boicotta spotify

https://bdsmovement.net/boycott-spotify

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, endorses the growing, organic consumer boycott of Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service, which directly profits from artist exploitation, systems of mass deportation, apartheid, and genocide. 

In October 2025, Spotify users began to hear racist recruitment ads for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as the agency continues to terrorize immigrant communities and those in solidarity with them across the country. Though the ICE ads have reportedly expired, Spotify has refused to change its policies, defending the ads as consistent with their company standards. 

Later that year, Spotify reportedly ran ads for genocidal Israel’s prison service, recruiting armed units. Under the direct control of racist fanatic Israeli government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli prisons and detention centers have increased the widespread and systemic use of physical torture, psychological abuse, inhumane detention conditions, and sexual violence against Palestinian political prisoners. 

Spotify’s complicity in Israeli apartheid goes much deeper than the typical lifecycle of these unethical and potentially illegal ads. The company launched in the Israeli market with a multi-year deal with Partner Communications Company Ltd, an Israeli telecommunications company listed in the United Nations’ database of businesses involved in illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Any such deal violates the 2024 International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s entire presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and amounts to apartheid. Failure of corporations to comply with international law may also constitute criminal complicity, according to leading legal experts.

Spotify is also among the leading platforms that have hosted genocidal Israeli government propaganda including Mission Brief: The Official Podcast of the Israel Defense Forces.

Spotify’s founder (and CEO until December 2025), Daniel Ek, is the chairman of German military AI company Helsing, and has personally invested his wealth gained from Spotify into the company, helping to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for it to expand. Despite the company’s claim that its technology is not currently used “in war zones other than Ukraine,” Helsing has direct contracts with multiple international arms companies that are complicit in genocidal Israel’s regime of apartheid and military occupation, including Rheinmetall, Saab and Airbus. Airbus is involved in the militarized policing and surveillance of the US-Mexico border, and its subsidiary Airbus DS Airborne Solutions has a long-term strategic partnership with the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries.

Spotify has long been notorious in the music industry for its poverty wages, rigged algorithms allegedly prioritizing major labels, and demonetization of the vast majority of songs in its extensive catalogue. We recognize that artists are not all in a position to pull their music entirely from the platform, given its near-monopoly over crucial metrics used by the industry at large. But we welcome those who are withdrawing from the platform, and we endorse the subscriber boycott and call for it to be deepened. We also urge artists to echo our demands, at a minimum.

With enormous wealth extracted from musicians’ labor invested by Spotify’s founder into AI warfare with links to Israel’s genocide; Spotify running ads for militarized, racist forces in the US and Israel; normalizing genocide and apartheid; as well as trapping artists in an exploitative system without fair pay, the case for music fans to unsubscribe from Spotify is more compelling than ever. 

We call on all people of conscience to apply strategic pressure on Spotify, including canceling Spotify subscriptions and deleting Spotify accounts, until the company:

1. Adopts an intersectional ethical programming, advertising, sponsorship, and partnership policy, which prohibits platforming companies, agencies or services verifiably complicit in human rights violations, including apartheid and genocide.
2. Ends all business with Partner Communications and all other Israeli companies  complicit in Israel’s apartheid, illegal occupation, and genocide. 

Genocide, apartheid, exploitation and racist deporations should never be on the playlist.