Spotify CEO bankrolls AI military warfare while musicians walk away

The Herald Scotland

31-07-2025

Spotify, despite its ubiquity, has never been looked upon kindly by artists. The music streaming giant has spent years paying musicians by the fraction of a penny, covertly adding AI-generated and in-house commissioned songs to its playlists, and writing the rules as it sees fit on how its royalty system pays out.
But now, CEO Daniel Ek has given the music world yet another reason to ditch the platform – this time, by pouring millions into playing business with high-tech war.
Last week, Australian psych-rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard yanked their entire catalog off Spotify, posting a blunt message on Instagram: 'We can't support a platform that profits from destruction'.
They're not alone. A growing number of artists are cutting ties with Spotify after learning that Ek's investment firm, Prima Materia, is bankrolling Helsing, a German tech startup building AI systems for military drones and warfare.
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Ek's investment firm first started their bankroll of Helsing in 2021, and recent reports from the Financial Times reveal they've just pumped in another €600 million. The musicians scraping by, and seeing paltry returns from their popularity on Spotify, are probably wondering what it's all for, other than fuelling the terrifying next generation of warfare.
Truthfully, it will take a Taylor Swift or a Drake pulling out of the platform to cause any movement. Swift had previously taken her music off Spotify between 2014 to 2017, enraged by the bum deal offered to her through its royalty system.
But in those years, Spotify was not quite the omnipresent juggernaut it is now – its huge gain in popularity in those years highlighted where music consumption was heading, but the total enmeshment between the major digital streaming services and the music industry was not quite yet complete. The idea of Swift removing her music from the platform would be much more radical now, but also much less likely.
Many artists and projects removing themselves from Spotify are independent musicians, with sizeable enough audiences, but independent all the same. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are the biggest, averaging 1.5 million listeners a month on the platform, but the vast structure of such a space means their exclusion is negligible in the long run. Same could be said for the other artists leading the charge against Spotify. Acclaimed indie acts like Xiu Xiu and Deerhoof have joined the boycott, but their influence on the trajectory the platform takes shakes out to even less.
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Still, musicians are boycotting Spotify, knowing all the risks to their own careers that it brings. The risk is simply worth it for them when trying to sleep soundly at night. Deerhoof made a scathing statement, equating their streaming revenue profits directly to the death toll of war.
''Daniel Ek uses $700 million of his Spotify fortune to become chairman of AI battle tech company' was not a headline we enjoyed reading this week,' read their statement. 'We don't want our music killing people. We don't want our success being tied to AI battle tech.'
These artists know their boycotts won't touch Spotify financially, but the moral grace of taking a stand outweighs any financial loss. If musicians are squeezing for pennies in the streaming economy, then at least they might as well not be blood pennies.
Spotify came onto the scene touting itself as a champion of artists, that the ease and use of streaming would inevitably democratise the process of music distribution. It once positioned its public image on this basis. But that has never been the case. Its business model has always prioritised growth and returns over dealing with anything close to fair artistic compensation.
And with its CEO diverting hundreds of millions into advanced military AI technology, the disconnect between its image and its financial incentives has become too hard to ignore, too much of an ethical red line for any silence.
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For now, the boycott remains symbolic. Without major label artists with industry clout joining in, Spotify's bottom line will remain steady. But the growing discontent highlights the deeper issue of the music industry's reliance on these platforms, how they are now the only game in town worth playing, and how artists can be held at mercy over any basic ethical concerns they might have.
For those musicians staying, the dilemma remains. Can they justify supporting a platform that funnels money into military AI, even if leaving means opting out of the biggest platform for their music? Either way, the conversation has begun, and it's a snowballing that the music industry will eventually not be able to ignore.