If you are actively searching for signs that Daniel Ek’s streaming edifice is showing cracks, you can find a few: there was Sturgill Simpson's recent number three Billboard 100 album debut with a physical-only release; the small but passionate cohort of indie artists who pulled their music off Spotify; and a few other notable slings and arrows from various quarters last year.

We don’t see it. Even beyond the strong financials they showed off last quarter, the network effects and economic realities that are keeping artists on the world’s biggest music streamer are stronger than ever. If you are a major artist, taking your music off Spotify is … not really a thing anymore. Neil Young returned to the streamer in 2024, and Jay-Z and Beyonce’s Tidal campaign is a fading memory. (Nils Lofgren is back too.)

Spotify’s stickiness is less about streaming payouts — which are often less than half (and sometimes much less than half) of what successful artists make in a year — than it is about the exposure and downstream career effects the platform delivers. Lots of artists may complain about streaming royalties, but the attention from those streams drives all the other ways they make money: music syncs, merch, touring  and (if they’re lucky) that late-career pot of gold, selling their catalog. In today’s attention economy, removing yourself from the place where hundreds of millions of music fans listen can be tantamount to removing yourself from music itself. 

The only major artist not on Spotify in 2026 is Garth Brooks, who signed an exclusive deal with my old workplace, Amazon Music, right before I started there in 2016. For years it seemed like a Jedi-master-level ‘zag’ for Brooks: he made a lot of money and had an inside line to Amazon’s physical music sales store — the biggest in the world — at a time when a huge number of country fans were still buying CD’s. As the distant-third streamer in 2016, Amazon was fired up to pull every possible marketing, sales and promotion lever for Garth. The deal helped solidify Amazon Music’s strength in country music, which expanded the overall streaming market. (Shout out to my former colleague Jeff Reguilon, who was credited around the office for coming up with the original idea.)

Of course, we are in a different landscape now. This story from a country music blog caught my eye:

The brute force economics of streaming appear to be taking their toll. Gen Z is driving country music’s growth these days, and those fans are on Spotify in enormous numbers; there is a cost to not being where they are. It’s hard to measure the missed opportunity, but Garth’s generational peers are racking up serious numbers on Spotify: Clint Black, who was born the same year as Garth, has close to half a billion streams; Reba McEntire has 1.1 billion; George Strait has 4.75 billion. Garth is still, at last count, the top selling artist in the U.S. according to the RIAA, but it’s a number he partially keeps healthy by taking advantage of how Billboard measures sales, selling box sets (which count for multiple physical sales) at dramatic discounts.

The point here isn’t to single out Garth, but to illustrate how Spotify was able to raise its prices twice in the past 18 months without any apparent deleterious effects. The forerunner of Garth’s Amazon deal was his Walmart exclusive back in the early 2000’s, a first of its kind arrangement that also brought him a windfall. But in 2026, Spotify is less like a record store chain, and, metaphorically, closer to an entire listening format.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, take note. 

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