Spotify

Mexican alternative band Café Tacvba is petitioning two of the largest music labels to take its catalog off of Spotify.

On Wednesday, the group’s singer Rubén Albarrán made an Instagram post calling on its former labels Universal Music Mexico and Warner Music Mexico to take action.

“I delivered letters to the record labels WMM and UMM, which by contract have the exploitation rights of Café Tacvba’s catalog, asking them to remove our music from the platform Stupidfy [sic] because it contradicts our artistic vision and our personal and band ethics,” Albarrán said.

He also claimed that the streaming giant invests in weapons manufacturing, runs ads for ICE and uses artificial intelligence in a way that is detrimental to musicians.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek leads an investment group that gave $694 million to the European defense technology startup Helsing in June.

“I personally invite our followers to listen to our music on other platforms, or better yet boycott it, and don’t take part in the abuses of power, ongoing wars, violence.” Albarrán added. “It is time to create a new world, more just — where music still has value, meaning, accompanies people, giving them support, joy, hope.”

Spotify responded to Albarrán’s post in a statement to The Times.

“We respect the artistic legacy of Café Tacvba and Rubén Albarrán’s right to express his views, but the facts tell a different story,” a Spotify spokesperson wrote. “Spotify does not fund war. Helsing is a separate company that has been supplying defense tech to Ukraine. Furthermore, there are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify; the advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms. We are a platform for music, and our AI policy is focused on protecting human artists from clones and fraud.”

In November, Rolling Stone reported that Spotify received $74,000 from the Department of Homeland Security to air ICE ads, according to information acquired from several data services.

According to Variety, the music streamer stopped airing ICE ads at the end of 2025. News of Spotify’s terminated contract came after Renee Nicole Good was killed by a federal immigration agent during an operation Wednesday in Minneapolis.

Spotify’s statement to The Times also claimed that the platform pays artists more equitably than other streamers, saying, “We are proud that Café Tacvba’s music has generated millions of dollars on Spotify over the years, and the reality is that Spotify continues to pay out more money to more artists than any player in music history. We consistently pay out 70% of our revenue to rightsholders.”

According to Spotify’s artist website, platformed artists must contact their label or distributor and ask them to issue a takedown request.

Universal Music Mexico and Warner Music Mexico did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Café Tacvba broke out onto the Latin rock scene with their second album,“Re,” a 20-song release from 1994. With smart, biting lyrics that touched on love, loss, hate, politics and modernism, the LP was hailed by the New York Times as “the equivalent of the Beatles’ White Album for the Rock en Español movement.” The L.A. Times’ critic Josh Kun dubbed it a “landmark.” And Rolling Stone put “Re” at the top of its “Top 10 Greatest Latin Rock Albums of All Time.”

The group saw even further international recognition with its 2003 megahit “Eres,” which received award recognition at the fifth annual Latin Grammys and has also accumulated over a half-billion streams on Spotify.

We might rarely get to see snowfall in Los Angeles, but logging onto social media in December means the arrival of a different kind of flurry. The one where our friends, both close and parasocial, excitedly share the year-end music-listening data dumps of their Spotify Wrapped.

Spotify Wrapped only represents the culmination of our listening habits on a single music platform, but every shared Wrapped post seems to come with some self-evident clarity about our personal identity. Spotify Wrapped bares our souls and provides us the opportunity to see ourselves deconstructed via our musical inclinations. By most accounts, it’s an irresistible delight. Oh, Spotify, you rascal, you’ve got us pegged.

For anyone in Los Angeles, 2025 has been one hell of a year to get the Wrapped treatment. We’re still processing the aftermath of the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires — and haunted by ICE raids and the federal administration’s ceaseless attacks on California. Not to mention Jimmy Kimmel getting silenced.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to take that temperature check.

But listening to music can be a passive experience — one enjoyed in tandem with folding laundry, or driving a car. To really learn about ourselves and how our year has been, we might want to turn elsewhere, to a habit with more intention. I’m talking, of course, about reading.

While there’s apps for tracking our reading habits, like StoryGraph or Goodreads, I’m devoted to a wholly analogue tracking method that’s helped me churn through books faster and with more intent than ever before: the book stack.

