Prolific Australian psych rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard joined a growing chorus of artists protesting the actions of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek last month, removing much of their music from the service. Ek‘s involvement in leading a $693.6 million round of funding for Helsing was to blame for the decision. Ek helped raise those funds via his venture capital firm Prima Materia, a firm which he co-founded.
That move proved to be controversial, as Helsing is leveraging and developing AI technology for military applications on the battlefield, leading to uproar from various artists, including Xiu Xiu and Deerhoof and more, who opted to remove their music from the popular digital protest provider. Not that Spotify had a glowing reputation with artists to begin with, the service has long been criticized for low streaming payouts while raking in billions in profits.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard were initially vague over their intentions, simply offering “fuck Spotify” as a casual mention in a social media post. However, as interest and fan concern over the missing albums began to increase, the group went on to issue a proper statement on July 25th, offering:
“Hello friends
A PSA to those unaware: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests millions in AI military drone technology
We just removed out music from the platform
Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better?
Join us on another platform”
As King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard‘s catalog weighs in at 27 full-length albums alone, excluding countless live and semi-official bootleg releases, and EPs, the move was significant at least to the over 1.1 million monthly listeners the band commanded on the service.
Now, in a newly published interview with Los Angeles Times, the group’s vocalist/guitarist, etc. Stu Mackenzie has shared some of the band’s reasoning into why they decided to take the drastic measure. Discussions regarding that took place as follows:
‘What was your initial reaction to Daniel Ek’s investments in an AI arms company?
A bit of shock, and then feeling that I shouldn’t be shocked. We’ve been saying f— Spotify for years. In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented. We saw a couple of other bands who we admire, and thought ‘I don’t really want our music to be here, at least right now.’ I don’t really consider myself an activist, and I don’t feel comfortable soapboxing. But this feels like a decision staying true to ourselves, and doing what we think is is right for our music, having our music in places that we feel all right about.
Was choosing to leave a complicated decision for the band?
The thing that made it hard was I do want to have our music be accessible to people. I don’t really care about making money from streaming. I know it’s unfair, and I know they are banking so much. But for me personally, I just want to make music, and I want people to be able to listen to it. The hard part was to take that away from so many people. But sometimes you’ve just got to say, ‘Well, sorry, we’re not going to be here right now.’ In the end, it actually was just one quick phone call with the other guys to get off the ship.
As the sizes of everything gets larger, all of the stakes start to feel higher. I grapple with that, because that’s not the kind of band that I like to be in, where it feels like everything is high stakes. I do miss the time where we could just do anything without any consequences, but I still try really hard to operate like that. In the past, I have felt tied to it, that we have to be there. But with this band, we have been happy to take a lot of risks, and for the most part, I’m just happy to see what happens if we just choose the path that feels right for us.
Do you think Spotify noticed or cares that you left?
I don’t expect Daniel Ek to pay attention to this. We have made a lot of experimental moves with the way we’ve released records — bootlegging stuff for free. We have allowed ourselves a license to break conventions, and the people who listen to our music have a trust and a faith to go along on this ride together. I feel grateful to have the sort of fan base you’ll just trust, even when you do something a little counterintuitive. It feels like an experiment to me, like, ‘Let’s just go away from Spotify, and let’s see what happens.’ Why does this have to be a big deal? It actually feels like we’re just trying to find our own positivity in a dark situation.’
