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."

I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.

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.

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.

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

Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations

"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..

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

Many of my friends use it. I'm old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.

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"

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.

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.

Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.

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

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.

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

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

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)

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.