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."
Published in January 2025, seeing the URL, huh.
The article is an excerpt from the full report, which comes out next month.
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.
That would be a health hazard, so it’s not really comparable.
It seems more like a soup joint using cheaper ingredients in their dishes, which is just… normal? I don’t get what the big deal is.
It’s normal if you accept it. You do not have to accept it. There’s also a good chance that it’s illegal in Spotify’s case, if not in the US then likely in Europe.
Under what law?
Likely antitrust.
That said if you’ve gone down the path of reasoning that says things that aren’t illegal are okay, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I suppose you could argue that Spotify can abuse its position in the same way that Walmart bullies its suppliers and Microsoft freezes out competition, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Like I said, it sounds like they’re just preferring cheaper sources.
This is a completely disingenuous comparison.
yeah, it’s more like they piss directly into peoples mouthes, but it turns out a few people are into that and can’t get enough of it
According to the RIAA, Spotify is a leading contributer to music revenue going up over the past decade plus https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf
Prior to spotify, people bought songs or albums, and were locked into their favorites or pirated music, which obviously contributed nothing to artist’s pockets.
Spotify is not the evil entity here, in my opinion. Record labels are.
Edit: Unsure how reliable of a source this is, but steaming reduced piracy levels by ~20% https://www.alliotts.com/articles/streaming-has-a-consumer-and-a-piracy-problem-the-answer-lies-in-the-music-industry/
I do think that we have become far removed from the old days, because music piracy was extremely prevelant before these services came out.
There are literally musicians with Only fans accounts because Spotify makes then such a pathetic amount of money. Every single artist I’ve ever seen comment on Spotify who hasn’t been amongst the most popular bands in their genre for decades have always said that Spotify is absolutely awful for artists.
Albums/singles traditionally weren’t money makers, merch and concerts were. Nobody is saying record labels weren’t and aren’t shitty, but believe it or not it’s possible for both of them to be shitty at the same time.
Your point feels like a false cause or an appeal to emotion fallacy.
It’s not Spotify’s responsibility that some artists choose to leverage their platform to promote OnlyFans or other side ventures. Artists have the autonomy to seek alternative income streams or even pursue entirely different careers if they find Spotify’s payouts insufficient. Blaming Spotify for these decisions ignores the broader context of the music industry and the role record labels play in revenue distribution.
Additionally, streaming platforms have helped reduce piracy and provided exposure to artists who might not have had it otherwise. The issue is much more nuanced than streaming services bad.
Being an artist doesn’t inherently entitle someone to make a lot of money. Success and income in any field depend on demand, skill, and market conditions. For example, writers often face similar challenges—many authors spend years creating books that may never generate significant income, and only a small percentage achieve financial success. Like musicians, they must often supplement their income through other means, such as teaching, freelancing, or speaking engagements.
Just as no one expects every writer to become a bestseller, it’s unrealistic to assume every musician will earn a substantial income solely from their art.
That said, given my views, I also do not want to be on platforms like Spotify. The music industry as a whole needs to make meaningful changes—finding a way to pay artists fairly, provide a robust recommendation engine, and maintain affordability for consumers. Until these systemic issues are addressed, the current model will continue to leave many artists struggling.
Sure, Spotify could raise their rates 100% and increase their payouts, but that wouldnt stop the record labels from taking their 80+%, as part of the contract the artist signed, and the consumer would end up falling back to piracy.
A couple of years ago we reached the tipping point where artist are paying more for Spotify to promote their music than Spotify is paying the artists. Spotify is more evil than even the record companies at this point.
Streaming only reduced piracy because it presented a more convenient option. This formula has already changed with their predatory behavior.
The reason artist create has little to do with money. It was never about that and those that think it make shitty music and are owned by corporations.
Technology has set us free from corporate control, but we have to shun commercial platforms. We will never be free running to the wide open arms of business ready to fleece us and lock up our culture behind their pay walls.
Enshitification is here for every corporate platform. There is no escape. The days are 0% interest aka free money are now long gone.
