07/11/2025
In September, we removed all our music from Spotify. But we forgot the most important rule of performative action, when we failed to make a big deal about it on social media. This has led to confusion and complaints from people unable to find antigen artists on the world's leading music discovery platform.
To overcompensate for this failure, here's a long post explaining why.
We’ve been complaining about Spotify’s business model for years. Basically, your subscription goes to a Swedish billionaire, while artists receive 0.3 pence every time you stream a song, as long as it has been streamed at least 1,000 times. And artists and labels have to pay for the privilege of uploading their music to the platform.
In February 2022, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek put that money to good use by investing 100 million euros in Helsing AI – an arms company offering 'tech-focused battlefield solutions' to 'ethically protect our common democratic values'.
And in June this year, there was more good news for everyone who has continued to enjoy the consequence-free convenience of music streaming. Daniel Ek became the chairman of Helsing and your monthly subscriptions have helped his venture capital firm Prima Materia raise a further 600 million euros of funding to enable the company to develop a new generation of autonomous strike drones. These will help human drone controllers, by taking the stress out of picking a teenage conscript to dismember with a payload of high explosives, in much the same way Spotify’s shuffle function takes the stress out of deciding which song to play.
But although we recognise and respect Spotify’s role in automating warfare, it has become impossible to ignore the damage it has caused to our operating profits. So we have removed everything from the platform. This move has been endorsed by our two biggest artists on Spotify, Tom Sherlock (Henry Homesweet) and Ben Brown (DINGUS KHAN and SuperGlu).
Some of the material we have released by antigen artists, past and present, remains on the platform. These albums have been uploaded by the artists themselves, they retain exclusive control over the accounts, and they receive 100% of the revenue. So, we would encourage you to cancel your subscription and bankrupt Daniel Ek 0.3p at a time, by continuing to stream their music.
NB. If you are concerned about how you will be able to support the arms industry without Spotify, fear not! For every 100 albums downloaded from the antigen records Bandcamp page, we will purchase an anti-personnel landmine and post it to the regime of your choice.
