On Monday, September 22, Chicago musicians Austin Koenigstein (who makes music as Smushie ) and Sam Cantor (who records as Minor Moon ) published an open letter urging their peers to pull their music from Spotify in protest. And there’s a lot to protest: The letter calls out the company’s insultingly stingy payouts to musicians, its major financial entanglements with a firm building AI military technology, its habit of populating its platform with unlabeled AI slop, and its surveillance and manipulation of its users.

At the time of the campaign’s public launch, 36 local acts were signed on, including jazz trio Twin Talk , Half Gringa front woman Izzy Olive, rapper Mykele Deville , multi-instrumentalist Matt Gold , and Hemlock bandleader Carolina Chauffe. “We hope our action c

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