Tune In, Drop Out

When Chad Laird conceived of his small record label, SLSC, in 2015, he was trying to imagine the opposite of Spotify. He’d grown up as a fan of indie rock in the golden age of bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., and had formative experiences seeing experimental music and art performed at free shows in unconventional locations—lofts, rooftops—after moving to New York City in the 1990s. He tried streaming years ago but quickly deleted his Spotify account, put off by the way it turned the music he loved from an avenue for free expression and community-building into an impersonal commodity. One small way to fight back, he figured, would be to invert their formula.

“It started as a kind of aesthetic game, an exploration of the logic of the opposite of Spotify,” he said. “The idea was to think through this notion of, if Spotify grants universal access, wherever you are, and you pay for it with a subscription fee, then I want to make it as inaccessible as possible. The music is going to be in the back of this old diner, and you can only go there one night to get it, but it’s going to be free.”

The old diner in question is Sunview Luncheonette, a defunct neighborhood restaurant on the edge of McGolrick Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For the last 12 years, a cooperative of DIY freaks and true believers, including Laird, has operated the Sunview as a guerilla art space, music venue, and community center. The decor has not changed much since its days as an actual corner lunch spot. There are shiny red booths, stools lined up at the counter, and a menu on the wall advertising cheeseburgers and egg salad sandwiches for $1.50 each. If you wander in off the street, you might encounter a free jazz concert, a poetry reading, a mutual-aid workshop, or a screening of a horror film against the backsplash of the old open-format kitchen. 

Laird sees the record label, whose initials spell out Sunview Luncheonette Social Club, as an extension of the space. He works with musicians who perform there to release extremely limited edition cassettes and lathe-cut records that are distributed only at the Sunview, and only on the night of a performance. He also collaborates with the musicians on the cover art, which is printed on a risograph machine in the back room. (Lathe cutting is an alternative to traditional vinyl pressing that makes small runs of records much more affordable; risograph printing is a 1980s-era method whose low cost and handmade look have led to a resurgence among artists in the last decade or so.) 

And yes, you can technically get one of these records or tapes for free, though Laird would prefer it if you left a donation. The releases—there have been 17 of them so far—cost him between $200 and $350 each, and he never breaks even, even with that relatively low outlay. Making money is not the point. “Most record labels, even labors of love, have to at least make their money back,” he said. “But I just think of it as an art project that I’m putting resources into. I’m not interested in it as a business at all. I’ve always felt resistant to the commercialization of art and music—this notion that it has to be caught up in systems of profit, or else it doesn’t exist. I’m trying to find whatever small, marginal ways to create little communal projects that skirt that model, and at least make a case, on however small a scale and specific a context, for things to function a different way.”

The large-scale proliferation of streaming over the last decade and a half has radically remade the landscape for recorded music, in ways that generally make it much more difficult for all but the most successful artists to make money from their work. Some of these musicians might have once been able to make an actual living from selling CDs and LPs; for smaller artists, the impact of streaming could mean the difference between breaking even on an album and ending up in the hole. Much like the way the Ubers and Amazons of the world leveraged vast amounts of startup cash and the power of convenience to establish virtual monopolies and lay waste to older, more labor-friendly ways of doing business, all before ever turning a profit, Spotify—which had its first profitable year in 2024—has turned the experience of paying an artist or label directly for their product into an anachronism, as old-fashioned as hailing a ride from a unionized cab driver. 

Infamously, the major streaming platforms pay musicians a small fraction of a penny per stream: plainly a bad deal. But agreeing to those terms can feel all but compulsory for artists who want to find listeners and feel like their work is up for consideration by the larger culture. Talent buyers at venues often look to streaming stats to decide which artists to book. Journalists may be less likely to cover a record that they can’t easily access. Even those listeners who consider themselves tuned-in to new music might miss an album if it isn’t available on their platform of choice. With those stakes, opting out of streaming can feel like rendering your own work functionally moot, like the tree that falls in a forest with no one around. 

But plenty of musicians are opting out anyway. Their reasons are manifold: opposition or indifference, ideology or practicality. Financially speaking, they probably represent a tiny drop in the bucket of the music industry, even in the aggregate. On the other hand, it would be impossible to account for them all, in part because their unifying characteristic is an absence from mainstream marketplaces. 

I wanted to talk to a few of them. In my own life as a musician, I’ve noticed a subtle but palpable shift in the tone of conversations about streaming in recent months. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, a thoroughly researched polemic against the Swedish tech giant and streaming in general, was a major catalyst upon its publication in January, helping to shake people out of their defeatism with a reminder that streaming is not some unavoidable fact of life but an industry with a specific and very recent history. And amidst the general upheaval and uncertainty of American life in 2025, there’s a growing sense that building an alternative might actually be possible—or that it’s worth trying, in any case, when the status quo so obviously stinks. 

