Deerhoof didn’t want to fund ‘AI battle tech’ — so it ditched Spotify

On Monday, the long-running indie rock band Deerhoof made an announcement: it was pulling its music from Spotify.

The impetus was Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s newest investment in Helsing, the German defense group that makes AI and drones. Helsing raised 600 million euros in its most recent funding round, which was led by Ek’s venture capital firm Prima Materia. “Helsing is benefiting from a surge of investment in defence groups, as a highly charged geopolitical environment spurs nations all over the world to increase military spending and the war in Ukraine triggers a rethink of battlefield technology,” the Financial Times wrote of the investment. Ek characterized the investment as “doubling down”; he’d previously made Prima Materia’s first investment in Helsing.

That didn’t sit right with the members of Deerhoof, who didn’t like Spotify much to begin with. The streaming platform has been criticized by artists for not paying enough, as well as for its practices around “ghost artists” and Discovery Mode. I called up Greg Saunier, Deerhoof’s drummer, to talk about how streaming supports war efforts, how much money the band made from Spotify, and where they drew the moral line.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Let’s start with how you made the decision. Your statement reads that you saw that Daniel Ek was using his Spotify money to invest in AI, and you objected to war profiteering. I think that refers to Ek’s investment in Helsing. Can you sort of give me a picture of how that decision went after you heard the news?

We were in a rented minivan, on tour in the Northeast, and so I think we were just making chitchat in the car. And I was just like, “Hey, did you guys see that latest headline?” I think it took the four members of Deerhoof maybe all of two minutes to decide.

Ed Rodriguez, our guitar player, did a quick look at our Spotify numbers. How much do each of us actually make a year from being on Spotify? As far as direct income, it was something small, like maybe $1,000 a year or something for each of us.

So this is our cue. We’ve been basically waiting for at least five years for a moment. Everybody already hates Spotify — everyone you talk to, whether they’re a musician or whether they’re a listener. And so we were hoping that somebody would organize a movement. We’d be the first to sign up. But that wasn’t particularly happening. And so just for our own ability to sleep at night, you know — regardless of whether it creates any movement, regardless of whether Spotify themselves care — we just for our own mental health did not want our music, and particularly our music success, to be funding AI battle tech.

All of us have seen the results of what AI battle tech does and, you know, AI decision making, AI targeting, facial recognition, AI systems that are developed to go through lists of addresses where suspiciously named people happen to be living, and then will automatically obliterate an apartment building. [What’s happening in] Gaza just gives everybody a taste of the future that Daniel Ek is trying to make possible for other regions of the globe as well.

So yeah, the band’s decision was very easy and quick.

There seem to be two strands here. One is objections to Spotify, and the other is objections to AI, and so I’m going to take them separately. How did you first join Spotify? You were around well before the transition to digital music, and I’m sure you remember the Napster era, so I’m curious about how this has affected your careers.

I actually don’t remember joining it. We were probably on [record label] Polyvinyl at the time, and it was simply one of several ways to stream music.

Napster, I think, is related to the history of Spotify. Because, you know, Spotify started in Sweden. And Sweden was also famous at that time for being the main hub for The Pirate Bay. But even downloading music for free, as with Napster, is — downloads are not streams. It’s a different way of consuming music. At the time that Napster was happening, people had music collections. That’s what I do. I buy MP3s, often from Bandcamp or classical music from iTunes. None of the members of Deerhoof have ever got a Spotify account because none of us like streaming — it never caught on for us.

A narrative we can probably all agree is the case in terms of Spotify is that it seemed slightly suspicious when it started. It has utterly snowballed in terms of the amount of hate, the amount of eyerolls, and it’s not only that there’s been a gradual increase in public awareness of how unfair their payment system is. It’s also that Daniel Ek is the type of oligarch — and there are several who are making headlines nowadays — who seems to almost have some psychological compulsion to put his foot in his mouth and make headlines by saying unbelievably stupid things that inspire the ire of musicians and music fans. He’s just that type of very obnoxious. Not all billionaires are like that. Some keep their greed hidden behind some kind of secrecy or some kind of sense of decorum. Then you get the Elon Musks and the Daniel Eks and the Donald Trumps, who are more like intentionally, overtly, publicly as cartoonishly evil as possible.

We felt in our gut that having our success be funding global annihilation was maybe one step too far. That’s too much. We’re not doing that. We’re not on the side of a billionaire who has that as their objective. It’s sort of like they forced us to take a side. We probably would have bumbled along for a while longer, just sort of waiting in the background to see if somebody else made a move. But that was just too much. I cannot stomach that. There’s no way in the world I’m going to be saying, “Hey, everybody, listen to our music!” while at the same time knowing what that would mean.

Do you have advice for bands who want to remove their work from Spotify? You’d mentioned wanting to be part of a movement. If you happen to spur that movement, what should people do?

I mean, I just did an Instagram post. I thought a few hundred of our followers would probably see it. I didn’t anticipate the possibility that this could actually be a part of a story that could build into a movement.

