GY!BE vs. The Algorithm
Godspeed You! Black Emperor have always operated not just outside the music industry, but in open defiance of it.
Releasing devastating orchestral compositions that felt like urgent messages smuggled across enemy lines, the band printed a diagram on 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O. showing the connections between major record labels and weapons manufacturers with EMI linked to Thorn, Sony to Lockhead Martin and BMG to General Electric, clear lines on a map from mainstream music to mass murder slipped into their liner notes.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a group who aren’t just anti-establishment in aesthetic like the disgraced rapist protectors in Anti-Flag. They have released all their music through the fiercely independent Montreal label Constellation, making not just art, but a fully-rounded case for a better way of doing things that wouldn’t feed the war machine. And for a long time, it worked.
When Spotify first showed up, it advertised itself as a frictionless way to discover more music whilst avoiding the guilt of piracy. Spotify was sold to us as a clean and ethical alternative to folders full of LimeWire downloads. Finally, a way to support your favourite bands with online streams.
What started as a utopian dream very quickly became the profit-maximizing monopoly we know today with artist payments through the floor, and major labels handed massive shares in the company. The major labels from the liner notes of Yanqui U.X.O. quickly became baked into Spotify’s code.
In time, every back catalogue from Godspeed You! Black Emperor to The Beatles was uploaded to the platform. It had become impossible for artists to survive on the outside.
This summer, a wave of influential indie artists, including GY!BE, are pulling their music from Spotify. Deerhoof, King Gizzard & Xiu Xiu have all left the platform in a refusal to see the profits of their labour invested into AI-powered military surveillance tech.
It’s no longer enough for Godspeed You! Black Emperor and other bands to avoid bad major label deals. The very act of existing on major platforms means participating in developing the systems that fund the militaristic mass murder we’re all watching today, and it’s not just major-label artists caught in the net. All of your favourite pacifist anti-war bands are too.
Vinyl is thriving, and direct-to-artist models need to be supported. The story of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Spotify proves once and for all that you can’t build an ethical career inside a machine driven purely by the maximization of profit. The boycott is growing, and it matters. Spotify won’t collapse overnight, but the question is now on the table: What would a better system look like?