Better check the TOS doesn’t include acceptance of various concentrations of piss…
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.
Just because it’s normal doesn’t me it isn’t bad.
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.
Unfair competition.
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.
In some ways it seems worse that they make humans pump out this slop instead of a machine
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.
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.
I only listen to obscure Swedish jazz musician.
“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.
Oh good point.
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.
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.
didn’t they sue someone for doing this on his own? I guess they want to be the only ones doing it.
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.
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
I live in Europe. Had Spotify for about 5 years, stopped paying and using 6 months ago. I usually buy from Bandcamp, mostly non mainstream music, and download in FLAC and store it on my server. I can stream through the app on my phone when I’m out.
For the ones I can’t find on Bandcamp, or albums from major labels, I tend to find it on Qobuz in MP3. Pricing trends to be similar everywhere.
My pirating nowadays is mainly for old music or establish artists.Edit: autocorrect
I scan understand that you prefer to pay for your music, personally I prefer support artists in other ways than buying from platform.
I don’t put my music on my server simply because i prefer to have music directly on local, it’s not that heavy so I prefer having my music directly on hand. Even with the possibility of self hosting it.
The artists I like don’t come around where I live, so I can’t support through live music. I’ve done it in the past when I lived in a large city. In the end we’re all trying our best. And we all have our use cases, there’s no right way to listen to music.
Yeah you’re right and live music is my opinion always the best 😃
I have no issue sailing the seas, if I can’t buy it an own it, then I don’t see the problem in downloading it.
My mother hates Spotify and just wants to own her music and listen to like the 100 or so songs she likes, but absolutely cannot figure out how to buy them. She’s not really technical and wouldn’t pirate if she were.
Your mother is absolutely right and this old school way is not so old school, it’s not mainstream but not really old school. But yeah piracy is a bit hard to accommodate, so in this way there are two options, teach her how to use it OR download her music.
If you support your favorite creators by going to their show or buying stuff I don’t see the ethical problem of piracy. I’ve more than 1600 songs from a dozens of groups and I just love it, got the best quality (at least 16 bit 48Khz), can listen to the songs offline on my PC or with my iem (best kind of earbuds in my opinion).
The only downside is the size of the files, I have about 25gigs in my library, my phone and my pc have enough storage but if I’d like I could reduce this to around 5-6gigs by using “normal mp3 audio”
What IEM setup do you use?
really little but it’s a good start in my opinion, maybe one day I’ll invest in some more quality stuff. Currently I use the DAC of my phone with a pair of Tangzu Wan’er S.G.
Do you use iem yourself? If yes, what’s your setup?
Oh yeah I do… depends on which ones I grab. High end (in perception not so much quality) I have a couple sets of Triple driver Westones. The MMCX connector version arey favorite of the Westones . My other pair came with a garbage “dental floss” cable and TT bax connectors, when I complained I was told the metal inside was contamination free or some bullshit. I did not bother pointing out listening to digital music and mp3s reduces the audio quality enough that none of their marketing bullshit is relevant.
On the other side, KZ have been my go to, because I’m much less upset if I mess up 40.00 IEMs vs 400.00 Westones. I have the AS12 which claim to have 6 drivers in each ear, could be and probably is BS but they sound amazing.
I’ve also got a bunch of Sennheiser and Shure in ears. Shure is basically like oldstyle Westones but stiffer with the Sennheisers being the smallest and having the smallest visual footprint.
I use the last two for TV broadcast and the Sennheisers are 100% the way to go visually.
Lastly I use a set of DCMEKA dual drivers with a FiiO Bluetooth adapter, they too out punch their price point.
Or I’m old and deaf.
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.
People sell whole collections or discographies on ebay too, I’ve had good luck with that. CD, then rip them. I don’t give a flying fuck what law says if I own the media I’m going to rip it.
For music that I really like, for artists that I really appreciate, I do look for ways to support them, because buying used does not.
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 :-(
Me too, it’s just so much better
Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
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.