I suddenly feel a lot of responsibility to people. It’s like any form of refusal, any form of protest, any form of civil disobedience, any form of strike, boycott. What we’re doing is basically going on strike — it’s not really, because we don’t have any intention of going back, but it’s like a strike. We were the musicians, the laborers Spotify uses as their bait for their ad company. In any of these popular situations, the more people do it, the more effective it is.

I already have had many of my music friends and colleagues tell me, ”Well, I can’t really afford to leave Spotify.” I’m like, I don’t judge you at all. I understand the situation. It was easy for us because we’re making most of our income from touring. But that’s a privileged position. I don’t look down at somebody who doesn’t feel that their own ability to to eat and pay rent will be so adversely affected by leaving Spotify that they just can’t do it.

At the same time, if a lot of people do it, then what happens is, Spotify goes the way of MySpace. You know, it’s just not cool anymore. It’s just not a trendy thing that everybody is compelled to use. That’s the ultimate goal, to make it so stupid and so uncool and such a laughingstock that nobody even wants to use it.

I want to talk a little bit about AI now. You made the announcement over Instagram, and Meta is also developing AI, and last year, okayed its use by the US military. So what’s the hard line for you?

I feel exactly the same about Meta or Instagram as I do about Spotify in that we hope for a mass defection. We hope for a mass strike, or a mass boycott, or just a mass refusal to use it anymore, and we will be the first to go.

But of course, there’s a gray area. We’re not literally directly making dollars from Instagram, but Instagram assists us in our ability to make income from other sources, such as ticket and record sales. I take some inspiration from, you know, worldwide boycott movements. I saw Cesar Chavez speak once in the late ’80s. I remember people were asking, “Why are you so focused on grapes? Why would you boycott an organic grape while there’s these pesticide-covered apples that you’re not even talking about?” And [Chavez] is like, “It’s just a strategy. It’s about targeted action.” You see very much the same thing happening with BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions], particularly in the past couple years. There are many institutions and companies and individuals who have ties either to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu or Israel’s government or the IDF [Israel Defense Force], but we’re going to target these specific ones so that public consciousness can be focused. In a media environment that is perpetually oversaturated, it sometimes is strategic to focus one’s efforts on a specific entity at a time, or not to overdo it.

We would also very much enjoy disempowering Mark Zuckerberg. His particular fetishes and hobbies and fantasies of what he would like to do with his multibillion dollars is slightly different, perhaps, than Daniel Ek’s, but it’s obviously been clear, at least since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Trump’s first election, that that he both desires and succeeds at being involved in politics. Not to even mention his flirtation with possibly running for president. It’s clear that he understands and gets a thrill from the fact that he’s actually able to control world events somewhat by what he chooses to censor or shadow ban or what he chooses to teach his algorithms to promote to the top of any given person’s feed.

Yes, Deerhoof would like Instagram to also become uncool. I imagine that Instagram will go the way of any other platforms that don’t really offer anything or create anything. What they create is loneliness, and they create what they require. They create longing, or they create distraction. They take you away from your own thoughts and your own feelings and obliterate your idle time in which you might have your own thoughts or feelings or create something, like writing a song. I don’t believe that Instagram is compatible with survival in the long run.

There’s a generation — probably a couple generations now — who’ve grown up knowing nothing but free music, and they may feel that it’s their human right. I actually can sympathize with somebody saying, “I think I should have free music,” in which case I would say, “Great, then obviously, if it’s a human right to have free recorded music, then it should be nationalized. It should not be done for profit.” It’s the same as we say about healthcare. It’s the same as we say about housing. It’s the same as we say about higher education.

It’s wild to be a touring band and be friends with French musicians. They’re like, “Oh, my salary is paid by taxes. My salary is paid by the government. I need to play 31 shows a year, and then I get paid.” In other words, the French population pays me to be a musician. [Ed. note: In France, musicians can collect a special class of unemployment income called intermittents du spectacle.] It’s like, whoa, try imagining that happening here, how much that would change everything.

Right now, the people who create recorded music do it for free, but any money that changes hands goes into the pockets of Daniel Ek. It goes into the pockets of somebody who uses it to automate and industrialize mass murder. That is not a scenario that most people are likely to give a thumbs up to if it’s presented to them in that way. That’s not Spotify’s sales pitch but it should be because that’s the reality, that’s what you’re signing up for.

You just had a new album come out, Noble and Godlike in Ruin. Where can people find it?

You can find it at the record store, you can find it on Bandcamp, you can find it on our website, you can find it on our label’s website, and then there’s any number of other tech platforms that allow for search fields in which you can type that. Or video platforms that will make it very easy for you to hear.

Spotify seems like the only choice as the result of backroom deals between major labels. That made Spotify compulsory for everyone, regardless if you’re Beyoncé. This doesn’t mean that it’s the only place to hear recorded music. Just go anywhere — literally anywhere — else.