My music is staying. My money and attention are leaving.
I canceled my Spotify subscription. Yes, my music is still there, and if that is where you listen to me, please enjoy it. I am not organizing a boycott or imagining that my cancellation caused someone in Stockholm at Spotify’s headquarters to drop their lunch. I stopped paying for something I no longer want to support. Apparently, in the music business these days, absolute action requires an explanation.
I am 60, and I have a harder time living with the gap between what I believe and what I keep paying for. At some point, criticizing a company while automatically renewing my subscription starts to feel like bullshit. I can explain the convenience and tell myself that my money makes no difference. But I still have to live with voluntarily supporting something I philosophically disagree with. For me, that lacks integrity, and it hurts my heart.
I do not need Spotify to notice my cancellation for that cancellation to matter to me. I notice. How much longer do I want to spend paying for things I resent, checking things I do not value, and explaining away the contradiction? I would like my choices to bear some resemblance to my convictions.
My objection to Spotify is fundamental: I believe its priorities are anti-artist.
It purports to be a music platform, but I see a data collection platform that uses music as bait. Artists supply the reason people show up. The company turns their activity into information that helps it retain subscribers, sell advertising, and keep people engaged. Music makes the business possible, yet the people creating it can seem remarkably disposable.
Yes, Spotify distributes recordings, pays royalties, and helps listeners discover artists. People find music they love there, including mine. But those functions do not automatically align the company’s interests with an artist’s interests. Keeping someone listening for three hours does not necessarily mean that person develops a relationship with any of the musicians they heard. The platform can have a very successful afternoon while the artists remain anonymous. And don’t get me started on their wishy washy non-action on artificial intelligence. Ridiculous.
What bothers me almost as much is how thoroughly the music industry has accepted Spotify’s version of importance.
Its data has become a professional credit that people promote at the end of the year (#SpotifyUnwrapped). Monthly listeners are offered as credentials, playlist placements as accomplishments, and screenshots as evidence that a career is happening and that you are relevant. We have given one company an extraordinary amount of authority to tell musicians how they are doing. Some artists have attracted labels, gigs and management based on Spotify numbers alone. Stupid.
A number rises, and apparently the derivative music got better. A number falls, and now we need a meeting, a strategy, and possibly some expensive promotion on platform. The recording has not changed. The activity around it has changed, which deserves examination but hardly justifies turning every fluctuation into a verdict on the artist. Somewhere along the way, checking the scoreboard became an occupation. Some do it hourly. Really stupid. The actual trend line of your Spotify data should be stretched into years not minutes to be consumed and interpreted in any way that is meaningful. All of this “checking” is what really drinking the Kool-Aid looks like.
I want useful information about my music. I want to know where people listen, which recordings connect, and whether a promotional effort accomplished what I intended.
But a stream count alone cannot tell me the depth of someone’s interest. Deliberately returning to an album and hearing a track because a playlist kept running are different encounters. Both may have value. Treating them as interchangeable evidence of fandom makes it much easier to sell musicians the illusion of an audience. Even Spotify’s “super listener” metric is misleading on its face because they only give you a tiny drop of additional data about these people which is impossible to put into context.
Spotify itself, meanwhile, is doing fine. In the second quarter of 2026, it reached 300 million Premium subscribers, approximately 9 percent more than a year earlier, while monthly active users rose 12 percent to 777 million. My canceled subscription is not going to derail that train. They will somehow have to carry on without me.
But Spotify’s growth does not make it synonymous with music.
DMN Pro research published in June 2026 found that YouTube Music had been the fastest-growing global music subscription service by percentage in 2025, for the second consecutive year. It added only a few million fewer subscribers than Spotify despite its smaller starting base. Those are 2025 results published in 2026 — a distinction worth preserving in an industry that sometimes gets so excited about numbers that it forgets to read their labels. Also, the amount of data you get on your YouTube dashboard is 10 times what Spotify offers. I think dollar for dollar a YouTube promotion is best ROI in the music industry. (insert sound of a “boom”)
Comparable public 2026 growth figures for Apple Music and Amazon Music are harder to verify, and subscription bundles complicate comparisons. I am not going to manufacture a tidy horse race from mismatched information. The useful point is that audiences exist across different services, with different habits and reasons for being there. The company winning the corporate growth contest does not necessarily hold the audience for your music.
Based on years on my own research I know that my audiences are on Pandora, Amazon, and YouTube. That is where substantial listening to my work happens.
Those listeners do not become less important because they are somewhere other than the platform the industry prefers to discuss. I am certainly not asking someone enjoying my music on Pandora to relocate so that my Spotify profile looks more impressive. I mention this because I have seen artists try to “corral” listeners on a platform of their choosing versus the listener’s. It went badly…
Meanwhile, I prefer Apple Music’s interface over anyone else’s. As a listener, I like using it and I have been a power user since the first moments of iTunes. But as an artist, I get practically NO love there, which neatly illustrates how little my preference controls the outcome. Apparently, liking the establishment does not mean the establishment is going to throw you a party or will even remember your name.
