The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed

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.
- 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.
  
  The normal behavior of corporations IS bad. By definition.
  
  IANAL but it seems akin to the antitrust case against Microsoft for bundling their own web browser in with Windows or movie studios also owning theaters and giving preferential treatment to their own films.
  
  You seem to be saying that something normal and legal cannot be bad.
  
  Just because it's normal doesn't me it isn't bad.
  
  Unfair competition.
  
  I'm just surprised that anyone didn't assume this was happening. If most people are using playlists generated by Spotify, how are they not expecting Spotify to choose songs that are also in their interest? Furthermore, how would this be different from the practices of a radio station? Seems like manufactured outrage to me.
- Her article: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
  
  Published in January 2025, seeing the URL, huh.
- 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 just want to remind people that you may still have a used CD store in your city, also 2nd hand stores for CDs. They tend to be quite cheap these days.
  
  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.
- Yeah, I switched to deezer then, haven't had any trouble with it.

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.

The last and only truth I needed to know about Spotify was it's 250 million dollar deal with Joe Rogan, who is antivax incel cancer, and that was it for me. No need to learn or know any more about them.
- Normies love some Rogan he shills Russian propaganda to them!
  
  Just like Fuckface 45 is the normal man's idea of a rich man, Rogan is the normal man's idea of a smart man.
  And wrong on both accounts.

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.
  https://www.universalmusic.ca/press-releases/jon-batistes-we-are-catapults-to-global-success-after-winning-album-of-the-year-at-the-grammy-awards/
  
  That's a good counterexample. Do you know what "more heavily influenced" means? It means "not always universally every time, but more often".
- And Lenin said, “the best way to undermine society is through its music” — Bob Duvall
  It’s a fake quote from Lenin, but suitably apt.
  
  Weird how we're supposed to think something is true and wise if it's attached to somebody famous.
  "Bleach cures anything." -- William Shakespeare

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.
  
  In some ways it seems worse that they make humans pump out this slop instead of a machine

"Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians."
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection..
- What's the equivalent for the movie and TV streaming?
  
  I was thinking about the Paramount Decrees and how the repelling lead to the creation of studio owned streaming servies which has exclusive acces to the studio's library like Paramount+, Disney+, Discovery+, apple Tv+, Peacock etc.

Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations
- So instead of the cents that artists get from streaming you propose they get nothing at all? You can buy from Bandcamp if the artists are on it and use ListenBrainz.
  
  Exactly, they aren't losing anything and there's hope a better system will come along.
  Agreed on Bandcamp though. The very few artists who use it get my money through there.
  
  Didnt bandcamp get bought by some big company a little while ago? Sp bandcamp just doesent have the library yet. I do like it though in its current form (until it gets enshittified)
  
  I'm very much in favor of people supporting artists, but I don't feel like people should be obliged to do so. I don't believe copyright is doing society any good, and I think everyone should be free to download/listen to whatever they please. If you make music and set it free in the world, let the world listen. If they like it, they might support you, and if they don't that's too bad. Feel free to disagree, but that's my point of view. If I pay for music it's mostly by going to concerts. I've also donated to artists, for instance to Cardiacs when their lead singer got ill. And Major Parkinson through their kickstarter campaigns.
- Can I import my history from Last? I've had my lfm account for like... almost 20 years, and I really don't want to have to start off blank...
  
  yes, you can connect them and you can import from last.fm. I was in the same situation as you, first I had both simultaneously running for some time, because I needed to get comfortable with the idea of removing last.fm. I also have data since 2008 so I felt a bit insecure 'risking' that. But after a while I concluded there was really no need for me to keep last.fm so I removed it. Haven't had any regrets. ListenBrainz isn't perfect but, despite it's small development team, it's sgnificantly improving every year.
  https://listenbrainz.org/settings/music-services/details/ Here you can "Connect to your Last.FM account to import your entire listening history and automatically add your new scrobbles to ListenBrainz."
- My listenbrainz recs are kinda meh compared to last.fm. I scrobble to both, and maloja via multi-scrobbler.
  What server do you use to host your music? Would love to set up one of the *arrs to auto download recs from the different scrobble databases and then delete them after a week or so if I don't "like" the track. Are you aware of any client can support that flow?
  I will say, none of the scrobble DBs I have used have recommendations as good as Spotify. Daylists are pretty sweet. I do think the Spotify API is free to use but I havent taken a dive in on what I can get from it
  
