The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
A year-long investigation by an indie journalist is a call to action
Article is talking about spam artists on Spotify who make playlists out of a couple songs you like, then fill it up with their own spammy music so it tricks you into playing their songs.
Reply All had a podcast on the same topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reply-all/id941907967?i=1000553542932
I appreciate the author's interest in the subject and agree that this is incredibly shady especially when you look at the CEO's stock sales on the last year.
But I pretty strongly disagree with their take on how to remedy the situation, that "record labels should grow a spine" and create some streaming service controlled by them (and granted an antitrust exception by the federal government).
Streaming services were an innovation from outside the music industry's control, and I don't trust them to be good stewards of the idea if we cement their control and make it harder for new competitors. It seems like the problem is pretty obvious (late stage capitalism, no criminal accountability for white collar crime). I'm baffled how the author completely skips over these root causes and thinks weakening antitrust regulation is the solution.
Indeed-- the way forward would instead be regulation to weaken the record labels hold on licensing rights: basically, if they license music X to streaming service A, any other reasonable competing service must be allowed to license the same piece of music for the same price. This would open for real competition in the space in a way that doesn't necessaily drive down license fees.
Agreed, if music labels start making their own streaming services, then it will go just like it has with video. Where there is now more streaming services than a regular person can feasibly pay for, and every service only has a small subset of what you want to listen to... Imaging needing to switch streaming service to listen to music from a different artist because they happened to have signed with a different label, and being unable to make a pplaylist that incorporates songs from artists from two different labels...
Tldr, anyone?
This article is a TLDR of an investigatory book coming out next month already, but the double TLDR:
Spotify has begun targeting "background music genres" like jazz and electronic music for "Perfect Fit Content". It's made by nameless "artists" (mentioned to possibly be AI generated) and they get no royalties (don't have to be paid).
Spotify takes this song, posts it to dozens, if not hundreds of fake artists' pages, and boosts them to the top of the algorithm to get hundreds of millions of listens. More listens than actual popular human artist. This artificially pumps Spotify's stock prices, and then the CEO of spotify dumped their stock, making nearly a billion dollars this year.
Likened to Payola, this hurts actual artists' payout rates on Spotify.
Not only is Spotify padding their library with AI-generated crap, they're cashing out now before people find out and take action. According to the article and its sources, Daniel Ek sold shares worth ~$348.3 Million dollars in just this year alone. Remember he's the CEO who caused a backlash earlier this year for saying the cost of producing music as an artist was almost zero. Now we know why - because he truly thinks using generative AI to make music produces just as good music as that of real artists - when it comes to lining his pocketbook, that is.
Whew. I haven't used Spotify in a long while, and it appears I had the right idea in a bass ackwards way 😅
Right? I left after they heavily promoted podcasts I did not feel comfortable about. But their long list of antics and misdeeds kept me away.
This new thing… wow.
Welp, adios
It's hard to say goodbye. But it's easy to rejoin Premium anytime.
Someone who enjoys writing.