I don’t think this is earth shattering news. These companies identify when the audience is barely paying attention (to content and ads) and spits out the cheap stuff. I watch fly fishing and fly tying videos on YouTube and often fall asleep with it on. Then I wake up to the third hour of a professional bass fishing tournament. It happens a lot

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.

But I am grateful for independent journalism, which is now my main hope for the future.

Well guess who’s in control of eyeballs on those journalists?

Social media companies, who have clear incentives to deprioritize such content and have repeatedly shown they do.

Let’s reclaim music from the technocrats. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust.

While I agree with the article, I have issue with this line. These are not technocrats, they are “leaders” willing to make companies and their products objectively worse in the name of short term profits. These aren’t ‘technical experts put in charge,’ they are greedy, spineless pigs.

One of the best thing to do is to pirate almost all of your music and then reward the creators by going to their shows, buying them shirts or even CDs (you can also rip physical copy if piracy is not a thing)

Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.

I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.

Can anyone tell me how to cancel Spotify service? I went to their website, but it wouldn’t let me in without installing or logging into their app. And from their app I can’t find a way to cancel!

Wow, and they didn’t even get into the seperate streaming numbers.

the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it’s a great watch if you understand german!

it’s called Dirty Little Secrets

EDIT: here’s episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call “ghost musicians”

I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.

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."

An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?

LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don’t get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There’s a lot already wrong with the grammys.

The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn’t be to avoid paying them - they’ve already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.

There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label

I understand that it’s a different model that will not work for everyone. But check out Bandcamp’s payout model. Find new music via internet radio/MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that)/yt and buy it via the model that is straightforward and at least seems to put the most money in artists’ pockets

Bandcamp also has a “discover” feature where you can set which genres you are interested in. I did find some interesting albums this way too

I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify’s weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!

They pay artists better and it’s been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn’t easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.

Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you’re into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn’t pay as much as direct support.

This reads as an ad but I’m genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.

As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.

Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I’d love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.