  I don't know about spotify recommendations, but given the incredible amount of user data they have it makes a lot of sense that they have the best recommendations. I love LB for providing a FOSS alternative, and though they steadily grow, they are still comparatively tiny. But I think they are our best shot at noncorporate automated music recommendations.
  For your questions, I have no idea. I'm not tech savvy at all myself.

When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”
Insulting your users, that always works out so well
- Insulting the artists too. Just like when Daniel Ek said that the "content" on Spotify was "basically free" to make.
- I'm all aboard Spotify alternatives, but this post is an echo chamber of people that are far more likely to know "the difference". We aren't representative of Spotify's customer base.
  Most people listening to music probably wouldn't be able tell the difference from cutting the quality down by double digit percentages. This is exemplified by the number of people using wireless headphones.
  Spotify certainly could offer service on par with Tidal and similar, but being beholden to shareholders that only look at the bottom line and never the quality of the service, that executive might not be right, but they're not exactly wrong.

After comparing the sound quality of Amazon, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal, the dynamic range of Tidal really stood out - even in lowest quality. At that time, I read that Tidal had the highest payout to the artists. I also like that the service is partially owned by several artists.
The recommendations and feeds are really top notch, just the right mix of stuff I know and like and nice surprises. The "Daily Discovery" often explores a certain genre or mood. There are so many cool bands I've found - also from genres I don't usually listen to. I can wholeheartedly recommend the service.
- Or Qobuz, which is like Tidal, but better and they never tried to sell users on made-up MQA hi-res.
  
  Qobuz is refreshingly good.
  
  I heard of Tidal a long time ago but their non-English support is simply missing. It doesn't even show the original Japanese titles of many songs I listen to.
  How about Qobuz?
  Edit: Tested Qobuz and the Japanese support was quite bad too. I searched for a Japanese artist, their name showed up but only one song was there. Tried searching for the title of a song instead, no hit. I thought I was region blocked. Then tried romaji and finally more results, mixed in English and Japanese though. In Spotify I can search in Japanese, English, or romaji when I'm too lazy to switch input method. Also in Qobuz lots of Japanese artists' profiles were incomplete.

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.

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"

The only people who make money on Spotify is Spotify. Support artists directly if you want them to continue to create.
- Is there a streaming model that better supports artists, has a large catalog of music, and is reasonably affordable?
  
  I'm pretty sure Tidal pays artists better than Spotify or Apple Music.
  
  The best thing you can do for artists is pirate everything (cutting out Spotify etc), and purchase an album a month from a band/artist you actually want to support. Buy direct for the artist, or Bandcamp (especially on Bandcamp Fridays)
  
  Apple Music pays over double per stream to artists and is better quality audio than Spotify.

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?
  
  I imagine they will inevitably enshittify since the buyout but they seem to be good still for now.
  The nice thing is I get to download the files so I'm not fucked when it happens.
  
  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.
- MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that
  ListenBrainz

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.
- Yeah. Didn't work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn't be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.

didn't they sue someone for doing this on his own? I guess they want to be the only ones doing it.

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.
  
  I believe that Bandcamp is doing a pretty good job with it. But you can always sail the seas
  
  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.
  
  Used CDs (or local library). Ripping software. Super easy. Or just buy from Amazon and download your files to local.
  
  Yeah, going from "Google Play Music" to "YouTube Music" was such a downgrade. Shit like Bluetooth had more issues with YTM, and they completely eliminated the ability to purchase music. It sucks and there are still no good alternatives on Android :-(
  
  It's not hard to download a YouTube video as an mp3, so all you've gotta do is rip it from one of the many places it's posted up.
  