Most of the musicians I interviewed about ditching streaming I know personally, in part because there’s no easily searchable centralized database of artists who don’t use it. As a result, this piece is primarily focused on the constellation of non-dance, non-rap, non-metal (and so on) sounds and scenes still best collectively identified as “indie rock,” because that’s the world I know best. There are a couple of jazz and avant-garde musicians represented, but the sorts who are at least as likely to be playing at adventurous bars and rock venues as nonprofit institutions and clubs with two-drink minimums. I should say up front that my own most recent record is available on all the streaming platforms—I’ve made $24.87 from 12,000 plays so far—and I used Spotify as a listener for years before finally ditching my subscription in late 2024. Hearing Things still uses Spotify and Apple Music to make and distribute playlists. I don’t intend this piece as an indictment of those artists who do use streaming—I am one of them, after all—but rather as a glimpse at the rich depths that exist outside of it, and an attempt to learn from those on the front lines of building alternatives.

Many are operating on the far edges of popular music, with few if any aspirations toward stardom. But it isn’t just no-profile musicians who are opting out. Cindy Lee’s lo-fi guitar opus Diamond Jubilee, available only as a digital download from the musician’s janky personal website, a fan-uploaded YouTube stream, and, eventually, on vinyl LP, was perhaps the most acclaimed independent album of 2024. The Bandcamp-only self-titled debut from Bolivian American electronic duo Los Thuthanaka is on its way to similarly vaunted status this year. Joanna Newsom, one of the most celebrated indie artists of the last two decades, is a longtime Spotify holdout, though her catalog is available on the other major platforms. In the process of reporting this piece, I heard from a friend in the industry who works with a long-running indie rock band whose most popular songs have tens of millions of Spotify streams, and who are apparently in the process of pulling their catalog.

Still, for now, opting out is mostly an underground phenomenon. Nico Hedley, a singer-songwriter and New York City DIY lifer, releases music through Ruination Records, the small-but-thriving musician-run label behind artists like Hannah Frances and Alena Spanger. With Ruination’s support, Hedley initially decided to release only the singles from a recent album on streaming, requiring listeners to buy a download or physical copy if they want to hear the whole thing. “We were treating streaming as if it’s like radio,” he said. “The singles are available and easy to find, but if you like it, you’ll actually seek it out and get it.” The devoted seekers numbered fewer than he and the label had hoped. “There were people who are involved in the music scene, a year after the release, being like, When does your record come out?” he said. “In a real way, streaming culture has won. Music exists there, and if it doesn’t exist there, it doesn’t exist.”

Hedley remains committed to imagining alternative ways of distributing music despite that setback. This year, he and fellow NYC singer-songwriter Léna Bartels launched their own tiny label, Rock for Sale Records, with a commitment to staying off the big streaming platforms as one of its founding principles. They sell cassettes through Bandcamp and give away free downloads through a rudimentary label website whose server lives under a table in Hedley’s Queens apartment. The plan is to focus on split releases by two different artists in collaboration, itself a small act of defiance against a New York indie rock scene that has drifted away from bands and toward solo artists with rotating casts of supporting players, away from community and toward professionalization. They see this change in part as an unfortunate side effect of streaming’s tendencies toward decontextualization and atomization, working in tandem with rising rents and disappearing DIY venues. “There are less spaces for kids to see live music, and the sense I get is they’re going to less shows,” Bartels said. “Of course you’re going to be less able to engage with alternative ways of music-listening and -making if you haven’t actually had the experience of doing something within your own little space that’s outside of the mainstream.” 

Bartels and Hedley do not harbor delusions of their modest label bringing down Spotify or Apple Music. The purpose of Rock for Sale, as they see it, is not to compete with the big streamers, but to contribute to the rebuilding of an infrastructure that prioritizes independent music and sits meaningfully apart from the dominant culture: a throwback to the network of zines, tape labels, and college radio stations that nurtured the indie-rock explosion of the ’80s and ’90s. 

“A culture needs to be rebuilt with the understanding that there’s certain sorts of music that you have to seek out in alternative ways,” Hedley said. “A lot of that comes from the listener, but some of it comes from the artist, where you have to make that difficult decision to give up on being the next Adrianne Lenker, or whatever. And maybe I’m not going to get a Grammy nomination for my indie rock record, but I can make 100 cassettes, and 100 people who come to shows will buy those.”

