[Viewpoint] Death 2 Spotify: The protest against the streaming giant widens

A few weeks ago, I told you about the revolt of several artists, particularly Massive Attack, against Spotify and the decision by Daniel Ek, founder and executive chairman (no longer CEO) of the streaming giant, to invest part of the music revenues in a startup that builds drones and other military equipment. You can find the article here on TNT-Audio.

Unfortunately for Spotify, and just when it had finally launched a lossless plan, the troubles aren't over. A movement of ideas is emerging in the United States with a not so reassuring title: Death 2 Spotify. More precisely, it all started with a series of events with this title at a Bathers book-store in Oakland, California. Here is the page dedicated to these meetings. Collective public events have been attended by DJs, radio speakers, owners of small independent record labels, and musicians. The initiative is rapidly expanding outside the US.

The Oakland meetings were organized by Stephanie Dukich and Manasa Karthikeyan, two enthusiasts of sound and digital media. What they don't like is the economic model imposed by the major streaming platforms, especially Spotify, which, with its low commissions per stream, has never enjoyed a warm welcome among artists, especially smaller ones. Even the algorithm that suggests new music to users has not been without criticism.

In the words of the organizers, the idea is to try to “decentralize the distribution, production, and listening of music within capitalist economies.” If you think about it, it's the idea behind decentralized finance, the so-called DeFi, a general term used to indicate peer-to-peer financial services run on public blockchains, mainly on Ethereum's.

In other words, the idea is that financial exchanges take place securely from user to user, without external intermediaries (banks). And it's the same idea that inspired web journalism in its early days (been there, done that, since 1995!), a system through which virtually anyone could convey information. This is what the Death 2 Spotify movement wishes to achieve in the music industry, eliminating intermediaries (streaming platforms) and allowing even small artists to earn a fair amount, not the small crumbs that fall from the platforms' tables.

It's an ideal world, of course, one that collides head-on with the very foundations of capitalism. It may not succeed, but the technology is now ready to completely question the role of intermediaries or, at least, make them understand that one day they may no longer be the masters of the universe.

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October 2025 Editorial

Death 2 Spotify: The protest against the streaming giant widens