Who was the first major artist to boycott Spotify?
It’s hard now to imagine a time when Spotify didn’t exist, and when we were exclusively using magazines, radio, and word of mouth recommendations in record stores to discover new music.
The algorithm made that so much easier to navigate, and when the Swedish tech startup launched outside of its country of origin in 2009, there was a lot of excitement about this newfangled way of listening to and discovering music.
All of a sudden, there was a wealth of new music for people to discover at users fingertips, all for a relatively low monthly subscription fee. It might have seemed too good to be true, and that’s probably because it was, and it wasn’t long before the backlash against the company started.
That’s right, it hasn’t just become controversial in recent years. People have always had criticisms to level at their business model and shady behind-the-scenes partnerships, and while there has been a recent trend of people who have rallied against its CEO’s nefarious deeds outside of running the company and complained about how little it pays its artists, some people have hated it since the beginning.
In fact, certain artists have refused to ever be on Spotify from the start. Joanna Newsom’s back catalogue is still not available on the platform, with her having told the LA Times that it is a “garbage system” and that they’re “a villainous cabal of major labels”. Other artists were initially reluctant to use the service, but have eventually buckled under pressure, with The Beatles and AC/DC eventually succumbing to allowing their work on streaming platforms in 2015. But who was the first major artist to take their material off Spotify?
Who was the first artist to remove their music from Spotify?
While acts like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu kicked off a wave of boycotts from major artists earlier in 2025 in protest against CEO Daniel Ek’s not-so-secret funding of military technology, they’re far from the first to have taken this stand, they’ve just highlighted the latest in a long line of issues that have plagued the streaming giant.
Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren all removed their music from the platform in 2022 in protest against their platforming of podcasts that spread misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, such as The Joe Rogan Podcast. While their concerns were never directly addressed by Spotify, other streaming services also began to make the podcast available to users, meaning that their decision to boycott one service was no longer relevant, and they promptly returned to the platform two years later.
Bob Dylan was also temporarily not on the platform after removing all of his music in 2009, which his management instigated in an effort to ensure that they could reach an agreement with the company over licensing rights. However, he returned three years later, and also just missed out on being the first artist to remove himself and actively boycott the platform.
The first to do so was singer-songwriter Magnus Uggla, a native Swede, who took umbrage with the platform’s pitiful artist payment model a few weeks prior to Dylan removing his music. Having had access to their service earlier than the majority of the world by virtue of coming from the same country as Spotify, he claimed that after six months of using the streaming service, he had earned “what a mediocre busker could earn in a day.”
Uggla didn’t stop there with his criticisms either. After learning that Sony, his record label, had almost 6% equity in Spotify’s revenue, he went on a lengthy and vulgar tirade about the hypocrisy of both the music industry and the streaming service. “After suing the shit out of Pirate Bay, [Sony are] acting just like them by not paying the artists,” Uggla protested. “I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than fucked up the ass by [Sony CEO] Hasse Breitholtz, and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service.”
It begs the question as to whether Spotify has ever been based on a good model, and whether there’s any point in pushing people towards it aside from it being one of the most valuable tools for music discovery. If more artists choose to boycott Spotify, considering their continued disappointments, then could we see a complete revolution of the streaming industry, or are things only going to get worse from here with the lack of distribution options available to us?
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