  I've bought a ton of music off bandcamp and qobuz. Definitely not mp3 tho, not when lossless versions are also available
  
  Tidal
- Me too, it's just so much better

Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
- Tidal has decided to sunset it's app, which means it's basically on maintenance mode now. Somewhat off putting.
  
  Did they? Couldn't find an announcement on the fly.
  
  Its app on a specific platform? Or do you mean the entire service? Seems weird that they would sunset their only product.
  
  I jumped ship over to Quboz for this reason. I've been really happy with it

I think it was revealed several times already in the past. Few examples out my hat:
When it was revealed how little they pay artists
When they tried to corner the podcast market
When they gave Joe fucking Rogan two hundred and fifty fucking million dollars for an exclusive deal

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 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.
- Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
  
  I couldn't find any info on this. Do you have an article?
- I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.
  The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.
  I think Deezer's best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.
  However, if you don't have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.
  I'd recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn't say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.
- I've been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn't missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.
  I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven't used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.
  I'm not sure if it's just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn't actually effect functionality, so it's just annoying more than anything.
- In my experience, the same fake albums show up on Deezer as Spotify. Frankly, I think the best way is Bandcamp. For for an album, download it forever. Stop paying to listen to the same music over and over and get DRM free tracks you can listen to your way while giving the money to the artists selling their albums directly.
  
  Bandcamp the union busting company that laid off like 75% of its staff over 2023...?
- I've been using Deezer for almost a year now.
  Things I like:
  Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
  Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.
  Things I (we) don't like:
  As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows ("hits" in other word).
  My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don't have servers.
  
  I find Flow fantastic for discovering new songs.
- I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.
  It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it'll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it's just me.
- Using it for four years or so, very happy with it.
- i use it with deemix-gui to download my music. works like a charm (using your ARL as login method still works)

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.
- 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.
- Completely agree. I had this exact discussion not too long ago about the recording industry 20+ years ago - or at least before the advent of widely available mp3 downloads. The recording industry and DJ/Radio was and still is an awful tyranny that plays kingmaker and squeezes every possible cent out of fan and artist alike while telling the fan what they’re supposed to consume and the star what they’re supposed to sound like.
  The upside to that content filter was that some genuinely good music got made and put on albums where both A and B sides were good to great. The downside is that a ton of artists never had a chance at being heard who might be just as good or might have shifted the genre, added to the repertoire, yet the music landscape was more monochromatic.
  IMO there was a lot less chaff 30 odd years ago because they got filtered hard. But consumers were also forced to listen to the billboard top whatever all the time.
  Now with affordable tools readily available and the ability to easily upload music to various streaming services the production of music has been democratized. This is good in the sense that it lets more people be heard. It’s also not so good because the ability to climb to the top is far far harder, far fewer will make any real money, and for every good single or A side there’s a thousand B side throwaways.
- 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.

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.
  https://podcasting2.org/apps
- 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.

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

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)
- Ideally just send them money, most of the are set up for donations.
  Tshirts and CDs create waste unless you actually end up using them
  
  I totally agree with your point of view, I was talking to buy stuff to use it. When sending money I usually just gives some money to the group at the end of the show by hand
- Or buy off Bandcamp on Friday's. But also support local and developmental acts
  
  why Fridays?

I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you'd expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.
That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That's another good way to never listen to ads.
- https://spotube.krtirtho.dev/ is another alternative, but it uses the Spotify api (you can hook up your account) and backends it by playing music from yt.
  
  Thanks, giving this a try.

Thats some pretty bad stuff: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3wLm5nlYrHkbd29ilMRq89?nd=1&dlsi=50e31b2329204ddd
its all the same song as the article states.

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!
- If you are using Paypal, log in to Paypal and go to Bills. Select Spotify and scroll down - there should be a link to cancel the subscription at the bottom.
- This is a legit problem with many services now. And some companies are, right now, being sued for this dark pattern practice.
  You can sign up with one click, but to cancel they make it impossible. Some companies literally will process an account cancellation only by registered letter. How messed up is that?

