On pulling our music from Spotify
Enough is enough, man
This weekend we opted to pull all Curious Quail music from Spotify (which frankly we should have done a while ago given how comically evil they are and we get into it below but in case you're wondering why something is not longer available, here's a blog post).
I saw a post on bsky from surasshu about an artist who got hit with a negative revenue report citing 'artificial streams' which gave me pause since I hadn't heard from either of our distros recently. Thankfully that wasn't the case for us - but I did find this fun nugget while looking through our "streaming sales" reports
Every month, Spotify sends us our "Your month on Spotify!" showing how many people streamed our music. Ok that's neat. Sure; but then I realized that so far, in every month of 2025, streams of our music on Spotify by these "active listeners" has been "ineligible" for revenue - with no explanation of why.
I had a lingering feeling it was related to the 2023 policy change that referenced certain artists not hitting enough plays to warrant payout; I distinctly remember saying this on Cohost when it was first announced:
Scenario: A musician has paid a distributor to put their music on Spotify. People (subscribed or ad-based) are listening to it - but Spotify has deemed it's not listened to enough for their threshold and therefore will not pay out for streams.
Full stop, Spotify is profiting off that music without paying the artist.
This was purely a hypothetical in 2023 yet it's exactly what has happened.
Every stream of ours since this policy change has resulted in \$0 in pay
We're not a huge band or anything! But the supposed threshold for annual streams they listed in that policy change (1000) we're well beyond UNLESS Spotify's own communications to us about our monthly plays is outright lying and who knows, right? They've always been a bit of a black box in terms of clearly communicating with the people who make their platform viable at all.
Also a note that not all of our music was on Spotify - we only had a couple of releases because at the time when we started (early 2010's) it made sense to be in as many places as possible, and since our 2024 record was a direct sequel to our kinda high profile 2014 record I wanted to at least cover that base for legacy fans - but like I knew in the back of my head that participating in the spotify ecosystem at all in the 2020s was a poisoned pill.
As mentioned above, the company rips off artists, shovels AI-generated music into playlists, the CEO is a war profiteer spending millions on AI weapons technology, the service actively platforms racists and bigots, and their goal is not to be anything other than a money printing machine that competes with "silence".
I'm tired of contributing. It's a tiny drop in a bucket but I'd rather have people skip our music entirely than only listen to it while giving those greedy fucks money.
Our entire discography is available on Bandcamp, with a good 90% of it being also on Mirlo and Itch.io as well.
New releases moving forward will only be available in these places, and to anyone thinking "well hey you're shooting yourself in the foot or leaving money on the table" by not being "discoverable" on spotify I'll look at the percentage of a cent per stream we WERE getting before they decided to stop paying us and not sweat it much.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's a cat.