Indie was already nudging toward the mainstream in the years immediately before Spotify’s 2011 U.S. launch, a time emblematized by Jay-Z shouting out Grizzly Bear as an inspiration after showing up with Beyoncé to sway politely at a concert in mid-gentrification Williamsburg. With the rise of streaming—and the concomitant withering and/or corporate absorption of the independent music press—that era’s thrilling sense of two distinct worlds approaching and informing each other gradually flattened. Say what you will about Grizzly Bear, but they did not compromise their profoundly fussed-over chamber pop on their way to this brush with fame. A band like them had time to gestate in scenes and in front of audiences that appreciated and encouraged their idiosyncrasy, developing a voice distinct enough that the world’s most famous rapper could appreciate it even though it had little to do with the kind of music he makes. 

Independent artists are now expected to find and build their audiences online, on platforms that were designed with the priorities of major labels in mind, and incentivized to calibrate their work for inclusion on playlists that privilege adherence to particular moods. As Pelly reminds us in Mood Machine, two of the three majors have small but substantial ownership stakes in Spotify, and its royalty rates were negotiated by all three. (Warner Music Group, like the other majors, initially received shares in Spotify in exchange for licensing its catalog, but divested them soon after the company went public in 2018.) If it’s hard to imagine an artist today with such a distinctly non-mainstream point-of-view getting the kind of looks that Grizzly Bear got in 2009, perhaps it’s because new ones are thrust immediately into the homogenizing machines of the streaming platforms, taught to think of themselves not as oppositional outsiders but as aspirants on the same playing field as global celebrities. 

Though streaming’s poor compensation has rightfully received much of the attention, there’s also a subtler but equally worrying cultural decay. Individual artists and scenes are still regularly producing vital work, but for those who remain truly committed to DIY, communities have become smaller and more insular, deprived of an infrastructure of their own and cut off from opportunities to connect to likeminded others. And for those who make the entirely understandable decision to play the streaming game, indie rock starts to feel a little less like a subculture with its own sensibility and value system, and a little more like the pop junior leagues. 

Heather Jones owns and operates the Philadelphia recording studio So Big, where she’s worked in various engineering and production capacities on albums by local scene stars like Florry, They Are Gutting a Body of Water, and Sadurn. She also leads the slowcore band Ther, an outlet for her incisive and openhearted songwriting. She is jokey and self-aware about the band’s appeal: “I write music that makes people cry. That’s part of the point.” 

Jones once treated Ther with a certain level of professional aspiration—paying for PR campaigns, hustling on tour—but found it at odds with the aims of her music, which felt more suited to intimate, community-oriented shows where the gap between a performer and an attendee isn’t so starkly defined. She likes talking to people after she plays, learning their stories and sharing hers. Last year, she made a conscious decision to dial back the large-scale ambition of Ther and funnel her extra time into activism and community organizing. She was in the middle of reading Mood Machine when she began pulling her music from streaming, inspired both by the book and a friend who had just done the same. It didn’t feel like a momentous break, more like a continuation in the direction she was already headed. She wasn’t especially concerned with whatever impact it might have on her songwriting career. “It’s actually nice to think that, now that my music isn’t on Spotify anymore, certain promoters won’t book me for shows,” she said. “If you use Spotify to book bands, then I don’t want to work with you.”

One of Mood Machine’s several overlapping lines of argument involves Spotify’s entanglement with the military-industrial complex. In 2021, co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek invested €100 million in a military A.I. startup called Helsing, and he now sits on the company’s board. In 2022, as Pelly points out, he authored a Politico op-ed arguing that the expansion of Europe’s military software industry is essential for protecting democracy. “​​It should go without saying that many musicians would prefer the profits made from circulating their work did not fuel the war machine,” Pelly writes. 

As Jones sees it, Ek’s investment in Helsing is only the surface layer of Spotify’s connections to global warfare. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset-management firm, owns a roughly $1.7 billion stake in Spotify, and has many more billions invested in several different major weapons manufacturers. Vanguard, another asset-management giant, also owns a stake in Spotify and hundreds of billions in arms-contractor holdings. The idea that Ther’s music was helping to generate value for Spotify, however little in the scheme of things, and that the value could be passed along to war profiteers through this chain of investments, gave Jones “permanent nausea.” “I’m not going to give these people my work so that they can use it to generate some server traffic and some advertising revenue, and some of that money will go to BlackRock or Vanguard, and some of that money will eventually go to missiles that will blow up brown kids,” she said. “I just can’t do it.”

