Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ek’s announcement of a €600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones and military software.
The move, announced on 17 June, has sparked widespread outrage from musicians, activists and social media users who accuse Ek of funnelling profits from music streaming into the military industry.
Many have started calling on users to cancel their subscriptions to the service.
“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.
damn people are just learning that spotify is a shitty pro fascist/pro white supremacist company?
Who’s calling for that boycott? Putin?
Respect for the true pacifists out there, but investing in EU-based defense industry is hardly questionable by ordinary standards.
Probably. Rashism is real.
Europe used the specter of Russia to justify it’s dive into militant fascism the last time too.
False. Western Europe increased arms spending in response to German aggression. Germany increased arms spending… well.
Well tough guy, how else is Raytheon supposed to perfect its AIM-9X Romper Room baby-seeking missile’s accuracy?
Been thinking of booting them for a whilst. Just cancelled. Better late than never.
Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere.
Qobuz’ recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify’s slop.
Same story here. I cancelled Spotify after the whole Trump thing and switched to Qobuz; the whole thing was pretty seamless. I’ve got to say, the increased quality is actually noticeable and, as you said, the curated selections actually seem to be, well, curated. Also, if you’ve got a load of playlists on Spotify you want to keep, Qobuz actually provides subscribers with free access to a migartion service that did a superb job.
I switched to Tidal and love it.
I think that’s the worry. Do I have to start again. Will my stuff be disrupted. Spotify has counted on me sleepwalking though with them and not moving because of this fear. They have had enough of my money.
I had to laugh at the leaving page “if you leave me now you’ll take away the biggest part of me”. Spotify is not a human and I’ll take my money. They need to get lost with the emotive marketing, Spotify and the CEOs actions speak louder.
My hard earned money and who I spend it with is one of my biggest voices in my world.
Spotify CEO also donated millions to trump campaign.
it will always be and has always been about money
Out of every company I would have never expected Spotify to be one of the ones to want that
“Said one user on X.”
I boycotted them a long time ago when I found out they donated to Trump’s campaign, despite being a Swedish company.
Been off Spotify since they have Rogan his platform, which contributed to Trump also.
Wow didn’t know that.
I also newly started boycotting them for the same reasons. Plus they don’t give enough to the musicians, and support AI music.
Not to mention giving 100s of millions of dollars to fund Joe Rogan and his extreme right-wing propaganda.
Highly illegal.
It’s legal through a US subsidiary if the funds come from US operations. The morality is questionable though
when due process is completely ignored, then you can be pretty sure that “legal” has no meaning anymore. especially seeing as how the people who are supposed to be enforcing these “laws” are the ones who are ignoring them
Honey this is America, anything is legal if you got the money
thats when i cancelled as well. this guy seems like such a fucknut
Same, took some legwork to get files for my 700-song library, but we did it. Fuck 'em.
I’m doing my part!
Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.
This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts
Israel’s Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn’t work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as “terrorists” after the fact.
“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.
You shouldn’t be “paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago” regardless of anything an executive has done. Be less lazy and cancel subscriptions to shitty services.
Also, if a CEO doing a bad thing is a dealbreaker for them, why the fuck are they on twitter?.
I think one of the most toxic things on Lemmy is the prevalence of judging normies for using incredibly popular services and ascribing it to a character defect instead of life just being too complex for most people to be able to prioritize exploring more ethical technology choices.
You’re not wrong. There are lots of holier-than-thou types around here.
😎 If you’re not compiling your own kernel 🏋🏼♂️ you’re missing out on substantial gains 💪🏼. Just drink a little Nix shake in the morning 🤙🏼, then hit your favorite systemd alternative GitHub pages and pull the nightly 🤘🏼. You’ll be so swole bro, you’ll be Godify. 🎶
Agreed, most comments are miserable, toxic, old man yells at cloud, energy. More and more, so.
