As you may have noticed, there’s a bit of trend of artists removing their music from Spotify, the well known music streaming service. After a lot of mulling it over, I’ve decided that the new Tiger Mendoza album Not A Game and the preceding single The Puzzle Is The Point will not be added to Spotify. I am also working on removing existing TM releases from Spotify as well.
Spotify started out as a reasonable alternative to the booming music downloading scene that came out of the early 00s Napster and Bit Torrent scenes but pretty quickly their practices started becoming more and more dubious – from the minuscule payments they give to the majority of the artists that have music on their platform to just not playing musicians for tracks with less than 1000 plays (which would include us) to Spotify founder Daniel Ek using that money to fund research in to AI based war drones. With everything else going on I’m just not comfortable with Tiger Mendoza music being on the Spotify platform.
To be clear I don’t necessarily have a problem with music streaming in and of itself. Streaming music from a shared music library is a reasonable thing to do and can have many in 2025 – shared playlists, discovering random b-sides and remixes that you didn’t know existed, diving in to a bit of the Spice Girls alongside some Deftones because you can, etc. Again, in comparison to the download everything for free generation it came from, music streaming which should actually pay something back to the artists and their labels is a reasonable alternative, IF it’s done properly. The whole streaming set up is far from perfect – generally artists don’t really get paid enough from streaming in my opinion and there are various other structural things that could be improved but expecting people to go back to buying £20 CDs from HMV for 1 track isn’t realistic. And I just don’t have my CD wallets any more. Minidiscs on the other hand…
But streaming does not equal Spotify. Because Spotify got in there pretty early on, many people use Spotify to mean all music streaming in a similar way to people referring to vacuum cleaners as Hoovers but there are other streaming options. The obvious next question is “So what alternative to Spotify do you recommend Ian / Tiger / Whatever?” and the honest answer is, I don’t know. For music streaming I personally use YouTube Music because it comes with my YouTube subscription (yes I subscribe to YouTube but that’s a post for another day). People say that Qobuz and Tidal are better in terms of how much they pay to Artists and that’s good. Obviously there’s always Bandcamp which is great for purchases (which kind of goes against my HMV analogy from earlier but there you go) but less good for just streaming and random musical exploration. If anyone has any other suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments below.
I guess what I’m trying to say is you do you but going forwards, don’t expect TM releases to be on Spotify going forwards. There may still be the odd Tiger Mendoza track on the platform uploaded by other people we’ve licensed our music to (like this one for example) or remixes I’ve done for other people for but any TM music released by TM will not be put on Spotify going forwards. We never really got much from Spotify plays anyway, partially due to the reasons mentioned above so it won’t be a massive dent in our finances. I’m sure the financial team from Spotify won’t even think to shrug it off – it would take an Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift level artist to jump ship for them to even notice but shout out to bands like King Gizzard and Deerhoof who have lead the way.
Oh and that new album? Check this out
