It's been real, Spotify 👋

A product breakup post-mortem

Two months ago, after 10+ years of using it, I finally broke up with Spotify.

I wish I could say it wasn’t personal, but it was.

In fact, I’ve wanted to for some time. My reasons are partly personal and selfish, and partly political. Its’ not so much political, as it is about value misalignment. About what it means to move with intentionality in this world.

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Artists have been calling Spotify out for years: low royalty payments, questionable practices, and a business model that feels like feeding off of the very people who make music possible and the platform viable. Some artists have pulled their music, some have spoken out, and others have urged fans to cancel.

For years, I’d read the news and opinions. Enraged about it all. Didn’t do a thing about it, and continued to pay my monthly Spotify Family subscription.

Then recently I found out that Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, led a billion-dollar investment into Helsing, a defence-tech startup developing AI systems for military applications. That was the moment it really hit me. To me, this felt deeply misaligned with what music is at its foundation.

Art, not war.

Art, as a way to reflect and connect, not as fuel for violence and conflict.

I thought about it for days, more enraged than ever.

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And yet, if I’m being completely honest, even that wasn’t enough to drive change for me. Not right away, at least.

I’m not going to sit here and lie and claim to have taken actions based on my principles alone. Despite my own ideas about what I valued, my actions aren’t as noble, so it seems.

The trigger for change was my selfish, greedy desire for what I wanted my music service to do for me.

Music is a big deal for me because it’s one of my native languages. Maybe because I grew up with it. And maybe because I often lacked a deep sense of connection with the people around me, and music was a way for me to not feel so alone. And maybe what I want is not what most people want. And maybe Spotify wasn’t designed with me in mind.

What do I want when it comes to a music service provider? I don’t know. Well, I suppose I have some ideas:

Serendipity.

Weirdness.

New genres.

Smaller, fringe artists—more local ones, maybe.

But nooooooo, Mary can’t have that.

Despite my best efforts to proactively go off on musical tangents on Spotify, I got loops of the same tracks until I wanted to tear my hair out. To me, at least, whatever algorithm Spotify built had become a machine for brainrot. A hollow echo chamber, where everything is predictable and safe. Boring.

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Over the last few months, I started floating the idea of leaving Spotify to my partner. I didn’t bring up the whole AI militant tech thing, and mostly just bitched and whined about my first-world problem of not having enough outliers in the music being served to me in a silver platter by a big company called Spotify founded and headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.

Why does it keep shoving the same songs down my throat? Am I asking for too much? I wondered aloud.

Yeah, I know what you mean, my partner said.

He felt it too.

I felt less insane.

I remember us in the car, going somewhere mundane, when Spotify resurfaced that one song, again. It was a song we liked, too, which makes it more annoying. My partner skipped it with visible irritation.

I admitted aloud that I felt stuck.

Like a toxic ex that gaslights you, Spotify had me convinced it was the best I could do. Maybe the alternatives weren’t better.

Plus, there were five of us on a family plan. Canceling didn’t feel like a personal choice. It felt like ditching my family to fend for themselves.

Dramatic, I know.

But especially as an immigrant kid, I was conditioned to be as convenient as possible for other people. Why create friction when it’s not that bad? Why not just stay put?

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Then came karaoke night. My sister was paying for a karaoke subscription service which we borrowed at times. She had recently ended the subscription because she wasn’t using it much anymore, but my partner and I wanted to throw karaoke parties every couple months. We didn’t want to pay for two music subscriptions; that’s ridiculous.

And then my partner told me that there was this one particular version (a specific live version) of this one particular song (Crawling) of this one particular band (Linkin Park) is not on Spotify but on Apple Music.

In that moment, because we’d talked about leaving Spotify a few times already, we were like, you know what, let’s give Apple Music a try.

My partner signed up for the one-month trial. But we didn’t immediately cancel our Spotify subscription.

Apple Music wasn’t perfect, but nothing is. The karaoke mode was pretty fun. The library was solid. I started discovering that the “switching costs” I’d built up in my head—playlists, habits, convenience—were less of a barrier than I had thought.

The stickiness was an illusion.

I transferred my playlists over, which was a minor inconvenience and I wasn’t able to transfer everything.

But life did not feel incomplete without Spotify.

Dramatic, I know.

—

And still, this isn’t a breakup post just to shit on Spotify.

Despite everything, I’m deeply grateful for what Spotify gave me.

Spotify carried me through sleepless, anxiety-fueled nights, and flat mornings of stare-at-the-white-ceiling dread. Through heartbreaks and losses, when music was the only thread that held me together.

Spotify gave me small bursts of joy when I felt numb, let me cry when I needed to let go, and let me feel seen when I felt like the only ghost amongst the living.

It provided the backdrop to late-night work marathons, celebrations big and small, road trips long and short, hanging out with friends, falling in love, falling out of love, hot pot parties, long runs, getting down and naughty, and my waxing and waning motivation.

It shaped entire seasons of my life.

Spotify gave me all of that, and I’m thankful.

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As a product builder, I can admire the craft. I know how much thought and work that must have gone into the personalization, the stickiness, the way Spotify slipped into the fabric of my daily life.

But that value given to me is now being built on harm to others.

As a product consumer, I can’t turn a blind eye to that. I have to ask myself. Is a company that gives with one hand and takes with the other worth supporting, for my first-world comfort?

All of these big tech companies, they’re all the same. They convince you your life can’t function without them.

But girl, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

Call me naive, but even among all the cynicism I see today in the wake of the ridiculousness of the state of the world as of the year 2025 on Earth, I still have so much hope.

I believe that if we are capable of building tech powerful enough to rewire people’s brains for distraction, dependency, even addiction, then we can also build tech that rewire them for the opposite: empowerment, independence, genuine connections.

Anyway, I have to at least hope that’s the case.

It’s been real, Spotify, but it’s time to go.

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If you are a designer, product manager, or researcher who happens to work at Spotify: I hope you enjoyed this detailed post-mortem of one individual churned user. I hope you can use this to advocate for what you believe to be right at Spotify. Actually, I don’t know if I do. I know that you know, that you’re likely to be dismissed and the idiots are just gonna run the show the way they always have. (Yes I wrote this sentence deliberately to be irritating.)

Anyway, take away with what you will from this. What do I know? I’m just an ex-loyal-user-turned-churned-user.