If you were planning to settle in and queue up some Godspeed You! Black Emperor on Spotify, there’s something you should know… the band just pulled their music from every streaming service, except one.
You can can’t listen to the Canadian experimental rock band on Spotify, or Tidal, or Apple Music (other than a couple of of their early projects), but… you can get all their albums on Bandcamp (and, honestly, you should).
Godspeed You! Black Emperor did not offer an explanation as to why they made this decision, but they join a growing number of artists who are choosing to sever times with Spotify specifically.
In a recent interview, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard frontman Stu Mackenzie offered some insight into his band’s decision to exit Spotify, noting that the final straw for them was the same as it was for Xiu Xiu: CEO Daniel Ek’s investment company, Prima Materia, investing in Helsing, a German company that builds drones and artificial intelligence for military operations.
“We’ve been saying fuck Spotify for years. In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented,” Mackenzie said, before going on to explain their choice.
“We saw a couple of other bands who we admire, and thought ‘I don’t really want our music to be here, at least right now.’ I don’t really consider myself an activist, and I don’t feel comfortable soapboxing,” he said. “But this feels like a decision staying true to ourselves, and doing what we think is right for our music, having our music in places that we feel all right about.”
Asked if it was a difficult decision to leave Spotidy, Mackenzie replied: “The thing that made it hard was I do want to have our music be accessible to people. I don’t really care about making money from streaming. I know it’s unfair, and I know they are banking so much. But for me personally, I just want to make music, and I want people to be able to listen to it.”
“The hard part was to take that away from so many people,” he continued. “But sometimes you’ve just got to say, ‘Well, sorry, we’re not going to be here right now.’ In the end, it actually was just one quick phone call with the other guys to get off the ship. As the sizes of everything gets larger, all of the stakes start to feel higher. I grapple with that because that’s not the kind of band that I like to be in, where it feels like everything is high stakes.
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