Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.

I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.

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.

Wow, and they didn't even get into the seperate streaming numbers.

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 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"

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 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.

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.

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.

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

The last and only truth I needed to know about Spotify was it's 250 million dollar deal with Joe Rogan, who is antivax incel cancer, and that was it for me. No need to learn or know any more about them.

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.

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

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.