Why You Should Think Twice About Supporting Spotify

When most people open Spotify, they expect music, not militarism. Yet the world’s biggest streaming platform is tied directly to the future of warfare and surveillance. Its CEO, Daniel Ek, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into defense technology—AI-powered drones, surveillance systems, and battlefield software. For Americans, and Floridians most of all, this raises a stark question: do our playlists now come with a side of war profiteering?

A Playlist That Funds the Battlefield

Daniel Ek isn’t just running a music company. Through his investment firm, Prima Materia, he has poured vast sums into Helsing, a European defense contractor valued at $12 billion. Earlier this year, Ek’s firm led a nearly $700 million funding round, cementing Helsing’s status as one of the fastest-growing military AI companies in the world.

Helsing’s work isn’t about defensive firewalls or cybersecurity. It’s about integrating artificial intelligence directly into weapons systems—using algorithms to sift battlefield data, analyze targets, and power autonomous drones. One of their prototypes, the HX-2 drone, can reportedly identify and act on threats with minimal human oversight.

This is the uncomfortable truth: the same man profiting off our playlists is investing in technologies that could determine life and death on the battlefield.

Artists Say Enough

This revelation has not gone unnoticed in the music world. Artists like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard publicly announced the removal of their music from Spotify earlier this year, bluntly pointing out Ek’s ties to military drones. Now Massive Attack has joined them, pulling their catalog in protest.

For Massive Attack, long known for politically charged work, this isn’t about streaming payouts—it’s about refusing to let art be complicit in building machines of war. Their protest makes Spotify subscribers confront a choice: is the convenience of a playlist worth supporting leadership that bankrolls the next generation of warfare?

From Music Venues to Surveillance Zones

Massive Attack’s resistance goes beyond removing songs. At a recent concert, the band deployed facial recognition technology on their audience—not as a security feature, but as a performance statement. Cameras scanned fans’ faces in real time, projecting them onto massive screens inside the venue. Some were labeled with names, others highlighted anonymously, but all were part of a chilling demonstration of how invisible surveillance can suddenly become impossible to ignore.

What happened inside that concert hall is exactly what civil liberties experts warn about: technologies designed for military or state use quietly migrating into everyday spaces. If facial recognition can scan a crowd at a concert, it can just as easily scan a protest, a border crossing, or a hurricane shelter.

Why All Americans Should Care

Even if you’ve never streamed Massive Attack or any band involved in this protest, the implications are profound. Every monthly Spotify subscription strengthens a company whose leadership is normalizing the merger of entertainment profits with military innovation.

The history of surveillance technology shows us that once developed, these systems rarely stay confined to war zones. Drones built for counterinsurgency patrols are soon deployed for border enforcement. Facial recognition tools designed to track terrorists become tools to track protestors. AI systems designed to interpret battlefields find their way into domestic policing.

The U.S. has not yet created comprehensive laws to regulate autonomous weapons or restrict the misuse of biometric surveillance. Until that happens, the risk of these technologies spreading unchecked is very real.

Why Floridians May Face the Greatest Risks

Florida, in particular, sits at the crossroads of militarization, migration, and climate disaster—making it a likely testing ground for the very technologies Spotify’s CEO is helping to fund.

Our state is home to sprawling Air Force installations and drone testing programs, which means defense contractors have direct access to deploy and refine their systems here. Our long coastline is already patrolled for immigration enforcement, and adding AI-driven drones into that mix could escalate risks for migrants and refugees.

Meanwhile, Florida has some of the harshest anti-protest laws in the nation. Imagine AI-powered drones or facial recognition systems monitoring environmental activists in the Everglades, immigrant-rights organizers in Immokalee, or students demonstrating on college campuses. The combination of sweeping surveillance and weak civil liberties protections is a recipe for repression.

Even natural disasters provide cover for these systems to expand. After hurricanes, when communities are most vulnerable, surveillance technologies are often rolled out under the banner of “emergency management.” In practice, that can mean storm-ravaged neighborhoods become involuntary testing grounds for new forms of AI-driven oversight.

A Culture of Resistance

Supporters of Helsing argue that this technology is vital to defending democratic nations, citing Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. There is no doubt that military innovation often rides on the back of crisis. But the question isn’t whether nations defend themselves—it’s whether consumers accept that their streaming dollars should bankroll weapons development.

Spotify is not a neutral platform. Its leadership is actively shaping both culture and conflict. The fact that artists are speaking out—removing their music, staging acts of protest, refusing complicity—underscores a larger truth: music has always been a site of resistance, from Vietnam-era protest songs to anti-apartheid anthems.

Massive Attack’s decision is part of that lineage. Their message is clear: you don’t have to know their music to understand their warning.

More Than Just Music

For Americans, and Floridians in particular, this is no longer just about access to songs. It’s about accountability. Are we willing to bankroll AI drones and facial recognition systems every time we hit play? Are we comfortable with art, leisure, and war being bound together under the same corporate leadership?

The future Spotify is helping build is not only a cultural marketplace—it’s a militarized one. And the cost of ignoring that might be far higher than a missing song on a playlist.