Remember when Joe Rogan signed a Juan Soto-esque contract (200+ million- that’s more than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is getting paid over five years!) with Spotify in May of 2020? The height of a global pandemic perforated by a flood of dangerous misinformation that was not only perpetrated by Rogan’s very own podcast (again, worth more than double Ronald Acuña Jr., apparently) but proven to be lethally irresponsible in such a volatile and clouded time, especially considering the naive susceptibility of his audience. Maybe you don’t, but I certainly do, considering I had to watch in disbelief as two of my favorite artists nobly took a stand against such recklessness and pulled their entire catalog from the only streaming platform I used. 

Now, if the notion of downloading Neil Young and Joni Mitchell records online and manually uploading them to Spotify in the midst of a pandemic sounds laborious and painful, it was. But not nearly as painful as the amount this industry behemoth compensates artists with per stream. If you guessed anywhere between $0.003 and $0.005, congratulations! You get a free trial week of Spotify Premium, ad-free and funded by AI Israeli war drones. I forgot to mention that Spotify’s founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, recently invested 600 million dollars (seven years of Shohei Ohtani) into the German Military AI defense company Helsing, which Ek is also a chairman of. 

While both Young and Mitchell have since returned their full catalogues to the platform following the addition of misinformation labels to “The Joe Rogan Experience” and other factitious programs, there has emerged a new wave of artists pulling discographies from the app due to discontent with the financial and ethical ways of Ek’s 150 Billion dollar success. Post rock greats ‘Godspeed You!’ Black Emperor and Xiu Xiu have deleted their music entirely from the service and trip hop legends Massive Attack announced a few weeks ago that they plan to follow suit. Not to mention the 400 strong that make up ‘No Music For Genocide’, an artist activist boycott that has removed the discographies of artists like Fontaines DC, Bjork, Paramore, Black Country, New Road and Rina Sawayama, just to name a few, from all Isreaeli streaming platforms entirely.

It is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to live an entirely ethically consummatory life in our contemporary world. By this, I mean nearly every facet of content we consume (and it’s a lot), every television show we stream, every movie we watch (probably stream), every album we listen to or book we read is stained red to some degree by the unmistakable fingerprints of … well, you name it. Racism, genocide, misogyny and so on all find a way to seep into the inner workings of the leisurely vices we may turn to as means to avoid these very same overarching disparities of our age. As I observe the artists I hold such reverence for sacrificing their own financial gain and accessibility in the name of principle, I am pointedly reminded that consumption, despite its frivolous appearance, carries an immense political weight, one that we must be vigilantly mindful of.

This is not to say that you need to cancel your Spotify subscription or Amazon Prime membership or whatever, lest you become Benjamin Netanyahu’s own personal footstool. Rather, it’s a salient reminder that now, more than ever, your cognizance becomes complicity. 

Not immediately, but slowly, lazily, weaponizing your own futile sense of autonomy until you are left blinded and torpid, devoid of any semblance of free thought as you log onto the Charlie Kirk Memorial App*™, the only streaming platform left online where you can watch your favorite TikToker try Israeli food for the first time. 

If it makes you feel any better, Spotify did lose around 2 billion in market value following Young’s decision to leave. So as you watch more and more artists — some of them might even be relevant to you! — remove their life’s work from this platform in the months to come, consider the trivial inconvenience that may follow as a wake up call of sorts. Never in our lifetimes has it been more prescient to consider the ethics of both what and how we consume. And remind yourself that you can always listen to Mezzanine, it’s not like it’s going anywhere.