In two weeks, on 26 November, we’re going to delist our podcast Flying the Coop from Spotify.
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It'll still be available on just about every other podcast platform, plus streaming on our own website.

I wanted to lead with that so you’d know what I’m on about from the get-go. The rest of this email is about why.

Breaking news, Spotify has blown up the moon!!

Just kidding. But barely.

The straw that actually broke this camel’s back is that they’re currently airing recruitment ads for ICE.

There sure were a lottttt of straws piling up before that one though:

• ​Spotify CEO Daniel Ek investing millions in Helsing, a defense company developing artificial intelligence software for military applications (FYI he's also the chairman of Helsing, it's not a casual relationship)
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• Spotify’s been shifting away from their human expert curators in favor of AI replacements​
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• ​Spotify is replete with AI slop (I literally mean fake bands with auto-generated music, super gross)
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• Spotify pays its artists an absolute pittance (as of today, Spotify pays artists between $0.003 – $0.005 per stream on average)

Anna and I both hopped over to TIDAL for our personal listening about three months ago.

At the same moment, we were on the cusp of releasing our brand new podcast, Flying the Coop, and had to make a call whether or not to distribute it on Spotify.
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After quite a serious and thoughtful discussion which we documented in an episode (go listen! or watch the video! There’s a nifty decision-making template included that you can adapt for your own team), we decided that, at least for the first year, we’d go ahead and distribute our podcast on Spotify -- mostly because we really, really, really believe in the podcast and wanted to make sure it’s as easy as possible for people worldwide to listen to it.

About 20% of our listens today come from Spotify, which aligns more or less with listening patterns globally given where our audience is distributed. To note: Spotify is an especially popular place outside of the US to listen to podcasts.

We decided we'd revisit our decision after a year’s time to see how we felt about it… unless in the meanwhile Spotify blew up the moon, in which case we would reconsider earlier.

The ICE ads are our moon-splosion.

We’re ALSO kicking Riverside to the curb.

Riverside is the video recording and editing platform I’ve been using to produce the podcast.

Through Devon Price’s fantastic newsletter, we’ve just learned that they are a proudly pro-Israeli apartheid firm that is founded and operated by IDF military & intelligence personnel.

It’s scary to draw ethical red lines like this. We feel exposed and vulnerable.

We’re also very aware we’ll likely lose ~20% of our listeners, which is a big damn deal since we just started producing this thing. Every single person listening is quite dear to us.

But.

To steal a phrase from Tarzan Kay, we feel we have “the privilege of choice.” For us, this compels us to act.

Based on our own ethics, we’re very clear that Spotify and Riverside are in the wrong. And we don’t feel right about growing our business in conjunction with companies that support a more hateful world.

If you’re one of the 20% of Flying the Coop listeners who prefer to listen on Spotify, we are truly sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll continue distributing the podcast everywhere else: Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Pandora – basically everywhere our publishing platform Castos connects us to, plus video versions on YouTube as well. We encourage you to give one of these a go.

BUT.

We also understand if that won’t fly with you.

We’re in a place where we feel we have privilege of choice; not everyone is in such a place.

We choose to hold these powerful corporations responsible for their choices.

With you, Reader, we choose to share what’s on our minds and open a conversation.

A few nuts and bolts:

• We’re going to use Squadcast + Descript as a Riverside replacement (thanks for the tip, Sophia Apostol!)
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• We use TIDAL as a Spotify replacement for our all-day music habits; ping us directly if you’d like a review of how that’s going
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• ​Flying the Coop will stay up on Spotify until 26 November 2025, at which point it will be delisted from there forever
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I want to add one more kind of personal thing about this whole debacle:

Getting to talk to so many amazing people about how they do business differently is actively shifting my own Overton window about what “enoughness” looks like for me, and for Strange Birds.

(personal transformation was never one of the stated objectives of starting a podcast, but it’s proving to be a very real side effect!)

It’s one thing to slag on the optimization bros, it’s quite another to actively decouple yourself from their mechanisms. Especially when it makes life more inconvenient, more expensive, or even measurably WORSE.

I’ll take it one step further:

It’s even harder when it’s more inconvenient/more expensive/worse for your business, which you’ve been taught from a very early age should pull in as much as possible at every turn.

Why would you tie your own hands?

How's your drop in the bucket possibly going to make a difference, except maybe by damaging your own ease of life?

Like, I can kind of justify making things harder for myself on a personal level due to my ethics, but business is business, and business must GROW.*

Right?

The longer we run Strange Birds as a co-op, and the more people I talk to whose businesses are intentionally structured to serve their intersecting communities…

... the less I’m focused on how can we grow as much as possible, and the more I’m considering how do we sustain enoughness.

I don’t have any brilliant conclusions yet.

But I promised to open a conversation with you, Reader, and that’s what’s on my mind.

What does enough look like for you (and your business, if you have one)?

How will you sustain it?

Petons and much love,
Janel

🏳️‍⚧️✊🏳️‍🌈✊🇵🇸

*Throughout writing this email, I’ve been hearing the Once-ler in my head:

Let this tiny act of decoupling be one more act of UNLESS.

Flying the Coop Ever find that you're forcing yourself into a tight box at work? Do you have a ‘squiggly’ career path? Feel frustrated that your way of doing things is seen as ‘lazy’? This episode is for you. Nancy Disbrow, founder of Neuro-osity, is an executive coach and consultant who helps high-achieving professionals, especially those with ADHD or dyslexia, rewire how they lead and work so they can stop spinning their wheels and start building systems that actually work for their brains. “A skill set is a picture of all the things you’re naturally good at, and that hardly ever aligns with the job we’re doing in the workplace.”​ ​ Listen to the episode

What I'm reading

​Raven Tower by Ann Leckie​

An usurper to the throne, big and small gods everywhere, and an awfully mysterious warrior as the nearly-silent central character. Each chapter feels like a little piece of an expanding puzzle exploring how this world works. The perspective alone in this book is wild!