Starting every January, whenever I finish a book, I place it sidelong atop a shelf in the corner of my living room. With each new book I conquer, the stack gets taller, eventually becoming a full tower by December. A book stack, low on analytics, can’t tell me the total number of pages I’ve read, or how many minutes I spent reading, but it’s a tangible monument to my year’s reading progress. Its mere presence prods me into reading more. It calls me a chump when the stack is low and cheers for me when it reaches toward the ceiling.

My first book stack started in 2020, a wry joke to demonstrate the extra time we could all devote to reading books during a pandemic. The joke barely worked. I ended up reading just 19 books that year, only a few more than I had the previous year (though it could’ve been more if one of those books wasn’t “Crime and Punishment”).

Still, the book stack model gamified my reading habits and now I give books time I didn’t feel I had before. I bring books to bars, movie theaters and the DMV. If ever I have to wait around somewhere, you better believe I’ll come armed with a book.

The pandemic may have waned, but my book stack count continued to climb, peaking in 2023 after reading 52 books, averaging one per week.

But, hey, it’s about quality, not quantity, right? If there’s a quality to be gleaned from my 2025 book stack, you’d see that I’ve been looking for hot tips on how to survive times of extreme authoritarian rule. Some were more insightful than others.

In the stack was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s “All the President’s Men,” a landmark true story about two intrepid reporters who brought down the president of the United States by repeatedly bothering people at their homes for information. Fascinating as it is, it also feels like a relic from a time when doing something like that could still work. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” tells the story of a Jewish New Jersey family in an alternate timeline where an “America First” Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, ignoring the threat of Hitler in Europe and giving way to a rise in antisemitism at home. Roth paints a dreary portrait of how that scenario could have played out, but the horrors are resolved by something of a deus ex machina rather than by any one character’s bold, heroic actions. Then there’s Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” about the converging stories of a German boy enlisted in Hitler’s army and a blind French girl during World War II. Sadly, this novel reads less like a book about living under fascist rule than a thirsty solicitation to become source material for Steven Spielberg’s next movie.

Each of these titles have merit, but this year’s book stack had two gems for anyone who wants to know how best to resist tyranny. Pointedly, there was Timothy Snyder’s tidy pocket-sized handbook “On Tyranny” filled with 20 short but fortifying chapters of practical wisdom like “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions” and “Believe in truth.” Each is applicable to our current moment, informed by historical precedent set by communist and fascist regimes of the past century. This book — well over a million copies sold — came out at the start of Trump’s first term in 2017, so I came a little late to this party. The fact that Snyder himself moved to Canada this year should give us all pause.

Practical advice can also be found in great fiction, and on that front I found comfort and instruction in Hans Fallada’s “Alone in Berlin” (a.k.a. “Every Man Dies Alone”), based on the true story of a married couple living in Berlin during World War II who wrote postcards urging resistance against the Nazi regime and secretly planted them in public places for random people to discover. Under their extreme political conditions, this small act of civil disobedience means risking death. Not only is the story riveting, there’s also great pleasure in seeing the mayhem each postcard causes and how effective they are at exposing the subordinate class of fascists for what they truly are: nitwits.

Also notable in “Alone in Berlin” is the point of view of both the author and his fictional heroes. Neither a target of persecution, nor a military adversary, Fallada nevertheless endured the amplified hardships of living under Nazi rule during World War II. His trauma was still fresh while writing this book and it’s evident in his prose. He survived just long enough to write and publish “Alone in Berlin” before dying in 1947 at the age of 53.

If I’ve learned anything from these books, it’s that it’s in our best interest to not be afraid. Tyrants feed on fear and expect it. A citizenry without fear is much harder to control. That’s why we need to raise our voices against provocations of our rights, always push back, declare wrong things to be wrong, get in the way, annoy the opposition, and allow yourself to devote time to do things for your own enjoyment.

And in that spirit, my book stack also includes a fair amount of palate cleansers in the mix: Jena Friedman’s “Not Funny,” short stories by Nikolai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” (whose main character is named after Gogol), and a pair of Kurt Vonnegut novels. Though it’s hard to read Vonnegut without stumbling upon some apropos nuggets of wisdom, like this one from his novel “Slapstick:” “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior.”

Zachary Bernstein is a writer, editor and songwriter. He’s working on his debut novel about a poorly managed remote island society.