Do your streaming dollars support ICE and the war on immigrants?
After Spotify began airing recruitment ads for ICE this fall, Indivisible took note. Reportedly, the ads not only touted the big signing bonus and fringe benefits of becoming a masked marauder, but also appealed to patriots seeking to protect our country from “dangerous illegals,” injecting a harsh note of xenophobia into listeners’ mellow playlists. After Spotify execs refused to meet with Indivisible leaders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg to talk it over, the two launched a national campaign urging folks to cancel their Spotify subscriptions.
Why boycott Spotify? Many other music and streaming services also accept money from ICE, including Pandora, Hulu, Meta, HBO, YouTube and even Spanish language stations like Telemundo and Univision which have aired adverts urging their viewers to self-deport. The logic is that Spotify represents the world’s largest streaming service, with 276 million paid subscribers. Most of Spotify’s revenue comes from Premium Subscriptions, which are currently priced monthly at $16.99 for a “duo” (like the one I just cancelled!) allowing two people in the same household to listen in. A relatively small fraction of their income (eleven to thirteen percent) comes from paid advertising. As a business, therefore, they can easily afford to do without ads from ICE, but can’t afford to lose large numbers of monthly subscribers.
A boycott of Spotify has a narrowly focused, achievable goal—removing ads for ICE—which the company can readily accomplish if economic pressure is applied. And a successful boycott of Spotify—the biggest kid on the block—would make it much easier to convince smaller kids on the playground like Hulu and Pandora to follow suit or face the same kind of financial consequences.
Want to fight fascism? To cancel your subscription, go to the Spotify platform on your laptop and log in to your account. On the upper right, go to your profile and then “manage subscriptions” where you can cancel and also send a message stating your objection to the recruitment ads for ICE. Right now, we listen to Spotify, but when dollars start to talk, Spotify will listen to us! Here are step-by-step instructions.
I’m a musician (still trying to be a guitar god in my golden years!) and love it all—blues, pop, jazz, fusion and classical. But I can happily live without Spotify, hoping to keep on rockin’ in a free world.
