Maclay Heriot
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have joined the growing wave of musicians pulling their music from Spotify. The Australian band said they made the decision as a protest against the CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in Helsing, a company specializing in A.I. software used in military operations and decision-making.
“Fuck Spotify,” the psych rock group said in an Instagram post shared on Saturday and pointed fans to a new collection of demos available exclusively via Bandcamp. They added: “Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests millions in Al military drone technology.
“We just removed our music from the platform. Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better?” The band posted the message over an image of Velvet Sundown, the AI band who recently made headlines after amassing more than a million monthly listeners on the platform.
At the time of writing the band’s vast catalog (King Gizzard have released 27 studio albums and more than 50 live albums) is still available on Spotify but a repo for the band told The Guardian that their “entire catalogue will be coming down” but that doing so “takes time because of the different labels and distributors.”
By removing their music from Spotify, King Gizzard follow in the footsteps of fellow indie rock acts Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu.
Announcing their decision at the end of June, Deerhoof wrote: “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech.”
Xiu Xiu, meanwhile, announced last week that it will take down its catalog from the “garbage hole violent armageddon portal Spotify”.
Ek joined the Helsing board in 2021 when his investment fund Prima Materia put $116m into the company.
