Spotify’s Quiet Collapse

Remember when the first week of December felt like a global flex session? Everyone posting their neon Wrapped cards, arguing over who got the weirdest micro-genre, secretly proud of 87,000 minutes wasted on the same sad-boy playlist. This year… crickets. And the silence is louder than any stat ever was.

2025 has been the year the cracks finally showed all at once.

The royalty cut that broke the camel’s back

Spotify decided bundling audiobooks into the Premium tier was a cute growth hack. The side effect? Royalties got recalculated across the board and most artists saw their per-stream rate drop again. A bunch of Grammy-nominated songwriters just… didn’t show up to the company’s own awards ceremony in protest. When your own guests ghost your party, you know the vibe is off.

Turns out the guy who built the biggest music platform on earth also poured tens of millions into Helsing, a defense-tech company making AI for military drones. Once that hit the feeds, the exodus started. Massive Attack, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Deerhoof—whole catalogs gone overnight. Ek stepped down as CEO in September (still chairman, still the largest shareholder, still very much in the room where it happens).

This summer an AI project called The Velvet Sundown popped up, zero humans involved, and racked up a million streams in three weeks. Spotify still refuses to tag AI-generated tracks. So every play is money taken out of the same tiny royalty pool that human artists are fighting over. Listeners have no idea if the cool new lo-fi band they found is a bedroom producer in Oslo or twelve lines of code in a server farm.

October: open the free tier, there’s a banner recruiting for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The backlash was instant. #CancelSpotify trended for 48 straight hours. People weren’t just mad; they were done.

Toronto writer Richie Assaly said it best: “The sheen has really worn off.” Being a Spotify user used to feel neutral, almost virtuous (“I’m supporting artists!”). Now every login feels like a small moral compromise.

I talked to a few friends in the industry last week. One mid-level indie artist told me his monthly payout dropped 30 % after the audiobook bundle change. Another manager said half his roster is actively shopping for alternative distributors. Even the superfans are jumping: I’ve seen more “here’s my 2025 Apple Music Replay” posts in November than I ever thought possible.

Spotify isn’t going bankrupt tomorrow2512; the machine is still huge. But for the first time since 2011, being the default choice doesn’t feel inevitable.

The lawsuits are stacking up too: one class-action over playlist payola, another alleging billions in bot streams that diluted the royalty pool even further. Every week there’s a new headline.

This isn’t just about one company having a bad year. It’s the moment the streaming dream we all bought into (infinite music, artists finally get paid, happy middle ground) hit the wall. Turns out you can’t scale “supporting art” the same way you scale cat videos.

Artists & teams

→ Start treating DistroKid + Bandcamp + Patreon as your core, not your side hustle.

→ If you’re still Spotify-first, at least upload through a service that lets you withdraw your music instantly if things get worse.

→ Talk openly about the numbers. The taboo around “how little we actually make” is breaking; lean into it.

Listeners

→ Try one month somewhere else. Apple Music, Tidal, Qobuz, YouTube Music; whatever. Notice what you miss and what you don’t.

→ Paying a human $15 a month that mostly goes to a defense contractor is a choice, not a requirement.

→ Share your actual Replay/Wrapped alternative this year. Make it normal.

Wrapped is still coming, I guess. The graphics will still be pretty. But a lot of us are going to open it, look at the numbers, and feel… complicated.

The streaming wars never really ended. They just went quiet for a while.

This time the listeners might actually decide who wins.

What about you; still in, or are you already out? Drop your thoughts below. The conversation matters more than the algorithm right now.