I get where you’re coming from, but it’s not like there aren’t multiple obvious alternatives (and not just on the fediverse). And someone being clued in enough to boycott Spotify should have no trouble finding those alternatives. Additionally, the platform being owned by an outright Nazi should give even the most out of touch people pause.
But agreed that people could stand to be a bit more tactful about it and not immediately go on the attack.
So what is there for normies? YouTube which is also owned by a fascist company. Deezer which is shit. Apple which is another fascist company that supports trump. Tidal which has also had its fair share of controversy ( not paying artists), shit ui etc.
And if you mention the fediverse people will look at you like you speak an alien language.
Most of those are lesser evils compared to X, and that’s probably the best you can hope for. And Bluesky is the obvious alternative lesser evil choice if you want a like for like replacement and aren’t open to Mastodon.
Oh you were talking about social media. I was talking about music services.
Fair enough then. I agree there is no excuse to still use X
Additionally, the platform being owned by an outright Nazi should give even the most out of touch people pause.
How is Daniel Ek a nazi? That’s a wild take if I’ve ever heard one.
I thought it was clear from context I was talking about X.
Oh shit, my bad. Yeah, hard agree there
No… It’s just laziness let’s not sugar coat it. You have the wealth of human knowledge in your pocket, knowledge of how to do absolutely anything and everything for free on a silver platter, all you have to do is prioritize exploring ethical technology choices. Complexity of the problem itself is not a good excuse to not learning to solve it as it continues to become a bigger problem.
Be less lazy
“Damn this sucks, I’m doing the thing”
“Hey you lazy stupid fuck, go back in time and do it sooner”
Why is the Internet like this?
Dude, you should have stopped using Spotify when they let Joe Rogan on their platform… or when they started hosting fake music.
Or because they pay artist way less than any one else, while having lower quality audio.
What are the Spotify alternatives people recommend?
Qobuz is great. It’s a french company, they pay the artists well and the music is in high quality
I jumped to Tidal many years ago because Spotify could not be bothered to provide high quality output. Yes, you can ear the difference, even on shitty gear.
For the stuff I could not get on either platform I started buying CDs on Discogs and ripping them to FLAC.
Edit: ear, not eat.
This is where I’d have recommended deezer, but they shit the bed on their mobile app.
+1 for tidal
IIRC Tidal and Qobuz should be good alternatives
Thanks.
I was talking to my wife this morning about this thread and the Qobuz recommendation was just what she needed to replace and cancel Spotify. She was able to import her playlists from her Spotify account and she’s been commenting for the past couple hours about how much better the audio quality is.
Qoobuz had the most horrific app I’ve ever experienced.
Couldn’t even search a song in a playlist bad.
I feel it’s been getting better. Like, it isn’t perfectly smooth, but I like what I get on the Frontpage way more than what I did with Spotify.
Oh yeah, I feel qobuz has the right mentality and ethos to really break into the scene and disrupt.
I loved everything about the experience, but the app was shockingly bad. Like, if it just behaved as gen 1 iTunes it would have been an improvement. Really bad at just the basic things. Just bad. And I cannot stress that enough lol.
I’ll keep an eye on them, but whoo-boy! I’ve never been scared off from an app so quickly
If you’re technically inclined, self-host navidrome or jellyfin.
If you just want music and don’t care about the streaming part, bandcamp (although it does have some basic streaming I believe.
If you want streaming and aren’t technically inclined, Tidal.
Qobuz
Tidal is cheaper and better quality, Deezer is good, too.
Napster, bearshare
Apple music believe it or not. Nice selection and interface. Works on Apple devices as well as android. Has a high bitrate and supports aptx on android. Don’t think they have a native app for windows or Linux, though, so you’d have to use the web version.
I have been using Deezer because it was local for me, France. At the beginning you could upload your own collection to share with others, it was fun. Now it’s basically the same as the others, I think it pays artists a little bit more than Spotify. Also just learned that it is now majorly owned by some US investment fund. 🫠 At least it’s not directly funding terminators yet?
Funkwhale
