A group of Seattle musicians, including several from the jazz community, have signed an open pledge to remove their music from Spotify, a major player in audio streaming. The boycott is motivated by Spotify’s business practices, which organizers believe to be “anti-human, anti-art, and anti-listener.”
Seattle Artists Against Spotify (SAAS), spearheaded by musician and former union organizer, Carolyn Brotherton, is a collective of local artists, DJs, and record labels who have signed an open letter expressing their decision to take their music off the platform, in response to the tech giant’s questionable ethics around AI music and its CEO’s defense technology investments. As of Friday, over 20 artists had signed the letter.
So far, signees of the group’s open letter include mover and shakers in the local music community, including Kevin Sur, an event producer and KEXP DJ, and Nathan Womack, owner and founder of stalwart local label Wax Thematique Records. Musicians who make jazz or jazz-adjacent music in Seattle have also joined the pledge, including psych-soul-jazz trio Afrocop, accordionist Josh Hou, drummer Chris Icasiano, avant-garde musician and Cornish College of the Arts Associate Professor Dr. Kaley Eaton, and flutist Leanna Keith.
“I already thought that Spotify was exceptionally predatory,” Keith wrote in an email to KNKX. “Its entire model relies on desperation from the artists in order to have content - without the musicians, Spotify doesn’t actually have a product. And yet, it continues to be one of the most profitable companies without giving the actual people making their product their fair share.”
AI on Spotify
In July, there was one incident in particular that galvanized Brotherton to start SAAS. An AI-created song was inaccurately attributed to late country musician and known anti-corporatist Blaze Foley, and posted without permission to his Spotify artist page.
“It’s an egregious violation of his artistic legacy, in my opinion,” Brotherton said.
While the track was eventually removed from Foley’s page, Spotify told 404 Media that the song’s distributor, SoundOn, violated Spotify’s “Deceptive Content” policy. Meanwhile, artists like Brotherton, believe Spotify should shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for their poor oversight, platforming, and promotion of AI-generated music.
“It's a big scam and it’s very anti-art,” Brotherton said.
“Ghost artists” or “fake artists,” have been documented on Spotify since 2017 and the rise of AI tools is deepening their impact. Spotify licenses music made by real humans that is then attributed to ghost artists and seeded throughout their playlists. Now, AI-generated artists and songs are being detected on the platform, without being labeled as AI.
The most recent example is The Velvet Sundown, a band on Spotify with 1.4 million monthly listeners who thought the musicians were human. Later, it came out that the band was “an AI band.” Likewise, as music critic Ted Gioia reported in his newsletter, The Honest Broker, jazz playlists on Spotify are one area hit particularly hard by “ghost artists.”
“Spotify apparently targeted genres where they could promote passive consumption. They identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music. That’s why I noticed the fake artists problem first in my jazz listening,” Gioia wrote in December.
Spotify’s adoption of AI, as well as its reliance on “algorithmic oversaturation,” or flooding listeners with more music than they can possibly consume, is a big reason that Kaley Eaton signed SAAS’s letter. She believes Spotify has contributed greatly to the dehumanization and cultural devaluing of music.
“That’s a cultural problem that has divorced us of our ability to actually engage art. And for me, that affects our relationships, that affects our wellbeing, of us as individuals, of us as artists, of our communities,” she said. “And ultimately, I think that it actually can destroy the health of democracy because we're totally diluting and dumbing down the most important vehicle of storytelling in the history of human people.”
Criticism of Spotify, particularly of its remarkably small payouts to the majority of musicians who host their music on the platform, has been mounting for years. As far back as 2012, Patrick Carney of The Black Keys, called the platform unfair to artists. In 2022, Neil Young boycotted Spotify for platforming right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan and Joni Mitchell joined in solidarity. Both returned to the platform in 2024.
In June, Pitchfork reported that indie rock band Deerhoof had removed their music from the platform, in protest of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investments in AI military technology. A few days later, indie band Xiu Xiu followed suit. On August 12, psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard also removed their music from the platform due to Ek’s investments.
A campaign for solidarity
All of this was on Brotherton’s mind when she penned SAAS’s open letter earlier this month, with the buy-in of friends and other musicians in the community. The open letter enumerates how, from SAAS’s perspective, Spotify hurts artists, the people at large, and the planet by demonetizing the streams of artists with fewer than 1000 monthly listeners, platforming and promoting “fake” AI music, and investing in AI military technology.
“We – the undersigned - are banding together to say NO to Spotify’s practices by pledging to remove our music from the platform. Together we can say, music is forever and will last beyond this particularly toxic corporate platform,” it reads.
On Sept. 1, she created the organization’s Instagram, where the letter is published and where artists can fill out a form to add their signatures.
Brotherton said the letter is less a list of demands for Spotify than a solidarity campaign amongst local music industry professionals in Seattle. With Seattle's history of activism, Brotherton thinks Seattle is the perfect place for a movement like this to pick up steam. She specifically cites the 1999 WTO protests, as well as the anti-corporate activism of Seattle's major artists, like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.
“ We've reached out to some bigger bands and we're hoping that these bigger bands, especially the ones that claim to be punk and rock and roll, you know, anti-authoritarian, will sign on,” she said.
Brotherton recognizes that walking away from a streaming platform as major as Spotify is terrifying to most artists, who rely on the exposure the platform provides to make their living. Still, Brotherton contends there are plenty of better ways to get your music to listeners. There’s physical media, and also streaming platforms like TIDAL, which according to recent data, pays more per stream to artists, and actively scours its content for any artificial streaming content from “bots, click farms, or other methods.”
With a vision for a more sustainable and artist-friendly music economy, SAAS organizers hope this anti-Spotify effort ultimately helps artists recognize that their magic and power as culture bearers is bigger than a single streaming service.
“It’s really isolating sometimes to be a musician and be interacting with the digital realm,” she said. “So, I think the first step is just to be like, ‘Hey, are you feeling upset about what's happening? Do you want to take your music off of Spotify but it feels scary? You're not alone. You’re part of this greater movement.’”