For musicians in indie’s middle class—between the deep underground of a band like Ther and the elevated stature of an artist like Joanna Newsom, who can set the terms of her own career with confidence that her audience will follow—quitting streaming may not be an option. Record labels need to make money, and may be reluctant to cut off a revenue source that can carry an album into profitability with a single high-profile playlist placement. Jones sees her position, having released Ther’s albums herself or in handshake deals with tiny labels, as a kind of inverted privilege that it is her moral responsibility to use. “I’m in a position where I can, so I should just do it,” she said. “Because not everyone can, and I’m sure there are so many people out there who wish they could.”

Read enough about the economics of streaming and you’ll eventually encounter a major roadblock to any reform that might make the platforms meaningfully more equitable for the musicians that keep them afloat: There is simply not enough money involved to pay everyone fairly. Spotify charges $11.99 per month for access to a catalog that endeavors to represent the entire history of recorded music, and that grows by tens of thousands of songs each day. The company claims to pay out more than two thirds of its music revenue in royalties. Even if they were to give out every single dollar that came in—a fantasy that would involve no money left over to pay employees, run servers, and so on—the payout for 100,000 streams would rise from about $200 to about $300, hardly enough to make a difference. This is why the most hopeful reform of the industry currently on the table involves forcing the platforms to charge more per month for a subscription. And why Jones, who calls herself a “music-labor doomer,” sees efforts to reform streaming rather than abandon it as a waste of resources. The continued existence of these platforms is entirely contingent on low pay for musicians. 

In 2021, I wrote about a cooperative of experimental musicians called Catalytic Sound who were building their own streaming service. Their model involves asking conscientious listeners to pay a subscription fee comparable to Spotify’s for a catalog that is many orders of magnitude smaller, but lovingly curated, with a sense of context and coherence that is generally missing from the world’s most popular music streaming app, and a regularly updated selection of music that can’t be heard anywhere else. In our age of gross information abundance, Catalytic’s limited scope—there were between 100 and 150 albums in the catalog on a given day at the time of the piece—is both a radical symbolic gesture and a crucial practical step toward keeping the platform sustainable. It means that Catalytic’s member musicians can pay themselves—not exorbitant amounts of money, but enough to help with the rent—with a relatively modest subscriber base, one that is commensurate with the resolutely challenging and not-for-everyone music they tend to make. (Incidentally, this is pretty similar to what we’re trying to do as journalists with Hearing Things. If you’ve made it this far into this piece, please consider subscribing!)

One of the Catalytic musicians I interviewed was Luke Stewart, an avant-jazz bassist perhaps best known for his work with Irreversible Entanglements. He is a sharp observer of currents in underground music that others might prefer not to acknowledge, and I was surprised at the time when he launched into a criticism of Bandcamp, the platform for digital and physical music sales that is often held up as a benevolent alternative to the big streamers. I didn’t end up using those comments in the piece, but they have stuck with me in the years since. “Bandcamp is like the indie version of Spotify, but it’s still not independent,” he said. “It has all but co-opted independent music. In terms of how it’s perceived by listeners right now, independent music effectively is Bandcamp, which is another corporation.” While working on this piece, I emailed him to ask if he still felt the same way. “I definitely remember this conversation, and continue to think this way despite my own use of Bandcamp,” he wrote back. “It is what it is!”

Stewart was the only person I knew of talking this way about Bandcamp in 2021. Then, in 2023, just after Bandcamp was acquired by the music-rights company Songtradr, about half of its employees were laid off while in the middle of negotiating a union contract. Almost every indie musician still uses Bandcamp—it remains by far the best option for anyone who wants to sell music online without building their own platform, it is what it is—but it no longer carries quite the same sense of near-universal goodwill. A few months ago, I got an email from Matthew Sage, keyboardist and percussionist of the ambient-jazz quartet Fuubutsushi, who told me that, despite having done gangbusters Bandcamp numbers on previous albums, the group had decided to sell its latest release exclusively through its own website. In a subsequent interview, the members of Fuubutsushi mentioned the union-busting as a motivator for their choice, but framed it ultimately as a practical one: They were tired of paying the 15 percent cut that Bandcamp takes on sales. 

Sage sketched out a scenario: “If you sell $50 of music on Bandcamp, and it’s your first thing, that can feel like a heroic amount to sell. And if Bandcamp only keeps like, $7 of that, it doesn’t feel that detrimental. But if you scale that up, you sell $500, they’re suddenly keeping $75, and if you sell $5000 they’re keeping $750, and if you sell $50,000 worth of music over the course of however long, Bandcamp makes $7500 off your catalog. That’s a pretty enormous, intense thing, at scale.” The band lost their Bandcamp stats when they deleted their account, but according to Sage, their sales numbers were somewhere near the top end of that hypothetical after three years of selling music on the platform. 