Artists can make recordings available, present them well, and invite people to listen. We can promote a release and improve the chances that someone who might appreciate it will encounter it. We cannot dictate where an audience forms or command that audience to care. Listeners have their own subscriptions, devices, routines, and tastes. They did not sign up to execute our marketing plans. I see this so often on BandCamp — it makes me cringe to watch artists force listeners through their “funnel”.
That said, independent artists who believe they can reliably control or manipulate their streams are in for an unpleasant education.
Marketing can work, but influence has limits. There is no dependable sequence of buttons that produces a lasting audience, however confidently someone packages the instructions. Anyone selling certainty about that arrangement should explain why they are selling you certainty instead of managing the biggest artist on earth.
Some promotional advice is legitimate. Some keeps musicians convinced that one more adjustment will finally make the machine love them. Optimize the profile, change the release schedule, feed the algorithm, buy another campaign. When the promised result fails to arrive, the artist gets another assignment and the person selling the solution gets another invoice. It is an excellent arrangement if you happen to be on the invoicing side.
Major label artists often have advantages that independent artists cannot match: budgets, teams, promotional relationships, and the resources to sustain attention around a release. Those advantages matter, and they should remain visible when someone starts telling the fairy tale of an entirely spontaneous discovery. Seeds tend to grow more impressively when somebody has paid for the land, the irrigation, and a national advertising campaign for the garden. The two most important words in this paragraph were: “sustain attention” for those keeping score.
Even then, somebody eventually has to want the music. Promotion can create opportunities to be heard and help interest develop, but it cannot guarantee that listeners will return. At some point, people seek out another recording, remember a name, tell someone about it, or move on. You can buy another opportunity to reach them. You cannot invoice them for enthusiasm.
The numbers are what the numbers are. Understand how they happened, learn what is useful, and decide what to do next. Refreshing the page is not artist development, and treating every movement as a referendum on your career is a miserable way to spend a life. I became a composer to make music. There was no childhood dream of becoming an unpaid analyst for a Swedish technology company.
Canceling Spotify is part of a much larger digital detox. Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, Tidal, and plenty of others have been let go. LinkedIn is not the center of my business life, and these platforms have become mostly noise to me.
I do not need to pretend that leaving them represents some enormous professional sacrifice. Their relevance to someone else does not establish their relevance to me.
I am an artist, and I take that distinction seriously. My work requires room to think, listen, experiment, and follow an idea before I know what it will become. Sometimes I walk the dogs before cutting a piano track because the fresh air and wagging tails keeps me grounded in what actually matters before I hit “record”. I know noise interferes with my process. Removing it is a practical decision about the conditions in which I want to work and live. I do not owe every available platform a place in my day.
No person, with the exception of my wife, is entitled to my time. A technology company certainly is not. Having an account does not create an obligation to show up, respond, post, or keep feeding the thing. I am allowed to be unavailable. I am also allowed to spend an afternoon making something without reporting that I made it.
I wish more of my people — artists, friends, colleagues — valued their time more. These companies certainly value it.
Our attention is a valuable commodity that they collect, analyze, package, and monetize. We supply the minutes, the habits, and the curiosity. They turn that activity into commercial value while encouraging us to supply more of it. “Engagement” is a pleasant word for an exchange whose cost we rarely stop to calculate.
The subscription fee is only the visible part of that cost. There is also the checking, browsing, comparing, and wondering what happened while we were looking away. Even an account that contributes very little can keep demanding small installments of attention. Enough installments add up to an afternoon, then a week, then an uncomfortable amount of a life.
My time has value before somebody figures out how to monetize it. It has value when I am composing, spending time with my wife, listening closely to a recording, or sitting quietly while an idea takes shape. None of those moments needs to generate a metric to justify its existence. I want more of my life available for them.
My music remaining on Spotify is part of this imperfect reality. Am I a hypocrite because I still participate professionally in a system I criticize?
No children, canceling a subscription does not resolve every contradiction and make the world a better place. I can acknowledge that without using it as an excuse to change nothing. Keeping recordings accessible to listeners and deciding where to spend my personal money are choices with different consequences. I am entitled to consider them separately.
So, yes, Spotify will survive my cancellation. And I will survive without paying a company I fundamentally disagree with.
My recordings remain available because listeners choose where they listen; that does not entitle Spotify to my money, my loyalty, or another hour spent obsessing over its meaningless numbers. I supply music to the platform. I do not owe it a subscription, and I am done confusing participation in the music business with an obligation to finance its bullshit…
A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe, “that fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
Stephen Crane