The chart showing how much money the CEO has made off selling the stock.. wouldn't he run out of shares? It appears executives have sold over a billion dollars in 2024.
Makes you wonder if they heard these investigations were ongoing and figured they'd sell shares before lawsuits came and any potential dips in the company worth.
If so.. insider trading charges would be nice
- CEOs are often compensated with stock, AFAIK.
  Insider trading is almost a joke now, and about to become way more of one under the next few years of the SEC.
- If so.. insider trading charges would be nice
  Yes with fines that lead than the profits... Nowadays charges are just used to seal the deal, see plebs, I settled with dady government, everything is cool.

Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it's barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can't find a song I wanna listen to. It's simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it's over with similar songs. I've discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn't shown up. And so far it hasn't been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren't just straight up trying to replace them.
I'm not saying Pandora is objectively better. I'm just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.
- I still prefer Pandora, it’s great for music discovery and it pays artists more than Spotify. I also feel like its recommendations are better or maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.
  I’ve Definitely found new artists and albums after listening on Pandora that I went off and purchased CDs or albums thanks to it.
  Apple Music’s recommendations were fairly good as well, and they also pay more than Spotify, but not tons and I abhor how it integrates music I don’t own with my actual library.
  I need to try Tidal, but I also just don’t get the “you’ll stream everything and own nothing” idea. I just like “radio” services for discovering new stuff.
- Problem is Pandora is US only. They stopped streaming to the rest of the world years ago.
  
  Damn I didn't even know. That's pretty dumb on their part as they could have been a bigger competitor. I'm sure they made the decision before Spotify took off as hard as it did.

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.
- An artificial effect is not the same as a natural cause.
  
  Sure, but can you explain what you mean by that in this context?

not sure if this explains why their stocks are so extremely expensive. every time i look at it it's worse.

Never had a compliant with Apple Music, has a decent Android client with Auto support too.
- Yeah, I’m looking to switch from iPhone to Pixel soon, but I’ll be keeping my AM sub. Had it since the day it launched, and it’s been great.
  
  Part of it too for me is that they've given me the student price for 6 years after I left school lmao

I don't pay for Spotify, but if I do pay for music then I would choose Tidal

Have known this for years, just look at any sleep or ambient playlist

So happy I switched to Tidal long ago because the pathetic music stream quality it has. I made me had headaches , literally. For the ones who don't know Best quality audio streaming are Tidal and Apple music . YouTube music is pure crap quality as Spotify.

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

That it all-around sucks? That I've been telling people this since it's creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.
It's all of the above, duh.
- I agree with most of this, but how have you never come across Munch's "The Scream" before? (Have to admit, I lol'd at your description of it tho)
  
  Seriously. I'm not at all an art guy so I feel qualified to observe that The Scream is probably one of the top 5 (and definitely top 10) most well known paintings, somewhere shortly after Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Starry Night.

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.
- I usually only listen to one album at a time, front to back. But I think most people don't do that.
  
  Yes, listening to whole albums is not only great with albums you already know, but it's also my favourite way to get to know new artists. A single song is often not enough to understand the whole picture or range.
  Well, seems to be an old-fashioned approach. But I'm also not the type of person who has music blare in the background all day. So I don't like the radio-like approach by Spotify to just let anything play what the algorithm thinks is fitting.
- 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.

I switched to YouTube Music a long time ago and I'm glad I did.
- I switched my corpo daddy for another corpp daddy 🤡
  Hey we all need the service but let's be real YouTube music ain't a flex here, just a different poison.
  If you want to flex, host some local content and deny the parasite that sweet profit
  
  It's crazy every corporate platform is made shitty after time. It is like the whole system is designed to get you to buy under false pretenses and then later pull the rug out from under you.
  Oh wait, did you hear about the new corporate music platform!? Yeah it is great, they pay artist a ton and pinky promise to never turn evil. Let's all go there!

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.