Xiu Xiu on leaving Spotify and why their music won’t “murder people for money”

This June, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s firm Prima Materia led a $700 million investment in military AI and drone company Helsing. The news rocked a music industry that was already struggling with diminishing borders between itself and the tech industry; in response, several renowned independent musicians to take their music off the world’s most popular streaming service. Jamie Stewart, founder of Xiu Xiu, was one of them, announcing in July that the veteran indie rockers had begun to remove their catalog from Spotify.

“We have been wanting to take our music off of Spotify since streaming began and we realized what a complete kleptocracy it was,” Stewart says on a video call near the start of August. “But the moment that I heard about Daniel Ek using money they were stealing from bands to murder people so he could make even more money, it was more than I could conceivably deal with.”

Ek has been on the board of Munich-based Helsing since 2021, when Prima Materia made an initial investment of €117 million into the lesser-known startup. At the time, Helsing was focused solely on software and artificial intelligence, and while some artists and consumers were outraged enough to ditch the platform, Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 bolstered the “pro-democracy” company’s reputation.

Stewart isn’t totally convinced – “history has shown arms dealers will sell their weapons to anybody who will buy them” – and when Wired asked if the company would sell to so-called democracies that have curtailed judicial freedom and LGBT rights in 2023, its cofounders refused to answer.

Helsing’s initial AI work was so successful that the startup earned a lucrative contract from the German government upgrading fighter jets with “AI-enabled cognitive electronic warfare (EW) capabilities.” Later in 2023, Helsing would pivot into drone manufacturing.

Deerhoof became the first indie rock institution to leave Spotify in the wake of the 2025 Helsing investment, saying in part, “We don’t want our music killing people.” On July 25 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard took their music off the platform as well; frontman Stu Mackenzie told LA Times this month, “I don’t really consider myself an activist, and I don’t feel comfortable soapboxing. But this feels like a decision staying true to ourselves.”

Stewart takes a similar tack, saying they haven’t asked any of their friends’ bands to follow Xiu Xiu’s lead. But they were “surprised” by how few bands have chosen to take their music off of the platform. The FADER caught up with Stewart to chat about Xiu Xiu deciding to take their music off Spotify, the long arc of the streaming economy, and their empathy for Ukraine.

“Our being off Spotify will do nothing to stop this. It doesn’t fucking matter what we do, we’re a tiny cult band. But the idea of even being 0000.1% involved in something like this is impossible for us to deal with.”

The FADER: Xiu Xiu has been around since the advent of MP3s. Talk to me about the start of streaming and where your head was at as a musician when your music was first put on these platforms.

Jamie Stewart: We’ve been around since 2002, so it’s been a while. The first couple of years that we were a band was kind of the last moment in history when physical media like CDs, LPs and cassettes, were all that was predominantly available. There was a little bit of music online at that time, but not very much.

And then, fairly quickly, in the mid 2000s, Napster took over, and then it was just total theft. Every band saw their royalties take a precipitous and notable decline. That was the beginning of us going, oh well, the internet is absolutely not musicians’ friend in any way.

We sort of gave up and said, “OK, we’ll just concentrate on making the best records we can make, and fuck it,” you know? The music business has been crooked since the beginning of the music business. Although I will say that the main labels we work with, Graveface, Polyvinyl, and Kill Rock Stars, have always treated us extraordinarily well. [So] not entirely crooked, but the larger mechanism of the music business has a long history of being crooked.

Luckily [piracy] kind of fell away [but then] streaming took over. Here’s another thing that we can either get worried about or ignore; there’s nothing we can do about it, it completely sucks. This is the biggest outright theft that has occurred in music history. We have no idea how we even got on these sites; we certainly didn’t approve it. Even Taylor Swift tried to do something about it to no avail, essentially, but you know, bands like us, it means nothing [to Spotify] if we do anything. It’s just essentially for our own sanity.

For the vast majority of the existence of this band, we’ve been banging our heads against larger corporations deciding it’s completely OK to to steal music for their own profit, and there seems to be really nothing anyone can do about it other than try not to participate to the degree that they can, which is almost impossible.

I really try not to think about it anymore and just concentrate on trying to make records, [but] the incident with Spotify, there’s no way we couldn’t think about that one. It’s very different than stealing music from bands, which is obviously completely ridiculous, but using that to murder people for money is beyond the pale.

That was on my mind when I was reading your statement and Deerhoof’s statement, just the threshold of [what people will tolerate]. Obviously what we’re discussing now is an extreme case, but it also fits into a spectrum where, for example, several years ago, Spotify said they would [stop promoting] R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music and Kendrick Lamar [threatened to pull his music from the platform], or audiences cancelling an artist for behavior they don’t approve of. I’m curious what you’re hoping your listeners on Spotify might take away from this decision.

It’s not really up to us. We can request that people cancel their subscriptions as a tiny, tiny, tiny act of resistance, but in the end, obviously it’s none of our business what people do. We can control what we do and people will make their own decision. That means that we’re not going to push anybody to do this. I certainly have not talked to any of my friends’ bands advising them or asking them to do this kind of thing.

And frankly? This will sound very judgmental, but I don’t necessarily mean this to be judgmental – I am really fucking surprised that not very many bands have chosen to do this.

There’s a moral horror component to this decision that’s obvious, but I also wanted to ask about it from a pragmatic or financial perspective.

When I thought about how much they actually pay versus the number of streams we’ve gotten, this amount of money is like… I’m not gonna go broke and I’m not gonna become houseless or not being able to feed myself, but it will be, not a disastrous hit, but one that I and my bandmates will definitely notice. But there’s no amount of money that would be worth it for us to be directly involved in this kind of thing. It was very easy to make this decision.

You mentioned you’ve done a few interviews on this topic; I’m curious if there’s anything you haven’t gotten a chance to discuss yet.

One thing that has come up that we’ve had a lot of discussions with people off the record — a lot of people in Ukraine have been upset with us, saying that Helsing and this technology will be saving Ukraine from Russia. And we’ve been doing our best to reply to people saying, we can never understand what your situation is. We’re in the unbelievably privileged position of being in a place that’s not at war.

I don’t think that any arms company in history is ever on the side of the good guys. History has shown that arms dealers will sell their weapons to anybody who will buy them, and probably the moment that sanctions are lifted from Russia, they’ll immediately sell this technology to Russia [too]. This technology will undoubtedly be used to murder people in Gaza and Iran and Syria and Lebanon and whatever the next place so-called democracies decide brown people need to be murdered so other people can make some more money.

I don’t have a good answer for people who are in Ukraine or are upset about the situation. I wish that I did. I can understand why they’re upset about it, but our decision to do this still feels right to me, and I’m sure that their being upset about it feels right for them. They’re not mutually exclusive points of view to me.