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The company, Helsing, pledges to only sell towards democratic governments. I think it's a very slippery slope. In my opinion, once you've taken a step towards the military industrial complex, you are the military industrial complex.

I'm not sure how much funding came from the profits of Spotify. It could have come from other investments. Ultimately, you have Spotify leadership involved in a defence company that makes drones. Ethically, I don't like my money going towards someone who invests in this.

Can’t speak for anyone else, but I read it and also don’t know what’s true beyond the headline which, in my mind, was the key takeaway regardless of the bands motives.

You can put one of the other reasons, such as: a) they pay some podcasters a LOT of money and have one of the worst payouts to artists out of the streaming services b) they donated to the inauguration of a cheeto, c) they are just getting lossless audio, but at a lower quality than some other services

Spotify has been shitty from inception IMO. I've tried it a couple times at different points and first off, just didn't like the UX at all.

The "free" tier is unusable if you're an active listener and not the type to just have something, anything, playing as background noise.

My biggest pet peeve with Spotify and most of the other big modern streamers: There's a tenuous connection between the listed artist and a "real" artist, so there's no way to tell if you're listening to something intentionally created that can be found elsewhere, or just procedurally generated slop uploaded by some rando. Google is just as bad if not worse with this since merging Google Play Music with YouTube. Apple seems to get this part right, but I have no other reason to switch.

Anyway, that's not even touching any political/ethics/business aspects of Spotify. It's hard to imagine it becoming any shittier, and I've always wondered how they have the market share they do. At some point I realized that it's kind of just the default option for the more casual listener who isn't already slotted into Apple or Google for everything. Plus it has official, polished integrations with a lot of other apps/ecosystems (e.g. Discord, Xbox).

I'd sooner bring lossless versions of all my stuff local and tag every track by hand than give them any amount of money, but it's clearly not made for me so that doesn't mean much.

I've been driven more to web radio stations, even terrestrial radio (streamed or actual FM). there are some great free/non-commercial choices out there still with human DJs. (Shout-out to kexp). Human-curated radio is still viable for discovery and going out of your comfort zone musically, and human "taste-makers" still have a place, which is reassuring. There are a few newish low power FM stations around me which are actually good, which is an interesting and unexpected development.

I was a reasonably happy Rhapsody/Napster user until crypto bros bought it and turned it into fucking garbage. They literally broke the damn app (not phone, entire web app) for weeks after some weird change where they put crypto crap into it. It was entirely unusable.

After that I gave up. Spotify has far more support and integrations. I don't care for Spotify and how little they pay their artists, but it works and support is far wider.

I'd go back to Napster if they weren't ass as they did actually pay their artists better. Their app footprint is tiny and support is weak. I integrate a lot of stuff with my home assistant and other things; trying to do it with Napster would likely be a frustrating dead end.