Recruitment advertisements for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are no longer running on Spotify, the streaming service has confirmed. Variety was the first outlet to report the news.
Last October, Spotify held firm in its decision to air immigration-enforcement ads between songs for users on the company’s free tier. “This advertisement is part of a broad campaign the US government is running across television, streaming, and online channels,” the company said in a statement. “The content does not violate our advertising policies.”
Spotify now says the ICE ads stopped running at the end of 2025—meaning Wednesday’s fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by an ICE agent did not play a factor in the ads’ disappearance. “The advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Pitchfork, adding that the ads “ended on most platforms and channels, including Spotify, at the end of last year.”
The campaign—which also included streamers Amazon and YouTube, among others—was part of the Trump administration’s $30 billion investment to hire more than 10,000 deportation officers by the end of 2025. News that Spotify was airing ICE ads was met with widespread criticism from fans and artists, leading to a general boycott of the streamer by grassroots political organization Indivisible. Last November, musicians launched a separate boycott called No Music for ICE aimed at Amazon over its own ICE contracts.
It took them quite a while. But if there’s also anyone else that’s still decided to build an actual music library, independent of streaming platforms, instead, here are a bunch of popular bands/artists that have some or all of their music on Bandcamp, among those that I listen to:
There are plenty of other indie bands that I recommend choosing from, but most people that stay on the streaming platforms stay for the big names - that’s why I wanted to create a list with names that are sure to be instantly recognizable for anyone who’s been listening to music in general, to a certain genre of music or who is looking for something more popular from the latest years. As a disclaimer, this is also why you might find some controversial names - I didn’t take my time to check all of these artists’ controversies; if there are any, let me know.
Remember, you can also support them by buying their albums on physical media (CDs, vinyls, cassettes etc.) or by going to their live shows whenever you have the chance.
Even if you decide to pay them something like $4 you have secured them more revenue than they gained by listening any of their songs for 1000 times, but if you buy their music on Bandcamp Friday, artists get a bigger share of the price you pay.
Is there a programmatic way to buy & dl the music from Bandcamp? That’s always been one of my problems with building a (paid for) library :/
Hmmm, for buying automatically, you might be looking into Bandcamp Clubs. You pick one of such “clubs” and you get one album into your library each month that you can keep forever.
For downloading, there’s Batchcamp.
I personally don’t mind visiting the website whenever I have some spare time each month to get something. I also have a task that reminds me of Bandcamp Friday (spoiler: it’s the 1st Friday of almost each month). In the months when there’s no Bandcamp Friday, I just mark the task as complete and move on.