Music streaming unwrapped, 2025

A few months ago, when Sweden was covered in sun rather than in...half-gloomy darkness most of the time, I visited Way Out West, a music festival in Gothenburg.

As I entered, I was struck by the name of a stage: the Spotify stage. Apparently exclusive for new musicians. Catch 'em while they're young.

During Refused's gig, the front man, Dennis Lyxzén, paused to tell the audience his feelings about that stage name. 'We're gonna split up later this year, so it's not like they're gonna be able to not invite us next time', he said before launching into a tirade about how Daniel Ek is a 'toilet with hands and legs' and asked the audience to delete their Spotify accounts there and then.

Unfortunately, the analogy was inept. Daniel Ek isn't the toilet: he's what goes into the toilet.

As notable musician Bogdan Raczynski has pointed out¹, Daniel Ek has personally invested 793 million U.S. Dollars in Helsing, a war company that builds killing machines. For an average Spotify musician to make 793 million USD, they'd need to have their music streamed 94.4 billion times. By the way, Taylor Swift is the most streamed artist on Spotify, having reached 115 billion streams. Ironically, Taylor Swift once left Spotify because they didn't value music highly enough⁸; oh, the irony for an artist whose 54-million-USD jet plane ruins the climate⁹.

As the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) point out in the image at the top of this post², Spotify on average requires an artist to have 800,000 streams/month to make the equivalent of a 15 USD/hour salary. This is slave wages.

Don't forget: Spotify gladly let ICE run ads on their platform¹⁰. I've written extensively on what bad Spotify do¹¹, and don't miss Liz Pelly's great book Mood Machine that deals with a lot of Spotify traits¹²; the book came out earlier this year.

Spotify alternatives

Are there alternatives? I'm glad you asked.

I've made a page³ that I try to keep up-to-date. The page lists music-streaming platforms that are decent. At least decent-ish. Please contact me if you have tips or any kind of insider knowledge of why one of the platforms I've listed does not deserve to be on the list. I'm happy for all tips!

Meanwhile, I've stopped using Tidal and instead am using Qobuz. Why?

Tidal love AI slop and have recently devised a way to allow musicians to directly upload music to their platform; this would be a great thing if it weren't for the fact that Tidal pays musicians and songwriters zero money for all music that's uploaded directly to Tidal.

Modern-day slavery. Mmm.

Meanwhile, Qobuz is the only big music-streaming platform that publish how much they pay musicians. They also let us buy music. There's no AI slop on the platform. There's a lot of technical benefits that Qobuz have over Tidal, but there are two things that are worth mentioning:

• Musicians are paid more (actually a little more than four times what Spotify pay musicians per stream, on average)
• The sound quality is better on Qobuz

Exciting Spotify alternatives

There are some really exciting alternatives out there.

Coda

Coda claim to pay artists the highest sum of money per stream. They don't accept AI-generated audio. They're not internationally launched and don't respond to emails from me, asking when they'll start working in Sweden.

Subvert

Subvert want to be an open-source version of Bandcamp. Yeay!

The platform is a co-op (!), charge 0% in platform fees, and safeguard against corruption. Impressive.

Currently only open in a closed alpha release, meaning they aim to go open later, hopefully in 2026. Fingers crossed!

To conclude

Thankfully, decent people bound together and make alternatives.

Quboz can change at any moment and become a capitalist behemoth. On the other hand, places like Subvert seem hell-bent to not let people down - simply because they're run by people, not by capitalists (who must put profit ahead of all other things).

In the USA, UMAW are pushing for The Living Wage for Musicians Act⁴, a political initiative that would force music-streaming platforms and other parties involved to make sure that musicians and music-related artists to be professionals - to life off their music. This is already something that's happened in Ireland⁵, for example. Artists in ancient Greece were to a large extent funded by the state⁶, something that benefited everyone⁷.