WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46518372

(no title)

geekamongus | 1 month ago

A couple of points missed for why Spotify is bad:

- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...

- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...

discuss

order

qwerpy|1 month ago

Also, even for premium customers they will display ads (local concert tickets) and add sponsored albums/tracks to playlists and the home screen.

jtokoph|1 month ago

This infuriates me. I launch the app to play music and am forced to interact with a pop-up promoting some random new release that is nowhere near the same universe as my music taste.

They recently did the annual “Wrapped” release. It took over the iOS Home Screen widget I use for playing/pausing recent playlists. The widget was unusable until you (1) watched the wrapped video in full on that device (didn’t matter that I had watched it on other devices before) and (2) you had to listen to the playlist they generated of your most played songs.

gynecologist|1 month ago

Yeah, I hate finding out when my favourite artists that I listen to on Spotify come to my city to play a show.

wismwasm|1 month ago

That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:

- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves

- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change

class3shock|1 month ago

I mostly only use spotify for discovery, using either discovery weekly or starting a radio stream from a particular song. Is there another service that treats artists better that I can use instead for this purpose?

chhs|1 month ago

If you don't mind self-hosting, I've recently started using ListenBrainz in combination with Navidrome. You can upload your Spotify listen history to seed it, and scrobble your ongoing listening to keep it up to date with what you listen to. You can use a plugin[1] to automatically generate daily, weekly, and discovery playlists based on your listen history, and what you have available in your library. You can generate even more playlists using ListenBrainz data via their tool, Troi[2].

[1] https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla...

[2] https://troi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

oblique|1 month ago

last.fm or rateyourmusic

cdrnsf|1 month ago

They also commission music from "ghost artists" that they can pay a fix rate, then place said artists in popular playlists to reduce royalty payouts.

Spivak|1 month ago

I really don't understand the hate around this one.

1. Spotify made a playlist that's "Chill Jazz To Study To" that's really popular.

2. They realize that listeners don't actually care about the specific artists in the playlist since it's background noise.

3. There are companies who specialize in making "b-roll" music for background noise and have a huge library of it just sitting around.

4. Spotify realizes they can license them on the cheap.

5. Profit?

Seems like a win for everyone involved including the listener who gets fresh tracks in their study playlists basically forever.

DelightOne|1 month ago

Isn't that how every streaming service does it?

maybsum1else|1 month ago

gotta mix in a little baby powder, ya know?

xp84|1 month ago

Wow. The ghost artists - that’s horrifying. Clearly Spotify would prefer to completely squeeze out everybody below the clout level of the top 10 artists, and replace the rest with stock music. I would bet anything they’ll cut out the middle-artist any day now and fill their playlists with AI sloptunes.

Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.

hydrogen7800|1 month ago

>Now the sound music comes in silver pills

>Engineered to suit you, building cheaper thrills

>Music of rebellion makes you wanna rage

>But it's made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age

The Sound of Muzak by Porcupine Tree (2002)

tambourine_man|1 month ago

Also, the UX is deliberately user-hostile.

Its only use case seems to be algorithm playlist. It’s an atrocious music player any other way.

troupo|1 month ago

> Paying musicians cheap wages

Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.

"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?

The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.

> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote

1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own

2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).

And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.

Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).

As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".

And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".

Performative outrage is performative.

> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams

1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.

> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform

Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.

So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).

Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.

thordenmark|1 month ago

[deleted]

stryan|1 month ago

> You can generate a heavy metal song that is actually heavy metal, same with other genres that have been destroyed, or the kind of music that just isn't being made anymore.

Or just listen to any of the easily available fantastic metal albums released in the past year? I could see the argument for incredibly niche genres (though in the age of Bandcamp I'd love to see a genre that doesn't have at least a few artists producing music for it) but there's plenty of heavy metal being made these days in both the general and the traditional (i.e. the heavy metal genre versus general metal genre) sense.

soiltype|1 month ago

It's very hard for me to see how someone could believe this unless they never even tried to actually find new music. I just bought a great new metal album (human made) yesterday.

potatoicecoffee|1 month ago

it probably is you just need to spend more time finding it. why would you choose this over finding music that has been made by someone interesting that lets you form a community or see a band live?

denismi|1 month ago

> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams

... 1000 plays in a year?

We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.

If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?