for years, under its so-called “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program, Spotify has been systematically replacing real artists’ songs with low-cost stock music—often under fake artist profiles—on its popular mood playlists like “chill,” “jazz,” and “peaceful piano,” in order to reduce the royalty rate they pay out to musicians.

this is very depressing yet little surprising if you assume that the main goal of spotify is to increase its profit and reduce what they pay to artist (which already is not great to begin with haha)

there have been last year quite some video essays on the topic speculating whether spotify was pushing such music on us - playlists made up of songs that all kinda sounded the same, by artists with not much of a track record - turns out they were correct.

i for one cancelled my subscription some time ago, not that it makes a difference to them, but for me it does.

This is not good news, specially for those with kids, as they are not able to distinguish or even look for new music out of the usual outlets.

I miss sharing tapes with friends, and listen to full albums for fucks sake! Nowadays even real artists only release a song every N weeks, and they are built generally for the tiktokers and video creators so they can go viral.

While this is bad, I think live music is going to get more attention because I hope humans want to listen to music played by humans. But who knows.

It is sad, at the same time it is the same material condition everyone else experiences too. If you make a product that is good and you cannot monopolize solely on the brand, there is immediate copy cats who will lower the price. It‘s crab mentality, but why would artists on Spotify get a better deal?

This is a topic not spoken about loudly enough. I feel a yearning for the days of MySpace music, where if this were the case Tom would’ve had a “sort by label” where everyone could filter out what they don’t want their searches sourced from after idk 100 people suggested it on his profile and have it done by lunch.

I started releasing music on the Audius Web3 Crypto Based Platform and its community playlist weekly release they were doing in 2024 got me on track for, well more tracks, but I’ve had such and easy time reaching so many other artists who were just so willing to collaborate and work with someone such as myself at the time who is just starting to get the ball rolling. At this moment in time it is home base for my music releases granted I have seven or eight or so tracks on

But other than that I’m still just rather aimless as to what to even do with all of the original music that I’m playing and recording.

I can only highly recommend Kyla Chayka's Filterworld to people who are interested in this topic. He unpacks how filters and algos impact our worlds, starting with coffee shops all around the world, up to things like plastic surgery and of course music.

a big chunk of how one can get out of this is at least as an individual is switching default mode of consumption from passive to active.

Ofc, it does not change the system, but it might make oneself a bit better off which is not a bad start in my books.

Thank you im going to check it out this afternoon!