King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard remove all songs from Spotify after AI military investment
Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have removed all of their music from Spotify in a boycott of the platform’s military investments.
It was announced in June that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek led a €600million investment into Helsing, an AI military start-up producing drones, aircraft and submarines. The company is also developing a new “Centaur” system to integrate “advanced AI pilots” into the cockpits of fighter aircraft. This investment has led to Ek being named chairman of the company.
King Gizzard actively oppose this investment. The prolific musicians announced on social media that they have a new collection of demos out everywhere, except Spotify. Their exact words were, “Fuck Spotify.” The collection can be accessed via Bandcamp instead.
Later, the prolific Australian rockers took to their Instagram story to explain their decision, as plenty of old Instagram posts had amassed comments such as “Hey, albums are missing from your Spotify?”
On their Instagram story, they wrote, “A PSA to those unaware: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests millions in AI military drone technology. We just removed our music from the platform.”
The six musicians continued, “Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better? Join us on another platform.” The backdrop to the statement was a close-up picture of the on-the-rise band The Velvet Sundown, who have appeared in many Spotify playlists, despite not even being real.
King Gizzard are not the first band to make this move. Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu also stressed their intent to leave the streaming platform. Deerhoof’s statement slammed Spotify at greater length, writing, “Spotify is flushing itself down the toilet. Eventually, artists will want to leave this already widely hated data-mining scam masquerading as a ‘music company.” It’s creepy for users and crappy for artists. Music-making lasts forever, but this or that digital get-rich-quick scheme is sure to become obsolete.”
At the time of writing, only a handful of King Gizzard albums made before 2020 are available via Spotify. A spokesperson for the band told The Guardian that this is due to different labels and distributors being tied up in different projects, but their “entire catalogue will be coming down.”
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