Last week, Spotify users received yet another email. “Starting on your billing date in December, your subscription price will change…” Another price increase. Another year of record profits. Another reminder that in the streaming economy, everyone benefits except the people who actually make the music.
I didn’t get that email. I am not a Spotify user.
This isn’t a story about dramatically quitting in protest. It’s about a conscious choice I made years ago—a choice informed by living on both sides of the streaming economy. As a composer creating conceptual albums and multimedia performances, I understand what those fractions of cents per stream actually mean for artistic sustainability.
So I chose differently. After years as a happy Apple Music user, I moved to Qobuz—a platform that pays artists significantly better royalties and delivers superior audio quality (find more in this other rant I did months ago). It wasn’t about moral purity. It was about alignment between my values as an artist and a call for conscious choices as a listener.
The Paradox of Infinite Access
Let’s zoom out and take a few steps back. When I moved to Berlin in 2016, I brought boxes of CDs with me. Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Depeche Mode and a bunch of movie soundtracks and, as well as a few inspiring indie artists. Physical music mattered to me then, and it matters to me now. Like many others in the last 10 years, I switched to vinyl. But I watched as friends around me stopped opening their CD cases, stopped visiting record shops, stopped thinking about music as something you own.
Why would they? They had Spotify. They had every piece of recorded music in human history available in their pocket, instantly, for less than the cost of a single album per month.
It felt like abundance to them. I saw it as erosion.
The quality of listening matters infinitely more than the quantity of what’s available. Yet the entire streaming industry is built on the opposite premise: more is better, infinite is ideal, access is everything.
But access without ownership, without choice, without intention—that’s not abundance. That’s just noise.
When Conscious Music Choices Demand Attention
There’s a moment in the creative process that defines everything. It happens late in production, after all the editing and mixing and revision. You sit down with the final version and you listen—properly listen—from beginning to end. No distractions. No phone. No email. Just you and the work.
I remember doing this with Music For The Planet in 2019. Ten orchestral tracks, each one addressing environmental destruction and the organizations fighting it. I sat in Fuseroom Studio in Berlin during the mastering session and listened to the entire sequence in one sitting. That’s when I knew whether it worked. Whether it meant something.
That kind of listening—intentional, focused, complete—has become almost countercultural. Streaming platforms don’t want you to listen to ten tracks in sequence. They want you to graze. To skip. To move on quickly to the next recommendation, the next playlist, the next algorithmic suggestion designed to keep you engaged but never quite satisfied.
For a platform, engagement is success. For an artist, engagement is just the beginning. What we actually need is connection.
The Mathematics of Devaluation
Let’s talk numbers, because they tell the real story.
When I released my debut album Memory Hole as Eric Oder in 2022—an exploration of Orwellian dystopia mastered by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering Studio in Berlin—I knew the streaming economics wouldn’t support its existence. The album took one year to create. Studio time, mastering, collaboration, artwork, everything that transforms sound into art requires investment of resources, especially time and energy.
If I had relied solely on Spotify’s streaming revenue, I wouldn’t have recouped 5% of production costs. Not even close.
The only reason the album exists at the quality it does is because of revenue streams beyond streaming: licensing deals for sync placements, live performance opportunities, and digital sales. Platforms like Qobuz that offer better rates help, but the economic viability came from diversified income—film/media licensing, commissioned work, and direct digital purchases.
Now consider what Spotify just announced: a 1€ monthly increase across their subscriber base. Assuming similar increases globally, that’s potentially 312€ million additional annual revenue (they have 276 million paying subscribers). Nearly half a billion euros extra per year.
Meanwhile, artist per-stream rates haven’t meaningfully increased in years. That money isn’t going to composers, producers, session musicians, or the entire ecosystem of human beings who create what makes their platform valuable. It’s funding executive compensation, playlist curation AI, podcast acquisitions, and feature development that makes the platform stickier but doesn’t address the fundamental inequity at its core.
What Ownership Actually Means
My work has always explored how technology shapes consciousness—from dystopian narratives to explorations of artificial happiness. Each project is designed not for background listening, but for full attention. For sitting with difficult ideas. For creating space where meaning emerges slowly.
When you buy an album—whether as digital download or physical format—you’re not just purchasing audio files. You’re saying: this matters enough to take up space in my life. This deserves permanence. This is worth returning to. You’d take it home, sit down, and listen to the whole thing. You’d read the liner notes. You’d study the artwork. You’d notice the sequencing, the way one song flowed into the next, the arc of the complete work.
