About leaving Spotify

Tribe, we’ve decided to remove our music from Spotify.
For those of you who know and follow us this probably won’t come as much of a surprise and for those who don’t, it may not feel out of place either in this strange world we live in. This wasn’t a decision made overnight, we’ve been watching the situation closely for a long time and we had to weigh it carefully before taking this step.

We all know that Spotify’s payment system is the shittiest and most unfair of all the streaming platforms, that it has one of the most opaque algorithms in the industry and that it’s literally a lost battle for smaller bands since the bulk of the revenue always goes to the same players. With their distribution model, it’s impossible to make it economically sustainable. We’re also aware of the company’s moral drift, like their CEO funding weapon companies, hearing him happily say that making music costs nothing, filling their platform with AI-generated “music” in order to pay human artists even less and running a recommendation system that is brutally manipulated and extremely inefficient for underground music and some genres. Spotify has become garbage.

So there’s us, in the middle of the noise, just a couple of people who have been pouring their souls into creating and sharing what crosses our imagination with lots of effort and perseverance, just like any other band.
We make music because we love it, because it makes us happy and because we enjoy sharing it with others. We are fully aware that being creative does not make you some mystical being who deserves a special treatment. We are just people who create things, that transform what we see and feel into works that can be shared, that can then become what others see and feel, or at least that is how we have always thought of it. A chain of creation and inspiration were each one of us is just a link. The problem is, it has gotten to the point were we feel the chain is starting to crack.

Looking at the current state of streaming makes us feel like donkeys chasing a carrot tied to a stick, strapped to a wheel that generates value from which mostly others benefit and where it seems that anything goes. Because even for those who “make it” it’s temporary as it goes up, it goes down and all that remains is the memory and the experience. So, what are you willing to give up in exchange for that experience?

We choose to make music, yes, but this choice added to others like it create the basis of an industry that moves billions. We do it because it makes us happy, yes, but without creators there is no entertainment industry. "AIs can do it", yes, but those AIs are trained with what humans have created (so you would say no, right?, we'll talk about that another time) and if humans stop creating new things, AIs will cannibalize each other until all they spit out is a plain goo. And of course we want to connect with you but for us no, not everything goes.

All our lives we’ve heard things like “you’ve got to work your ass off”, “that’s just how it is”, “if you want to get anywhere you have to… (insert random abusive argument here).” But not everything goes. David Bridie said “Spotify used to seem like a necessary evil for musicians. Now it just seems evil” The abuse of “payment in exposure” has gone so far that abuse itself has been normalized. Maybe it’s time to stop swallowing garbage.

We’ve seen other bands leave Spotify, seen how people reacted and we know every action has consequences. We won’t be a huge loss for Spotify anyway, we’re tiny, but for us this is a big step in the direction we feel right.

And we know we’re not going to change the WORLD, all caps, but that’s not the point. The point is choosing differently, a gesture that speaks to making decisions, one after another, that slowly shape OUR world, the one we have to live in day by day, so that it resembles who we are as much as possible and above all, staying consistent with what we think and believe in.

We have never wanted to be something we are not and we like to think that this way of being is one of the reasons that makes you stay with us.

We know this may be inconvenient or uncomfortable for some of you and we apologize in advance, we hope you understand. Our music will still be available on other streaming platforms and, of course, on Bandcamp.

We don’t know what will happen from here but a very smart person once said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The system used to be different, now it’s this and in the future it’ll be something else, so let’s keep going and see what comes.

Thank you for being there.

Greengoat