Artists pull music over CEO’s AI war tech ties

The Australian rock group King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is among the latest to protest Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and his controversial investments in AI-powered military technology. Other artists, including Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu, have followed suit.

Daniel Ek’s investment firm fuels backlash

Ek co-founded the tech investment company Prima Materia in 2021. In June, the Financial Times reported that Prima Materia led a multimillion-dollar investment in Helsing, a European AI defense firm focused on drone warfare and battlefield tech.

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The outlet also noted Prima Materia had previously backed Helsing months before Russia’s 2021 invasion of Ukraine.

When asked about the company’s strategy, Ek told Financial Times:

“There’s an enormous realization that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield. We can’t understate the implications of that for this conflict [in Ukraine] or really any conflict going forward.”

Spotify loses artist catalogs

As of this week, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Spotify page is nearly wiped clean. Only a few collaborative projects remain on the platform due to a pre-existing label agreement with Joyful Noise Recordings.

The band has amassed a massive discography, releasing 27 albums since its founding in 2010. While it’s not uncommon for the band to release more than an album a year, in 2017, the band released five full-length albums. The band did it again five years later in 2022.

Band members announced their departure on Instagram over the weekend, saying, “New demos collection out everywhere except Spotify (f— Spotify). You can bootleg it if you wanna.”

Band joins other artists

Last month, musical group Deerhoof also removed its music from Spotify. In a statement posted to their website, the group wrote, “‘Daniel Ek uses $700 million of his Spotify fortune to become chairman of AI battle tech company’ was not a headline we enjoyed reading this week. We don’t want our music killing people.”

Xiu Xiu followed suit on Thursday, July 24. They posted a statement on Instagram saying, “We are currently working to take all of our music off of garbage hole violent armageddon portal Spotify.”

The band concluded by urging fans to cancel their subscriptions.

While every artist’s streaming revenue differs, it’s widely known that they see a small cut of the profits from streams. For smaller artists, they average less than a penny per stream.

Not all artists are staying gone

Despite growing backlash, some high-profile artists have returned to Spotify after previously boycotting the platform.

Musician Joni Mitchell pulled her catalog in 2022.

“I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify,” she wrote on her website. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

Neil Young’s decision stemmed from the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” 

Following the controversy, Joe Rogan released a now-deleted, nine-minute video on Instagram.

“I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist,” he said. “I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations with them. Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong. But I try to correct them… I’m interested in finding out what the truth is.”

Ek responded by announcing Spotify would add content advisories to podcast episodes that touch on the pandemic. The company also launched a COVID-19 hub to direct listeners to “trusted sources.”

Last spring, Young re-uploaded his music to the platform. Mitchell followed this summer.

Spotify’s financial performance sees mixed results

While artists continue to pull content, Spotify released its second-quarter earnings on Tuesday, July 29.

The company reported 276 million paying premium subscribers, up from 268 million the previous quarter. However, despite the increase in monthly active users, Spotify posted a quarterly loss instead of the predicted profit.

This result was largely expected, as Spotify has recently shifted away from exclusive podcast deals in favor of non-exclusive licensing agreements.

Ek addressed the company’s financial growing pains in a call with investors.

“The one area that hasn’t yet met our expectations is our ads business,” he said, according to Hollywood Reporter. “We’ve simply been moving too slowly, and it’s taken longer than expected to see the improvements we initiated to take hold. It’s really an execution challenge, not a problem with the strategy.”