There’s something almost radical about that now. In an age of cloud storage and algorithmic curation, choosing to own something—whether as lossless files or physical objects—is an act of resistance against the transient, the disposable, the algorithmically optimized.
The Discovery Myth
Spotify positions itself as a discovery platform. And to be fair, I’ve found artists through it as well as watched friends doing it. But increasingly, I’ve realized that what the algorithm offers isn’t discovery—it’s continuation.
It recommends what you won’t skip. What fits seamlessly into your existing taste profile. What keeps you in the app. True discovery—the kind that challenges you, that expands your world, that introduces you to something genuinely unfamiliar—rarely comes from a platform optimized for retention metrics.
The algorithm serves you more of what you already like. Life—messy, unpredictable—serves you what you didn’t know you needed.
Any Way Out?
I’ve written about this choice in detail on my blog—Breaking Free from the Spotify Mindset—because I believe the conversation matters. We have alternatives. Platforms exist that respect both artists and audio quality. They’re not niche. They’re not inconvenient. They’re simply better aligned with the values that matter: fair compensation and faithful reproduction of artistic work.
Apart from streaming platforms, I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of supporting artists directly. Whether buying digital albums on Bandcamp, or gifting music to friends with a note about why I think they’ll love it—these transactions are personal, intentional, generous. They can’t be replicated by forwarding a streaming link.
Bandcamp remains essential, especially on Bandcamp Fridays when artists receive 93% of revenue instead of fractions of pennies. When I discover something I love, I buy it there. I pay what I can. I know it makes a difference.
The Artist’s Perspective
Here’s what I know from the inside: when I compose music for film, the compensation comes from licensing agreements, not streaming revenue. When I create bespoke music for brands, they’re paying for exclusivity, for craft, for specific expertise. When I release conceptual albums, licensing deals, performance opportunities, digital sales, and higher-quality streaming platforms make them economically viable.
The streaming model works for certain types of music: playlist fillers, mood enhancers, functional background sound. It fails catastrophically for everything else. For music that takes time to understand. For experimental work that doesn’t fit genre categories. For ambitious projects that cost more to make than they’ll ever earn through micro-payments.
If the only viable music is music that generates high stream counts, we’re going to end up in a very boring world.
What AI Can’t Press
Just yesterday, I had the privilege to visit Kling Klang Klong studio here in Berlin. I sat with Maurice Mersinger, founder and creative director, and we had a long, meaningful conversation about how we relate to music and art today. We identified something profound about our time:
In the past, the time required to create a work was way more than the time required to consume it. With the advent of AI, it’s the other way around which make the work itself worthless.
This shift is fundamentally changing our relationship with art itself. What happens to value? To meaning? To the human investment that makes art matter?
AI music is made to live inside streaming platforms where volume matters more than vision, where background noise earns more than artistry, where the marginal cost of creation approaches zero.
Digital ownership and physical formats and live performances expose the difference. They reveal intention, craft, investment, care—time spent. They prove that a human being believed this work mattered enough to create and release it properly, and that the listener believed it mattered enough to own it—not just stream it temporarily.
That alone should tell us where the soul of music still lives.
The Slow Listening Movement
I’m not suggesting everyone should quit Spotify. Family plans that let households share music make sense. Regional pricing makes streaming the only viable option for many listeners. Discovery playlists have genuine value. But I am suggesting that we’ve collectively lost something in the bargain, and it might be time to reclaim it. I hereby found the Slow Listening Movement. Basic principles behind it are:
What if instead of listening to music constantly, we listened to it occasionally but completely?
What if instead of accumulating vast libraries we never hear, we built small collections we love?
What if instead of letting algorithms decide what we discover, we trusted friends, artists we admire, and our own curiosity?
What if we remembered that music isn’t a utility to be optimized, but an experience to be inhabited?
The Questions Worth Asking
If you’re still reading, consider these questions:
How much of your streaming library do you actually listen to?
If you only bought the albums you genuinely loved this year, would you spend more or less than your annual subscription cost?
When was the last time you listened to a complete album without interruption?
Do the artists you care about earn enough from streaming to keep making the work you value?
What would change if you owned the music that matters to you?
I don’t have all the answers. But I know this: music deserves better than being reduced to background content in an attention economy. Artists deserve better than fractions of pennies for years of work. And listeners—we deserve better than infinite access to everything and genuine connection to nothing.
We can support artists directly. We can listen intentionally. Through conscious choices, we can remember that music is an art form, not a utility.
