At the place where music, technology, and art converge, you’ll find Amazon, a monopoly rapidly spreading their bad practices to just about every corner of industry and commerce. Presented by AWS, the cloud platform that hosts Palantir and powers technology that enables ICE to detain and deport people, Intersect Festival is paid for by the annual re:Invent conference, a conference for engineers and developers hosted by AWS - whose employees are largely against their work supporting ICE, and who started the #WeWontBuildIt movement to protest leadership’s profit-centric decision making. Now open to the public for the first time ever, Intersect festival willfully neglects Amazon’s harms to offer a distracting two-day journey of culture and, for whatever reason, a drone show posturing as a celebration of gender diversity despite the company’s known discrimination against women.

Music is actually superfluous to Amazon and AWS - Amazon accounts for some of the lowest percentages of streaming and sales, and their per-play payout to artists is one of the worst in the industry. At Intersect’s core is a desperate attempt to break further into a creative field they’ve yet to take over and devastate, like they did to books. Like an algorithmically-crafted playlist, Intersect’s lineup spans many genres, and includes many artists who had no idea they were performing an Amazon event, since AWS was never listed in their contracts.

Find your place in a community. Not in a tech company.

Let’s not let a monopoly complicit with ICE dictate the development of our culture. Let’s not allow a ruthless corporation turn artists into tech workers to exploit and mistreat. If you’re an artist, sign #NoMusicforICE and pledge to abstain from future work with Amazon until these contracts are dropped. Tell your label or distributor to pull your music from Amazon’s streaming and digital stores. And if you’re a music fan, listen to and purchase music literally anywhere else.