8 Months Without Spotify: What the Numbers Actually Say
What follows covers five things: what I actually had on Spotify before I left, what happened to my streaming income afterwards, how Apple Music and YouTube have performed in the gap, what I’ve genuinely lost, and the questions I still can’t answer. I’ve tried to be as specific as possible throughout.
Before I get into this, a caveat that I think belongs at the top rather than buried near the end.
My numbers are small. I’m not a streaming artist in any meaningful sense — I play folk music in the UK, I sell CDs and LPs at gigs, and I’m trying to build the kind of slow, committed audience that might still be there in 20 years. If you’re a recording musician uploading to streaming platforms, your numbers will be different. But I hope that putting mine out there is more useful than another piece about integrity and algorithms that stops short of the spreadsheet.
When I wrote the third piece in this series, back in September, I was careful not to overclaim. I’d been off Spotify for six weeks. I didn’t know yet what I’d lost or what might replace it, so I tried to describe an open-ended process honestly rather than wrap it up neatly. That felt right at the time.
Eight months have now passed. I’ve been sitting with the data — not just feelings, but actual numbers from DistroKid (the service that handles my digital releases and tracks streaming income), Apple Music for Artists, and YouTube Studio — and I think it’s time to follow through on the comparison notes I promised.
The short answer to the question I’ve been asking myself since July is: it hasn’t been as bad as I feared. But that’s not the whole story, and I don’t think vague reassurance is particularly useful to anyone weighing the same decision. So here’s the longer answer, with the numbers attached.
What I had on Spotify
“I wasn’t building an audience; I was filling a gap in someone else’s algorithm.”
In the 12 months before I left, Spotify reported 31,343 streams. In the world of Spotify, that’s a small number — the kind of figure a more mainstream artist might rack up in a slow afternoon. I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating; I’m saying it because I think it’s important context. The platform’s scale is so enormous that numbers which feel significant to an independent folk musician are, in its terms, essentially invisible.
And even within that modest total, the picture gets more complicated on closer inspection. 83% of those streams came from Spotify Radio or other algorithmically generated playlists. Spotify Radio isn’t traditional radio — it’s a feature that automatically generates a stream of songs based on a track or artist you’ve been listening to. You don’t choose it; Spotify chooses it for you. Those listeners almost certainly didn’t search for me, had probably never heard of me before, and in all likelihood never thought about me again. I want to be fair here: a passive listener is still a pair of ears, and some small number of them will have gone on to follow me or buy a record. But the conversion rate from that kind of discovery is low — my Spotify follower count at the time I left was around 1,200, accumulated over years, not from a single year of passive streaming. The honest picture is that 26,000 casual streams probably converted into a tiny number of regular listeners. I wasn’t building an audience; I was filling a gap in someone else’s algorithm.
The remaining 17% — people who actually came looking — amounts to around 5,300 streams across 12 months. That’s the real number. The one that represents something like genuine interest.
When I started thinking clearly about what I’d actually lose by leaving, it was closer to 5,000 engaged streams than 31,000 casual ones. That reframing helped considerably.
What happened to my income
This is the part I was most nervous about. I’ll be honest about the numbers because I think that’s the only way this piece is useful.
An important clarification first: these are streaming and download figures only, pulled from my DistroKid dashboard. They don’t include what I make from Bandcamp sales, my merch desk at gigs, or PRS royalties (the payments collected when music is played publicly or broadcast on radio or television). Those are separate income streams, and significant ones. What I’m measuring here is purely what the digital platforms pay out — the part of the picture most directly affected by leaving Spotify.
In the 12 months leading up to my Spotify exit — August 2024 to July 2025 — I earned £220.77 from streaming and downloads across all platforms (excluding Bandcamp).
In the eight months since leaving — August 2025 to March 2026 — I’ve earned £213.18.
Eight months earning nearly as much as 12. My monthly average has gone up, from £18.40 to £26.65.
I want to be careful not to oversell this. The streaming numbers are small — nobody should leave Spotify expecting a windfall from the alternatives. But the fear that this particular income stream would collapse has not come true. If anything, the opposite has happened, partly because Apple Music pays roughly three times more per stream than Spotify did, and partly because the listeners who followed me there seem to play things more than once.
Apple Music after the exit
The clearest evidence that something shifted comes from looking at my Apple Music lifetime plays graph, which goes all the way back to 2016.
For years, it was more or less flat. A small spike in April 2023, when I released Before I Knew What Had Begun I Had Already Lost — that’s the biggest single-day peak in my entire Apple Music history, nearly 600 plays in one day. Then it settled back, higher than before but not dramatically so.
From around August 2025, there’s a visible step upward. Daily plays ran at 200 to 250 through the autumn and into early 2026 — not a coincidence. Some of the listeners who found me on Spotify appear to have followed me across, and some new ones have arrived who weren’t there before. Since then, the numbers have dwindled back. And here’s the thing: that’s not really a Spotify story. That’s just how algorithms work, on every platform. They favour tracks that are getting engagement right now. When you’re a small artist with no new release, the algorithm loses interest — and your catalogue goes quiet with it. The same logic applies on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. You either feed the machine something new and shiny, or it moves on. At some point you stop being a musician who occasionally promotes their work and start being a content creator who occasionally makes music. I’m not sure that bargain has changed much by leaving Spotify. My new single — a version of Blues Run the Game by Jackson C. Frank, out on 1 May on Apple Music, Bandcamp, and everywhere except Spotify — will give the algorithm something to chew on again. I recorded it because I wanted to, and because I think the people who listen to fingerpicked folk guitar arrangements will find something in it. But I won’t pretend the catalogue bump isn’t part of it too.
