Why I Boycotted Spotify:

 

Music is and has always been a personal experience for me.  I remember listening to Swan Lake by the family jukebox.  I’d sit on the hard wood floorboards the entire time and listen in a dark room.  I played that cd on repeat for much of my childhood and even opted out of playing outside so I could hear it just one more time.  A little later on, I learned to play the flute.  I practiced on the screened-in front porch for hours with blankets slumped over my shoulders and a space heater at my feet.  I could see my breath on those cold winter nights as I marveled over music notes and learned to play scales.  Despite the discomfort, I journeyed through it until one day I could play multiple instruments.  It was a labor of love.  And more importantly, it helped me align with my values and passions.

 

I realized at some point that there was something about that chilling air on the front porch that added to the bittersweet quality of Mozart.  And there was something riveting about those hard wood floorboards that I sat on long ago.  It was not dissimilar to the painstaking work of a ballerina, defying gravity on her own hard wood floors.  For me, music was a tactile experience—one that involved evening runs as a golden sun set, or the enlivened atmosphere of a soccer stadium, as my four shadows danced around me.  Music was like flavor in the air.  And I’ve lived my entire life believing that it could transform any mundane moment into a magical one.

 

Being a musician is much like being a magician.  Because music contains its own metaphysical power.  Music is energy.  It is vibration.  And our very cells respond to such a vibration and transform our physical experience as such.  Music is sacred.

 

However, in our modern time, society has abandoned the sanctity of music in lieu of cheap thrills and factory production.  Music is no longer written by an artist.  It is produced by a team with no personal experience with the song.  Simply look at the credits of popular songs today and you will find an assortment of contributors.  Many musicians do not even play instruments, but simply press buttons on their computers.  There is not a tactile experience, a discipline, or labor in the craft.  It is not an act of personal intimacy, but rather an experience of tinkering with technology. 

 

The average listener decides if they like a song within the first 9 seconds of a song.  In our ADHD phone addicted world, slow songs or deep songs are often put on the chopping block, and dying out against fast-paced sugar rush music created simply to entertain and then be forgotten.  Classical music used to tell a story through operatic drama or ballet performance.  Music of the 70s and 80s expressed more of the organic individual.  The music was not hyper polished.  Breaths could be heard between lines.  A white noise often hummed in the background.  Musicians were self expressive and authentic.  

 

Yet, today our music yields to performance and we now listen with our eyes.  We judge by who has the brightest outfit or the most controversial headlines.  Performances are tight and picture perfect.  The thrills are wild.  The tempo is rushed.  We no longer have the ability to simply sit down and reflect as society once did on what the individual experienced to write the song or to hear it.  Culture now is commercialized.  And we are dying under the weight of that commercialism.

 

I boycotted Spotify for two simple reasons: Spotify does not respect its artists.  And Spotify uses the format of social networking for streams.

 

Spotify offers its artists only $0.006 per stream.  Yes, that’s two zeros to the right of that decimal.  This means that an artist would need well over 10,000 plays every day just to make minimum wage.  Once, artists could offer their song for $0.99 per download.  The song would then be owned by an individual and the artist would be directly paid for that sale.  Yet, now artists are simply scrounging for the scraps while Spotify corporates rake in millions.  Also, listeners no longer own any of their favorite music.  They simply borrow it through Spotify and are therefore dependent on Spotify to hear it again.  Because the platform is so cheap for listeners, they are at liberty to take music less seriously.  I call it Reckless Consumerism.  They listen to five seconds of a song and then pass it along for another and another then another.  They simply glance but do not sit and consider the music.  They swipe along just as they do on TikTok or Instagram.  The intense efforts of musicians are no longer respected or even noticed—especially when so much music is produced by sound-creating machines rather than an individual anyhow.

 

Spotify also advertises its artists by their follower count.  That follower count is inescapable.  It is plastered next to the artist’s name like the results of a prom queen ballot.  Music has simply become nothing more than a popularity contest.  Before, audiences listened to new artists with curiosity and openness.  Now, audiences will not listen to an artist unless they are popular.  Venues book artists according to this follower count, as well.  Thus creating an impossibility.  Musicians cannot become popular without performing at venues.  But venues do not book artists that are not popular.  So how do new “nobody” artists become popular at all when the odds are stacked against them?  Either they go unnoticed for years on Spotify.  Or they vet for attention.  This vetting process involves paying people to follow their content and to share it with others.  New artists pay listeners to put their music on a playlist.  New artists also pay influencers to promote their music.  In fact, the large banners and advertisements that feature supposedly hot new artists are also paid for by the artist and studio.  The audience has accepted this with indifference.  They do not, after all, care for meaningful music or intellectual musicianship.  They care instead about popularity, numbers, public opinion, and money.  Music has become shallow and superficial.  It has become the equivalent of a sugar rush and nothing more.

 

I chose not to distribute my music to Spotify simply because this platform cheapens the experience.  I believe in having more class as an individual and as a musical artist.  I do not pay people for likes.  I do not bargain with others or beg people to follow me.  I also do not offer my music to people who will treat it with meaninglessness.  I believe in authenticity, grace, elegance, and sophistication.  I do not write music with others.  I write it alone.  And I write out of sheer authentic emotion.  It is organic.  I play my instruments and sing on my own mic.  I even master each song personally.

 

My hope is that I may provide an authentic human experience.  One that is intimate with an audience.  I believe in raw honesty.  And through my cathartic experience, you may also experience release.  “Catharsis” literally translates from Greek to mean “to purify, to cleanse.”  There is something metaphysical about writing music.  And in my darkest experiences, I have transformed through each song.  I have been able to convey the depth of my pain or love or happiness in ways that words do not.  It is a worship of the spirit.  And it is, I hope, done with a little more class.
 

Thank you.  And thank you for listening.