This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
I don't pay for Spotify, but if I do pay for music then I would choose Tidal
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.
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.
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've bought a ton of music off bandcamp and qobuz. Definitely not mp3 tho, not when lossless versions are also available
I believe that Bandcamp is doing a pretty good job with it. But you can always sail the seas
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.
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
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.
This ratio has been true of music forever. We have always depended on filters to get to the good stuff. Used to be access to recording studios (hence labels fucking everyone), then DJ’s setting taste (had its own problems). Pick a period of time there’s always a group or economic filter separating wheat from the chaff (not perfectly but generally successfully?) which makes it hard for independent/lesser knows to break through.
Now everyone can record and publish easily, so it’s about finding shortcuts or tricks to game the system and get ahead. Or, as always, just get lucky 🤷♂️
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.
I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.
Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations
My listenbrainz recs are kinda meh compared to last.fm. I scrobble to both, and maloja via multi-scrobbler.
What server do you use to host your music? Would love to set up one of the *arrs to auto download recs from the different scrobble databases and then delete them after a week or so if I don't "like" the track. Are you aware of any client can support that flow?
I will say, none of the scrobble DBs I have used have recommendations as good as Spotify. Daylists are pretty sweet. I do think the Spotify API is free to use but I havent taken a dive in on what I can get from it
the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it's a great watch if you understand german!
it's called Dirty Little Secrets
EDIT: here's episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call "ghost musicians"
"Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians."
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection..
There's a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it's Spotify, on top of your label
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)
Or buy off Bandcamp on Friday's. But also support local and developmental acts
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.