Three songs hit 1,000 all-time Apple Music plays in the space of a few weeks in January and February 2026 — Strung Out on the Line, Lofty Tall Ship, and Could You Be the One? — which feels like something deepening rather than contracting. With that in mind, it’s worth knowing that Spotify, starting back in January 2024 and still in place when I left, brought in a devastating rule that few people seem to know about. On Spotify, a track has to reach 1,000 streams in a 12-month period before any royalties are released for it at all. Below that threshold, the money isn’t held back and paid later — it’s redistributed to tracks that have already crossed the line. For an artist with a catalogue of songs accumulating small numbers of passive streams, that means a portion of what Spotify reported as “your streams” was generating income that went directly to someone else.
YouTube, which I’d been underestimating
I’ll admit I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to YouTube. Looking at the last 12 months properly, I’ve had 68,800 video views — up 79% on the year before — and 339,700 impressions, up 20%. Nearly 50,000 unique viewers. The channel gained 300 subscribers, 36% more than the previous year.
YouTube isn’t a platform I can make the same ethical case against as Spotify — it has its own problems, but Daniel Ek’s Helsing decision isn’t one of them — and the data suggests it’s doing more for my career right now than I’d realised. If Apple Music has replaced some of the income, YouTube has quietly replaced some of the reach.
What keeps me awake at night
“I became, at least in some corners of the internet, the Spotify-leaving guy. I’m a musician who left Spotify, and those are different things.”
When I made that first video about leaving Spotify, I expected it to reach the people in my English folk community — a relatively small pond. Instead, it reached 4.1 million accounts. I genuinely hadn't seen that coming, and then, if I'm honest, ego got the better of me. I made a few more videos on the same subject, chasing the wave a little, before realising I had nothing left to say of any consequence and that I'd backed myself into a peculiar corner. For a while I became, at least in some corners of the internet, the Spotify-leaving guy. People followed me because I was saying something they agreed with about a streaming platform, not because they wanted to hear traditional songs from the wider Midlands. When I post about music — the actual music, the craft of it, the history — the engagement drops. When I post about Spotify, it spikes. I didn't want to become the Spotify-leaving guy. I'm a musician who left Spotify, and those are different things. The distinction matters to me, even if the algorithm doesn't care.
I've had moments — after a booking didn't come through, or when I've looked at where a younger artist is getting their traction — when I've wondered whether I've made life harder than it needs to be. Then there's the record company. Through the grapevine, I heard that a label may have had some interest in me but weren't happy about my Spotify position. I don't know how seriously to take it, or whether it would have come to anything. But it keeps me awake sometimes. That one I can't verify with a spreadsheet.
The practical costs are real and concrete. Festival and gig organisers use Spotify numbers as a quick measure of an artist's reach. They want to add you to a playlist to help promote their events. Without a presence there, you're invisible to part of that conversation — and that conversation directly affects bookings and income. I knew that going in, and I stand by what I've written about that being a reductive way to evaluate music. But I'd be naive to pretend the number has no practical effect.
“Would I lose credibility by returning to Spotify in any form? These are the things that taunt me.”
I find myself wondering, more often than I'd like to admit, whether there's a middle ground. Not returning wholesale — putting my entire catalogue back and pretending the last eight months didn't happen — but something more considered. A handful of tracks, living on Spotify as a calling card for the people whose decisions affect my career. Enough to exist in that ecosystem without fully re-entering it. Is that a reasonable compromise, or just a slow way of going back? Would I lose credibility by returning in any form? These are the things that taunt me.
I said in September that the battle between ethics and ego hadn’t ended. Eight months on, I can report that it still hasn’t, quite.
What I don’t doubt is the ethical decision I made in July. That part feels clearer now than it did then, not murkier. Helsing is still there. The money is still flowing. AI music is still appearing under musicians’ names and Spotify is still not doing enough about it. None of that has changed.
But I’m trying to be an honest reporter here rather than a campaigner, and the honest report is: I’m still in the middle of this. I haven’t arrived anywhere. The doubt is real, the ethical conviction is real, and I’m holding both of them at once.
A note on the numbers nobody publishes
One thing I noticed while putting this together: almost nobody who has left Spotify publishes actual figures. The conversation stays at the level of principles and feelings, which are important, but which don’t help musicians trying to make a practical decision about their careers. I’ve tried to do something different here. Whether that’s useful depends on how closely your situation resembles mine — a middle-aged folk musician, building an audience slowly, with live performance and direct sales doing most of the lifting. If your model is different, your numbers will be too.
What I can say is that eight months on, I’m still here, still making music, still asking the same questions. If you’ve been through something similar and want to compare notes, find me on the dreaded Instagram, or come to a gig, or just reply to this. The spreadsheet hasn’t settled them. I’m not sure anything will.
Jon Wilks is a folk musician based in Hampshire, UK. His latest album is Needless Alley, and his new compilation Bones is out now on Bandcamp. His new single, Blues Run the Game, is out on 1 May.
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