“People have a lot to say when a venue takes a 15 percent merch cut at a concert, but that’s Bandcamp’s standard cut,” Sage continued. “It’s the same thing, but I don’t think people are talking about it in the same way. It feels really kumbaya, for some reason, and I don’t know why.”

Fuubutsushi guitarist Chaz Prymek cited the indie rap world, where it’s not unusual for artists to cut out middlemen and deal directly with fans, or otherwise take creative risks with pricing and distribution, as an inspiration. “You have Quelle Chris, Cavalier, Backwoodz Studioz, who all are experimenting with these ideas,” he said. “What we’re doing is not unprecedented.” 

Island House is a New York-based label, focused primarily on cassette releases, that operates in the same jazz- and ambient-adjacent universe as Fuubutsushi, albeit at a smaller scale. (Prymek has a non-Fuubutsushi album coming out on the label soon.) Its founder, Tim McManus, announced in March that he would not work with Bandcamp or the streaming platforms on future Island House releases. His initial disillusionment with music on the internet came as a listener: amazement at the amount of albums at his fingertips turned to a vague sense that he wasn’t connecting to any particular one as deeply as he used to, coupled with the realization that the artists themselves were getting a bad deal. He started Island House during the pandemic, inspired by reading about the mid-20th century avant-garde jazz scene—the way musicians would set up their own venues in lofts and record stores, more concerned with community and pushing the art forward than they were with profit. Taking the label fully independent was a way of remaining true to that inspiration. 

The decision came in the wake of Island House’s first release based on songs with lyrics, an album that became the label’s best-ever performer on streaming and its worst-ever performer in terms of sales. McManus had invested more money than usual in promotions, thinking he might have a hit on his hands (full disclosure: his expenses included hiring me to write a bio that went out with press releases), and ended up around $2,000 in the hole, a significant loss for him. The streaming figures gave the album the outward appearance of success, but it hadn’t moved the needle for the community of fans that actually keep the label afloat. It was hard to reconcile the disconnect. “I realized the music I’m putting out is not for everyone,” he said. “I figured it would be more fun to go back to a more grassroots approach.” 

McManus connected with a web developer who offered to build him the infrastructure to sell physical and digital music on his own site, and he says he’s not worried about whether his label’s audience will continue to buy records if they’re not on Bandcamp. But I suspect that, for most other independent artists and labels, the downsides of the platform will continue to be a worthwhile exchange for the e-commerce services it offers and the built-in audience of listeners who actively search for new music there. I’ve thought a lot about pulling my music from Spotify et al., and very little about pulling it from Bandcamp, where the same album that made me $24.87 for 12,000 streams made me about $800 for 45 sales—not a ton, but almost a month’s rent. 

In music, as in every other area of life under capitalism, it would be all but impossible to ever fully divest yourself from corporate interests. Are you going to build your own instruments? Manufacture your own CDs? There’s always going to be an uncrossable line somewhere. Many of the musicians I interviewed emphasized that they’re trying to figure out what works for their own practice rather than blazing a trail that others should feel obligated to follow. Fuubutsuhi, for instance, are still on Spotify and the other big platforms, though they’re no longer on Bandcamp. They’re frank about why. “We just got a few really choice playlist placements, and we’re one of those unicorn bands that weirdly makes money on streaming on a monthly basis,” Sage said. “We have no control over it. As musicians, we’re already being so taken advantage of that it’s tricky to ask us to moralize our way through how we can best serve our fans. It’s hard to love making music so much and also feel pinched in the gears of the machine.”

For those who are devoted to full DIY, it’s surely a difficult road, but not an impossible one. Nico Hedley of Rock for Sale swears, for instance, that setting up your own server for music distribution isn’t that complicated. If musicians can figure out how to perfectly dial in our tone on a chain of 10 pedals, or program a modular rig the size of a small supercomputer, we can figure that out too. McManus is working on his server; Jones says she hopes to get one going. I mentioned to her that Rock for Sale has one; she asked me to put her in touch with Nico, and he said he’s happy to help her out. They’ve never met, but I’m certain they have friends in common. Even without much of the old infrastructure, indie rock is still like that. You sing your songs, take them on the road, meet people like you, offer them a couch to crash on or a quick lesson in file-sharing networks if they need it. They tend to do the same. The tech giants may want to build a world in which every social interaction and creative impulse is mediated through platforms that generate revenue for investors who fund climate devastation and war. They may be very good at making it seem like those platforms are our only options. But they’ll never be able to stop us from just talking to each other.