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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."
So basically Payola 2.0
I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.
Ngl, I canceled them and haven’t gone back since. Don’t really miss it much, I try to use the same cost as my subscription to buy music every month on CD when I can.
I have recently discovered Qobuz (French company). You can purchase digital music. They aren’t cheap, but they have selection and hi-res music (sometimes 24 bit).
But good on you for the CDs, too!
I heard they pay artists a lot more. Need to double check.
Try bandcamp too. Almost all goes to the artist and you get FLACs.
I’ve used them plenty but…
They recently got acquired by a turd company and if I remember correctly, already issued a round of layoffs.
Don’t recall the details. Check.
I cancelled it the second I found out how easy it was to get it for free.
I still buy FLAC releases individually from artists I like, I just use Shittify for discovery. Fuck 'em.
There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label
Yes and…
Lily Allen and Kate Nash are on OnlyFans and make more money there…
Yeah, but that’s probably partially due to their existing fame.
Well, yeah.
They make more money from OF than from Spotify… and they are not doing porn.
For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.
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. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
I’m just amazed they haven’t tried to use AI to write and record their shoddy muzak, cutting out the musician all together.
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.
I only listen to obscure Swedish jazz musician.
The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality.
Do you know who Jon Batiste is?
The album won on quality. The sales spiked after the win.
That’s a good counterexample. Do you know what “more heavily influenced” means? It means “not always universally every time, but more often”.
I have no idea what you’re trying to say. It’s not a counter example. It is literally the example given in the article, which you quoted.
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”
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.
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.
Once something gets critical mass and becomes “default,” it doesn’t even matter, people just use it and take it.
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’m a bandcamp user and buy stuff regularly there, only because they are the lesser of all evils… but what is their current status? I thought they went bankrupt and owned by tencent?
Are they still fighting the good fight? Or heading toward enshittification?
They are still doing the Bandcamp Fridays where everything you pay goes to the artist, so that’s nice.
Bandcamp was owned by Epic Games, not Tencent for a short while, and now owned by Songtradr which does not have anything to do with tencent.
At least, this is what i found.
didn’t they sue someone for doing this on his own? I guess they want to be the only ones doing it.
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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Spotify was my penultimate subscription. Still have to bring my AWS Lightsail instances back in house. :(
Yeah, enshitification indeed. Was quite happy 4 years ago. Worth $10/mo. to get what I want and some new stuff occasionally thrown in. Suggested music tracked my tastes, easy UI, all that.
Then they upped it $1. Fine. Then I started getting all sort of bullshit when my playlist ran out. “Fuck was that?!”
Now that I cancelled the paid version, the ads are killing me. Look, I’m a GenXer, accustomed to ads for free TV and radio. I’m fine with that revenue model. But fuck me, just like modern radio, the ads became so thick as to be distracting. And of course I can’t use it in the deep woods where my internet is sketchy.
I download all my playlists. FOSS I can use to upload and play that on my phone? Guess I’m back to pirating.
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.
Yeah I guess it’s always been this way. Does anyone remember the Captain Oblivious mp3 “mixtapes” he used to put out regularly, like 20 years ago? Indie and underground music. Rule of thumb, I would listen to only about 1 in 20 songs more than once.
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.
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.
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.
Really hated when they started adding auto play of another unrelated podcast when my current podcast ends, like I don’t want your shitty podcast selection Spotify. The enshitification of the web continues.
I deleted the app the day the day they implemented this. The podcast they started playing was a 30 minute podcast advertising mattress firm or sleep country.
Don’t use Spotify for podcasts. They’re actively trying to kill off what we know as podcasting and trying to lock the media into their own service.
Instead, use any app that supports Podcasting 2.0.
If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it
We can do this with crypto now.
Ideally you want to use a hardware wallet though so the payment money doesn’t have to sit in a hot wallet connected to the internet, but that means pressing a physical button to initiate the payment, but it could just sit beside the computer, and eventually be built into computers.
Alternatively, you could have a hot wallet and it’s all seamless, but you risk the loss of funds from a compromised browser.
It’d include a permanent record of your ownership of what you purchased as well as long as you keep that seed phrase around, so you could redownload it if you lost the files.
Edit: And if the system was built around something like IPFS then the files would always exist.
I’m not sure how IPFS is different from torrents. I don’t think it’s solvable with blockchain too.
It’s nice that someone’s made electronic distributed gold, but that doesn’t include a payment system.
EDIT: in any case, I’m aware of various systems covering small pieces of what I’ve described.
Maybe I’m thinking of a different distributed system, but there’s one out there that replicates it’s files to different hosts if one ever goes down. With torrents people need to actively keep it up and it could be just one machine that eventually turns off, or one machine that the FBI raid and take down.
Edit: and crypto was for the payments and tracking of ownership. If you want it to be that easy to pay as pinging an IP, it can’t be credit cards or other similar methods. There are barriers all over the place to sending and receiving with that and it’d be rampant with fraud.
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.
