From the article:
"…journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
…
"Now she writes:
‘What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.’
In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels."
Once they get maket shared they start extracting…
To normal people this is called enshitification
This should theoretically at least be illegal, as they abuse the power of the platform to favor certain tracks unfairly.
Any action would require a government that pretends to care for the pedons.
Spotify is AFAIK Swedish, so there you go.
PS:
I guess you mean peons.
Pedons is apparently types of soil: https://www.britannica.com/science/pedonAll western regimes sold out us out, mate
Exploiting us is the MO as workers and customers
Can someone explain why this is bad? It seems like normal behaviour of corporations.
Or has spotify previously committed to being a fair market?
This is like a soup joint that’s trying to see how much they can piss in the broth before customers notice.
That would be a health hazard, so it’s not really comparable.
It seems more like a soup joint using cheaper ingredients in their dishes, which is just… normal? I don’t get what the big deal is.
It’s normal if you accept it. You do not have to accept it. There’s also a good chance that it’s illegal in Spotify’s case, if not in the US then likely in Europe.
Under what law?
Likely antitrust.
That said if you’ve gone down the path of reasoning that says things that aren’t illegal are okay, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I suppose you could argue that Spotify can abuse its position in the same way that Walmart bullies its suppliers and Microsoft freezes out competition, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Like I said, it sounds like they’re just preferring cheaper sources.
This is a completely disingenuous comparison.
yeah, it’s more like they piss directly into peoples mouthes, but it turns out a few people are into that and can’t get enough of it
According to the RIAA, Spotify is a leading contributer to music revenue going up over the past decade plus https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf
Prior to spotify, people bought songs or albums, and were locked into their favorites or pirated music, which obviously contributed nothing to artist’s pockets.
Spotify is not the evil entity here, in my opinion. Record labels are.
Edit: Unsure how reliable of a source this is, but steaming reduced piracy levels by ~20% https://www.alliotts.com/articles/streaming-has-a-consumer-and-a-piracy-problem-the-answer-lies-in-the-music-industry/
I do think that we have become far removed from the old days, because music piracy was extremely prevelant before these services came out.
There are literally musicians with Only fans accounts because Spotify makes then such a pathetic amount of money. Every single artist I’ve ever seen comment on Spotify who hasn’t been amongst the most popular bands in their genre for decades have always said that Spotify is absolutely awful for artists.
Albums/singles traditionally weren’t money makers, merch and concerts were. Nobody is saying record labels weren’t and aren’t shitty, but believe it or not it’s possible for both of them to be shitty at the same time.
Your point feels like a false cause or an appeal to emotion fallacy.
It’s not Spotify’s responsibility that some artists choose to leverage their platform to promote OnlyFans or other side ventures. Artists have the autonomy to seek alternative income streams or even pursue entirely different careers if they find Spotify’s payouts insufficient. Blaming Spotify for these decisions ignores the broader context of the music industry and the role record labels play in revenue distribution.
Additionally, streaming platforms have helped reduce piracy and provided exposure to artists who might not have had it otherwise. The issue is much more nuanced than streaming services bad.
Being an artist doesn’t inherently entitle someone to make a lot of money. Success and income in any field depend on demand, skill, and market conditions. For example, writers often face similar challenges—many authors spend years creating books that may never generate significant income, and only a small percentage achieve financial success. Like musicians, they must often supplement their income through other means, such as teaching, freelancing, or speaking engagements.
Just as no one expects every writer to become a bestseller, it’s unrealistic to assume every musician will earn a substantial income solely from their art.
That said, given my views, I also do not want to be on platforms like Spotify. The music industry as a whole needs to make meaningful changes—finding a way to pay artists fairly, provide a robust recommendation engine, and maintain affordability for consumers. Until these systemic issues are addressed, the current model will continue to leave many artists struggling.
Sure, Spotify could raise their rates 100% and increase their payouts, but that wouldnt stop the record labels from taking their 80+%, as part of the contract the artist signed, and the consumer would end up falling back to piracy.
Devils advocate moment… If people keep listening (or sort of listening) and they are OK with music that seems to lack any soul, is it not just giving the audience what they want and deserve?
Devils concierge moment… What a bunch of shitbags.
I think it was revealed several times already in the past. Few examples out my hat:
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When it was revealed how little they pay artists
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When they tried to corner the podcast market
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When they gave Joe fucking Rogan two hundred and fifty fucking million dollars for an exclusive deal
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Many of my friends use it. I’m old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.
It’s all but impossible to purchase an mp3 anymore. Anywhere you can theoretically buy music does everything it can to lock you in to their ecosystem and prevent you from accessing your music outside of it.
