Spotify is by far the most used music streaming service in the world. And at the surface level, it seems obvious why: it is easy to use, has free and paid versions, and has many features to introduce its users to new music. It is when you start digging deeper that you discover the massive issues with Spotify.
The biggest issue that Spotify presents is the incredibly low pay rates given to the artists. According to New School Free Press, as of December 2025, artists on Spotify are being paid $0.003-$0.005 per stream. This is outrageously low, especially when compared to other music streaming apps such as Apple Music, which pays its artists more than one cent per stream. Even worse is that in 2024 Spotify stopped paying artists for songs with under 1,000 streams completely.
The low pay rates are not the only reason that people are turning against Spotify. A more recent issue has been the rise of AI-generated music on the platform. AI-generated music really started to gain its initial breakthrough in relevance in mid-2023, when many people were being recommended music through Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature. Notably, in 2025, the AI generated band, The Velvet Sundown, gained over a million streams in a few weeks, and its top song is now listed at just over four million streams. In 2023, Spotify claimed that it would not ban AI music. Though minor changes to stop this have occurred, the effort to fully stop it has not been there. Many notable AI artists, including the previously mentioned The Velvet Sundown, are still on Spotify.
The AI situation became even more controversial after Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment firm Prima Materia placed €600m into AI military tech firm Helsing. This notably did not go over well with the rock band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, who removed its music from the app in protest to Ek. The band was not alone in this decision, as other artists like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu removed their music for the same reason.
Many people are switching from Spotify to other alternatives, such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, or YouTube Music, with others even focusing more on physical media like CDs and Vinyl. Ultimately it is up to you whether you want to keep using Spotify or not; there are still many great aspects to it, but it is important to know the secrets that they try to hide.
