At the moment, the Spotify exodus of 2025 is a trickle rather than a flood. A noticeable trickle, like a leak from the upstairs bathroom dribbling down the living room wall, but nothing existential yet. The five notable bands who have left Spotify in the past month – shoegazers Hotline TNT last week, joining Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE) and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – are well liked in indie circles, but aren’t the sorts to rack up billions of listens. Still, it feels significant if only because, well, this sort of thing wasn’t really supposed to happen any more.
Plenty of bands and artists refused to play ball with Spotify in its early years, when the streamer still had work to do before achieving total ubiquity. But at some point there seemed to a collective recognition that resistance was futile, that Spotify had won and those bands would have to bend to its less-than-appealing model. That realisation was best summed up by the Black Keys, a legitimately big rock band at the time of Spotify’s emergence who refused to put the albums they released around then – 2011’s El Camino and 2014’s Turn Blue – on the platform. They relented two years later and say now that “taking a stand definitely hurt us in the long run”.
