music, which also results in lower per-stream payments.
The most recent figures released by the company, at the end of 2024, showed that across the platform users consumed 190 billion hours of content, which equates to roughly 24.8 hours of content per user per month.
Spotify’s main competitors on a global basis are the music services offered by Apple, Amazon and Google’s YouTube. The Sabres Of Paradise say their music will continue to be available on those platforms because they “better reflect our principles”.
But, while there might be fewer issues with Apple, Amazon and YouTube’s music algorithms, you don’t have to dig very hard to find other ethical issues with each of the tech giants.
Various start-ups have spotted an opportunity here and launched “ethical” streaming services, seeking to capitalise on artists and fans who are anti-Spotify, and may ultimately have similar feelings about the other tech giants that operate in music.
However, it remains notoriously difficult, and incredibly expensive, to launch new streaming services, even if there are music fans in the market looking for alternatives.
While a new service may be able access a decent sized catalogue of recordings by negotiating deals with labels and distributors - possibly starting with the indies - there is the tricky task of licensing the separate song rights contained in every recording.
In the US, that can be done through a small number of collecting society licences - available via the likes of BMI, ASCAP and The MLC - but beyond the US it involves a much more complicated mix of deals from a plethora of collecting societies and music publishers.
As a result, some attention has recently fallen on long established but smaller streaming services that have all the licensing deals already in place but are possibly less problematic than Spotify and the tech giants, with Qobuz getting particular attention in that domain.
Though it seems likely that some big name artists and bigger labels would have to start boycotting Spotify - and maybe the music services of other tech giants - to see any major shift in the market. And that probably isn't going to happen anytime soon.