The Mess is a new column from journalist Richard Villegas, who has been reporting on new, exciting sounds flourishing in the Latin American underground for nearly a decade. As the host of the Songmess Podcast, his travels have intersected with fresh sounds, scene legends, ancestral traditions, and the socio-political contexts that influence your favorite artists. The Mess is about new trends and problematic faves whilst asking hard questions and shaking the table.
We’re going there. We’re talking about it. Even if things get a little messy.
Music streaming is so ingrained into our daily routines that it feels like nothing more than a simple tool for entertainment. But for artists, labels, journalists, and other music folk, the fingerprints of historic industry exploitation are all over digital subscription services. Spotify has become the face of streaming’s ugliest contradictions – from poor sound quality and deteriorating user experiences to creating “ghost artists” to minimize royalty payouts, plus company co-founder Daniel Ek’s nefarious investments in military technology. The platform is amassing baggage that’s increasingly hard to ignore, and yet, most people have made peace with the elephant in the room.
The average consumer would rather feign ignorance than migrate to a different service, or dismiss Spotify criticism as a drop in the bucket of an overall streaming culture that isn’t much fairer. However, a growing artist exodus is calling the bluff that Spotify, and maybe streaming at large, is necessary for career survival. As new paths for distribution, promotion, and remuneration arise, and with the music industry facing an all-time high of economic precarity and intellectual property disputes, artists are still able to control how their work is accessed, and, at the very least, ensure that it doesn’t contribute to war.
Let’s set the scene: Popular indie rock bands Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor removed their catalogues from Spotify in protest of Ek and his firm Prima Materia, which, in June, funded a €600 million investment in AI military defense company Helsing. A month later, the prolific Australian psych band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard followed suit, taking to Instagram with an update for fans and asking, “Can we put pressure on these tech billionaires to do better?” The answer is, perhaps.
In 2014, Taylor Swift set a powerful precedent when she removed her music from Spotify after asking, to no avail, that her albums be made available only to the platform’s paid subscribers to mitigate low royalty rates. At first, the move was derided as greedy, but an open letter from the singer published in The Wall Street Journal proved remarkably prescient. “It’s my opinion that music should not be free,” she wrote, polemically, “and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”
Cut to the present day, and Spotify is the music industry status quo. Streaming content and ephemeral social media trends rule the zeitgeist, and creators compete for ever smaller spoils. You have Colombian Latin Grammy-winners Diamante Eléctrico confiding in fans about the unsustainable economics of their band, while in an interview, Ale Sergi of Miranda! pinned the rise of bootlegging on rapacious major labels rather than cash-strapped fans.
Swift is among the few to emerge from the streaming trenches resilient. Her catalogue returned to Spotify in 2017 to blockbuster fanfare, while the cover variants for her forthcoming The Life of a Showgirl LP are expected to yield a tidal wave of profits from her fans. However, the billionaire pop star was right about the dangerous illusion that music and art are free, as non-billionaire artists are overwhelmed by the snowballing cost of recording, producing, mixing, mastering, distributing, promoting, and performing. The starving artist trope is as old as art itself, but to create is to labor, and the sweat from one’s brow should always be compensated.
“What makes sense to me is prioritizing other mediums, like physical releases and Bandcamp exclusives, and fortifying the community that listens to us in Chile and across Latin America,” says singer-songwriter Simón Campusano, frontman for the indie rock band Niños del Cerro. “Streaming platforms and playlists never really worked for us. They’ve never been conducive to our growth and success, so we operate from the margins without completely leaving.”
Niños del Cerro will release a new album this October, exclusively in a physical format at first and later available online. The band is planning a free show in Santiago to launch the record, hosting parallel listening sessions across Latin America, where copies of the album will also be sold. Innovative strategies keep the band one step ahead of industry-co-signed precarity, though Campusano rejects the suggestion to leave streaming platforms altogether.
“I admire bands like King Gizzard or Goodspeed for taking their music off Spotify,” he adds, “but that’s a privilege for bands of the first world, who can recuse themselves from streaming because they operate within a larger, more lucrative infrastructure. Bands in Latin America can’t afford that luxury, though hopefully audiences will someday listen to music again in a way that connects with the reality of the artists.”
For fans interested in more ethical — or even more enjoyable — forms of streaming, alternatives include YouTube Music (praised for its intuitive algorithm), Apple Music (which now allows you to import playlists from Spotify), and TIDAL (the highest streaming pay rate available, at $0.013 per play). If you’re a stubborn indie freak like me and want to keep money out of billionaire pockets, I’d recommend taking your business to Bandcamp, an online store that delivers 90 percent of sales revenue directly to the artists. As a frequent contributor to their editorial outlet, I assure you it’s way less niche than you think, and even Bad Bunny, C. Tangana, and Björk are on the platform.
“[Taking your music off Spotify is] a privilege for bands of the first world, who can recuse themselves from streaming because they operate within a larger, more lucrative infrastructure. Bands in Latin America can’t afford that luxury.”
My last suggestion? Put your money back into physical media. One of the biggest dangers posed by streaming is that music, television shows, and films can disappear from these platforms for any arbitrary reason at any given time. In 2017, after sexual assault allegations came out against punk singer Ben Hopkins, his band PWR BTTM was immediately scrubbed from the internet. In an act of lesser fury but galling for all creatives involved, Warner Bros. canceled their 2022 Batgirl film near the end of production, shelving the project and repurposing it as a tax write-off. And plenty of actors, musicians, and influencers have spoken about shadow-banning and declining social media engagement as backlash to their political stances.
Streaming is one of the clearest examples of neo-feudalism, the economic system into which capitalism has already mutated, where the working class owns nothing and we instead rent goods and services from companies. We now depend on social media to communicate with each other, and third-party subscriptions that, if not paid on time, can pluck content right out of our hands. Buying a CD from your local band won’t prevent social collapse, but at least Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek won’t censor your at-home listening experience or insert ghoulish AI slop.
“The current music industry dynamic forced us to find alternatives to keep the project sustainable, even if none of us actually make a living from music,” says Emanuel Mora of Costa Rican shoegaze band Adiós Cometa. “We’re committed to merch and physical music releases [with our label, Furia]. In times of scarcity, like now, people want to experience music in tangible ways. At our shows, we sell vinyls, CDs, and cassettes, which is something we believe in and [the income] helps us carry on.”
So, is it time to quit Spotify? Probably. But realistically, most of us, including me, won’t. As much as I rely on Spotify for research and my podcast, Songmess, I also try to funnel as much of my support as possible into artists directly, whether through Bandcamp or physical releases. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and even less so under neo-feudalism, but we can still choose to put more of our money into the hands of creators, not corporations. The question is whether enough of us can look past the convenience to see the responsibility.