Used CDs (or local library). Ripping software. Super easy. Or just buy from Amazon and download your files to local.
People sell whole collections or discographies on ebay too, I’ve had good luck with that. CD, then rip them. I don’t give a flying fuck what law says if I own the media I’m going to rip it.
For music that I really like, for artists that I really appreciate, I do look for ways to support them, because buying used does not.
No idea why you would think it’s hard to buy MP3s. I’ve never had a problem buying any, just go to the big name FAANG companies’ music store webpages or Bandcamp for FLACs. No DRM on any that I bought.
I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset. I tend to listen to a lot of variants of electronic music. 95% of the music is absolute crap. 4.5% is tolerable. And 0.5% might end up in my playlist. Less tan 1:100/songs. I have no doubt that “band” or artist names were made up to crank something out, abandoned, and started up under a different name to churn out more boring samesies hoping for a few plays in one of those “made for you” playlists.
So the service doing this for themselves and enabling it for profit isn’t surprising.
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One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset.
People being able to do art isn’t a bad thing, and I’m glad streaming has made publishing so much more accessible.
If you don’t like it you don’t have to listen to it. Every time some algorithm playlist churns out another spoonful of slop you don’t actually have to open wide.
You could just look up the artists you like and what other people like that’s like those artists, or look at collabs they’ve done or who remixes them or been remixed or covered by them and who they’ve been in bands with and what genre they tag to see who else is in that (micro)genre/niche.
I’ve never actually listened to someone else’s playlists, not man-made nor generated, only my own, and I regularly listen to extremely niche folks with 1k-40k Monthly Listeners all of whom are completely legitimate artists with unique great music, many of them electronic actually.
The truth is that 99% of people like copy-paste slop and that’s why they click on the slop and gravitate towards algos or charts for top ten artists.
And a global market for music with a low entry barrier means that it’s easier than ever to get started artistically expressing yourself for fun and for yourself, just as it should be, but still hard to be actually heard if you want to take it commercial, even if it’s fairer system than the gatekeeping of labels.
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Art… look, I get the premise of what you’re saying, but just because art is mediocre or just bad doesn’t free it of criticism because “art.” It can be shitty art and be called exactly that. It’s not sacred.
Edit: nice massive edit you did.
And is this argument that “if i don’t like it I don’t have to listen to it”? The WHOLE POINT of Spotify is to listen to it and be exposed to music, and my position was that it’s littered with crap. You’re basically telling me that if I don’t like billboards along the roadside I shouldn’t bother having a car? Lol, whatever man. Shitty art is still shitty art. Not everything belongs in a gallery.
Yeah sure, it’s actually good to think critically about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s existence is a negative, which is how your comment comes off - dismissive.
In the same way the world would be a slightly worse place without the joys of b-movies like The Room or Suburban Sasquatch or Plan 9 FOS, or without outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston etc…
I don’t need to listen to badly made music any more than I need to be exposed to budget hotel room art on the walls of the Louvre. You wanna watch B movies? Great! But nobody’s inserting 30 C and D films between your current netflix series.
“badly made music” is a subjective idea.
“Inserting 30 C and D films” implies forcing someone, you are never forced, Spotify is not a goddamn radio station, you can just click on the track or album or artists you want.
That’s the whole selling point of portable music since the days of the original Walkman, that you listen to what you want, and not what’s on the radio.
Same thing with Netflix, you can click the search bar and type in your film or show of choice, you can even stop using Netflix altogether instead of just consooming like a slop vacuum.
Maybe touch non-algorithmically selected non-personalized grass too.
I don’t know, do you people let Spotify decide that much about what you hear? I normally never let the music run through so that automatic recommendations play, but I choose explicitly what’s added next in the queue. So the problem mentioned in the article is not relevant to me at all.
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No, I don’t think that and I did not write anything like that. I was just sharing my perspective. And was interested in learning how other people use the player.
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I was asking a question, so yes, I wanted to know how other people see this and how people use the music queue.
Of course I’m sure that there are many different ways to interact with Spotify and I don’t think that any specific type of use is superior.
But since I don’t let the algorithms influence my music selection very much, the problem described in the article doesn’t have that big an impact on my everyday life.
I’m not saying that I think Spotify’s approach is right. I would like a much more user-friendly music player anyway, unfortunately I find Spotify quite cumbersome and inflexible.
Apart from that, I think that artists should get a bigger share for the use of their works.
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I just recently discovered a band on Soundcloud that has amazing tracks but they all have the familiar feeling of good songs being listened to decades ago, with the voice of the singers similar to that of famous singers of all genres. This is the band in question. [(https://soundcloud.com/flowerpunkhobo)]
I think it’s AI generated music from previous songs from the past.
