New Delhi, Aug. 30 -- The news around Spotify these past weeks has left me with more questions than answers: about myself as a tech reporter, a consumer, and a human who doesn't want her choices to contradict her values.

Every major streaming platform has long faced allegations of underpaying artists. But the news from June this year of Spotify founder Daniel Ek leading a €600 million funding round in Helsing, a European defence company building AI tools for military weapons, raises the stakes of being a paying subscriber of this app. It's no longer just about the royalties the company pays to artists. It's about whether my paid listening indirectly endorses something I'm deeply uncomfortable with.

While global headliners have sta...