Salvador Sobral is putting his albums back on Spotify (but not his listening)
The Portuguese singer pulled everything off the platform in February over Daniel Ek's investment in defence AI. He says the reasons have not changed — the arithmetic has.
Salvador Sobral took his entire catalogue off Spotify in February. On Tuesday, in a video posted to his official accounts, he said he is putting it back.
His reason is plain and not especially heroic, and he says so himself: he needs to reach people, and he needs to sell concert tickets. He called the platform a Goliath too strong to take on alone.
Why he left
Three things stacked up before February. The first was money — among the large platforms, Spotify pays songwriters least. The second was the investment by Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder and chief executive, in Helsing, a European defence AI company, made through Ek’s own venture firm Prima Materia; Massive Attack pulled their catalogue over the same thing in 2025. The third was AI-generated music turning up in recommendation playlists with no label on it.
None of that has changed, and Sobral does not pretend otherwise. What changed was the arithmetic. He had expected a collective boycott by fellow musicians and listeners, and when he looked behind him nobody was there.
What stays the same
He says he will keep boycotting as a user — he listens on Qobuz — while the music returns to the catalogue. The lead single “A flor do recomeço” goes back too, and the album of the same name lands in October: his first record built entirely from Brazilian compositions, recorded in São Paulo with songs by Adriana Calcanhotto, Arnaldo Antunes, Chico César, Céu, Marcelo Camelo, Mallu Magalhães, Marcos Valle and Tim Bernardes.
There is an uncomfortable lesson in this about the streaming economy, and it is not really about Sobral. A platform with hundreds of millions of subscribers does not register that a mid-sized artist has gone, and the entire cost of leaving lands on the one who left. It is the tension that ran through Lorde’s protest against AI-made music, and the one you hear backstage at Portuguese festivals including Paredes de Coura, where Sobral has played.
Anyone who wants to hear him without going through Spotify still can. The difference is that now they no longer have to.
By Lucy Bennett
Photo: Roger Dewayne Barkley / EuroVisionary, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
