The German electro-pop musician Remute has announced he is quitting Spotify, due to the CEO's recent investment in the German drone maker Helsing, "bot-playlists", "and what he has dubbed an "accumulation of toxicity" surrounding the platform.
If you're someone who likes to keep tabs on the latest retro releases (and let's face it, you probably are if you're reading this website), you will have probably come across Remute's work in the past.
The electronic artist has been fairly prolific over the last decade or so for releasing his music on a range of increasingly interesting platforms, including several old video game consoles and computers, such as the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, SNES, N64, PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16, Nintendo Game Boy, and Commodore Amiga.
This has often earned him a fair share of attention online, with countless news articles being written about the artist and his refreshing and often unusual approach to music distribution.
Traditionally, in the past, Remute has primarily sold his music physically through websites like Bandcamp, but it appears that in order to satisfy a small portion of his fanbase he also recently started distributing his music through the streaming site Spotify as well, to make sure those who couldn't afford buying physical media would be able to listen to his music.
This hasn't gone quite according to plan, however, with the retro musician having since released a rather long and particularly fiery statement earlier this month on Twitter/X, in which he announced he was quitting the platform and blasted the streaming platform for a string of questionable actions that he finds objectionable.
This includes the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's €600 million investment in the German company Helsing earlier this year, which specializes in AI Strike drones — something that has also caused other musicians to quit the platform in protest — and the rise of "bot-playlists and AI music" on the service, which he feels the Spotify team isn't doing enough to combat .
Bot playlists are an issue that has come up a few times in the past in relation to Spotify. These are essentially playlists that are put together by bad actors to artificially inflate the number of listens a particular track has, and can lead to artists being fined or having their music removed, if they are found to be culpable.
In the past, however, there have been various cases reported online where artists who claim to be innocent have had their music inadvertently added to one of these playlists without their consent, which could potentially lead to issues with Spotify's moderation team.
In the statement, this is what Remute has claimed has happened to him recently, with Spotify reportedly accusing the artist of faking streams and threatening to charge him as punishment. In response, Remute has, therefore, decided to pull all his music from Spotify and will now only distribute through Bandcamp and other music and game retailers going forward.
"Unfortunately I have to remove my music from Spotify again as I do not support exploitation, war and shady business practices," Remute wrote on the social media site, "Like charging independent artists unsubstantiated fees and accusing them of fraud and fake plays. This just happened to me and I feel deeply offended.
"My new album 'Remute²‘ is very popular and caused a significant spike in plays and listeners on Spotify. But somehow my popularity seems 'fake‘ to the Spotify team and they threaten to charge me xxxx $ of these fraud fees! It seems that there is a huge problem with bot-playlists and AI music on Spotify and instead of taking care of this problem, the Spotify team blames the artists and labels and is literally just fine with bankrupting them. To put it in simple words: it’s just disgusting and dishonorable and I can't stand this accumulation of toxicity anymore."
You can read the statement in full here.