Musicians Fleeing from and being Forced off Major Streaming Platforms
“I’m so pissed about our music being taken down from Spotify with no due process.” — David Weeks, member of John McNulty, a talented indie folk rock band based in Paris.
“Sometimes I feel like Spotify is a necessary evil. A lot of people find my music on that platform. It’s a way to gain fans. However, it is a ripoff to the artist. The owners of Spotify have no clue what goes into the creation of music. They don’t understand the cost for the promotion as well. They devalue our music. Our music is worth a lot more than they think. Music has saved lives. It has made a difference in people’s lives. Music is worth more than they think.” — multiple award-winning singer/songwriter Natalie Jean who has had over 1 million streams overall for her songs on Spotify
“Hey I’m Ian Ketterer from Seattle band Among Authors. We’ve toured the country and performed on NPR Tiny Desk. I hope you all might read our story about complete corruption in the music industry that has to do with TuneCore and Spotify. This is not just our story, this is happening to bands all over the world. We have officially removed all of our music from every streaming platform due to @tunecore and @spotify illegally taking down much of our music with false claims of illegal streaming activity, and then charging us penalty fees for every song they remove.” — Ian Ketterer, Among Authors
As a creative living in Hollywood, we writers have our own issues about diminishing fees, productions leaving Los Angeles, and, pressures from AI technology — I actually got an offer to teach some AI platform how to write like me for a fee, in other words, to create my own demise.
But my creative pals in the field of music are also being given the one-two sockeroo to the gut. No one buys CDs or tapes. Few of us pay for our digital listens on various platforms like YouTube…and Spotify.
But the dollars and cents for getting streams on Spotify are eye-opening. Some sad stats and facts:
— Many artists earn $0.003 (that’s three tenths of a cent) per stream, so if you acquire 250K streams you earn $750, minus taxes and fees, blah, blah.
— Here’s a case story: L.DRE, an LA-based music artist and producer got 1.5 million streams for a recent LP, at the rate of $0.002896 per stream or $2.896 per 1000 streams. His total earnings minus the deductions was $4345 for over a million streams. Hello!
— Spotify now has a minimum threshold to pay royalties, which was raised in 2024 to 1,000 streams per song per year. Songs that don’t meet this threshold don’t generate royalties for their artists.
— Many artists feel Spotify’s algorithm favors major acts and trends, making it harder for smaller, independent, or niche artists to gain visibility and reach their target audience.
A recent thread posted on Reddit ran a headline — “Spotify is erasing thousands of real bands from their platform, and charging to do so” — and the band member Ian Ketterer admitted: “We are working on finishing up our new album right now, and I can honestly say I am terrified thinking about how irrelevant our band is becoming by the day, due to not being on streaming platforms. How on earth will anyone listen to our new album when we release it?”
So, closer to home, here’s the recent story of John McNulty & The Dimestore as told by my pal David Weeks about how their music was taken down by Spotify:
“So, Spotify accused us of paying to have our music added to a playlist, of having ordered bots to listen to our music. This playlist is then listened to by users in a bot farm to generate streams (and therefore money…pitifully small amounts of money). We were aware last May that we got a spike in streams. Suddenly about 2000 over two days for just one song. But we went on with our lives, and we forgot about this ‘spike’ because we weren’t concerned about how many streams. We’re just happy if people appreciate our music as we all do it just for its own sake. And, we certainly didn’t pay for or order anyone to boost our streams.
“We received a message in August from Spotify making the accusation of us paying for bots. So, we wrote back saying ‘BS!” We don’t care about streams. We even offered to send screen shots of our Whatsapp from May showing we didn’t know why it happened. We never received a reply from Spotify. Then the entire album featuring the song was removed by Spotify.” Weeks warns, “They want rid of the small fry to make room for AI.”
John McNulty adds: “From what I understand, some people on Spotify boost their streams by hiring ‘cowboys’ on the internet to have multiple computers listening to your music to boost your streams but Spotify can tell. But we never solicited this service, and I think a song like ‘Queen of Montparnasse’ was taken for a while and boosted with these kind of streams but we did not solicit this service. We just fell into somebody’s bot service for some reason. Why bots would choose random bands to boost streams over, I have no idea. Especially if they are not being paid for it but the internet is a mysterious thing. We want our traffic to be au naturel. But I think Spotify is so under the gun to cleanse their site of fake streams, that they just take any case and eliminate the catalogue, regardless of the artist’s implication in the matter. And despite your guilt or innocence. At the end of the day, we are talking about 1500–2000 streams. It’s like 40 cents or something so the whole thing is ridiculous but in the age of AI when a little band put on their real songs on there and get cleaned up with all the other cleansing it is annoying that there is no ‘trial,’ just straight to judge, jury and execution and they took our whole album off by the way, not just the track in question. Talk about over-kill. We just want our songs to be available at the end of the day and now we can’t even do that on Spotify. ‘Up all Night’ is still available all on all other services and our old album is still up there on Spotify.” McNulty further suggests: “It is a weird world in which only the gatekeepers know what is really going on.”
So, the band will be putting its next LP release on Bandcamp only.
Among Authors has removed their music from major streaming platforms and offers it for purchase or direct download through their Bandcamp site. Similarly, John McNulty & The Dimestore’s music can be found on Bandcamp, and here’s a link to a story on the band’s “Up All Night.” Drop in on another band that David Weeks plays in, The Downtown Merrylegs. And, check out Natalie Jean’s own music website.
