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Music streaming platforms have way too much control over musicians and music lovers. It’s time to rein them in.

Spotify Co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström speak onstage at the Spotify Investor Day 2026.

If you are like nearly 200 million other Americans, you have an account on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. You probably access the music you love primarily by streaming. Recorded music is likely the backdrop to many of your fondest memories. Listening to it may well be an essential part of your daily life.

But log on to any of these streaming services today, and it becomes immediately clear just how far they have strayed from their role as an unobtrusive means to access one of life’s most basic pleasures. From intrusive ads to AI DJ features you didn’t ask for, the overall experience has degraded—not that it’s stopped billionaire executives from hiking subscription prices.

If you’re a musician whose music is on one of these platforms, the odds are that your experience is even worse. You are likely paid fractions of pennies on the dollar per stream—after a process for determining compensation that is often opaque to you but filled with contractual quirks and kickbacks. You might be further squeezed if you want any chance of the algorithm pushing you to new listeners. You might even be nudged—covertly or overtly—to change artistic directions based on what the platform describes as your music’s most and least popular characteristics. You’re all too aware that platform executives’ decisions have the power to make or break careers—that it is, in other words, a game of pay-to-play.

This is all pretty demeaning, and harmful to musical culture. There is a legal tool kit at our disposal if we want a fairer, less destructive way to enjoy one of humanity’s oldest art forms. But it involves reconceptualizing what these services really are.

Hating the streaming giants has gone mainstream. Musicians from Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift have spoken out against them, even as they are some of their highest-paid artists. And our understanding of their harms has grown even more acute in recent years, as journalists like Liz Pelly have richly documented the deep problems at the heart of the business model and user experience. Meanwhile, independent musicians are organizing to divest their local scenes from Spotify. Many have started to ask themselves: Why can’t we ditch these platforms?

A range of ideas have been proposed, adopting familiar models from labor organizing (organizing musicians into new unions capable of exercising countervailing power) and tax policy (creating new categories of royalties for artists by taxing streaming platform revenues). Private market-based solutions—like competition from new, upstart streaming platforms, or consumer boycotts—have also attracted attention and, in some cases, endorsement from the streaming platforms themselves (as applied to their rivals).

But none of these solutions account for the fact that music streaming platforms are not like the retail businesses that supplied past generations with records and CDs. When operating in competitive markets, these businesses might have been responsive to external private power. Spotify and its peers are more like public utilities or infrastructure: large platforms that connect musicians to listeners and vice versa, where scale and connectivity are all-important. This makes them unlikely to be effectively governed by private actors alone—just like electric utilities are unlikely to be disciplined by competing power lines or by households........

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