In case you hadn’t heard, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is investing the millions of dollars he has leeched from artists into weapons manufacturing. For myself and many other musicians, this is the last straw with Spotify, who has continually devalued our work. Boss makes a dollar, we make literal fractions of a cent.

I’ve previously written about Spotify’s exploitative business. I for one am no longer interested in competing with Spotify’s slew of AI artists, nor am I interested in making any money for Ek to spend on war. So I’m taking my music down.

If you’re a fan of my music, you can still enjoy it everywhere else, as before. You can even download most of my catalog for free (at time of writing) on Bandcamp. I’d recommend you drop Spotify and enjoy music another way.

If you’re like me and have used CD Baby to distribute your music to digital platforms like Spotify, I can share with you how to delete your music from Spotify, since it was not very intuitive and hard to learn via search.

Once you log in to your CD Baby artist page, click the “Albums & Singles” tab on the large, top banner. You should see a spreadsheet of your releases. On the far right column of this spreadsheet, you’ll see “View / Edit” buttons for each release. Click it, and you will be taken to the “Title Overview” page, which should look familiar from when you first uploaded it.

Scroll down and select the “Distribution” drop-down menu. One of the first things you might see is a small button that says “CANCELLATION OPTIONS.” Click this, then select the “Cancel From Specific Partners” toggle, unless you mean to cancel from all. A checklist will drop down, from which you can select Spotify. Click submit, and then you’re done.

To be clear, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and all the streaming services kinda suck but none as brazenly as Spotify. I do believe Spotify as a platform will continue to enshittify, losing musicians and listeners, and I hope that makes some difference in our resistance against these evil powers. But for now, especially for us who never made much money off Spotify, why enable a billionaire warmonger when you can simply withhold?