Technology

I don't pay for Spotify, but if I do pay for music then I would choose Tidal

I think it was revealed several times already in the past. Few examples out my hat:

1. When it was revealed how little they pay artists

2. When they tried to corner the podcast market

3. When they gave Joe fucking Rogan two hundred and fifty fucking million dollars for an exclusive deal

I just recently discovered a band on Soundcloud that has amazing tracks but they all have the familiar feeling of good songs being listened to decades ago, with the voice of the singers similar to that of famous singers of all genres. This is the band in question. [(https://soundcloud.com/flowerpunkhobo)]

I think it's AI generated music from previous songs from the past.

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 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

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 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.

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

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)

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

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.

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