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The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally
I listened to a few ambient playlists on Spotify and Youtube and they were just slop. Even when I was doing something else (e.g. programming) I became annoyed that the background music was so bad. Same with the lo-fi beats channel that is so popular.

I'm not sure there is a problem if a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop. I do, however, think its a problem if Spotify is giving preferential treatment to slop, as is claimed in this post. I also would prefer a system that better supported musicians, while having the ease of use of Spotify.

> a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop

this is perhaps the crux of the matter!

Very few people in my social circle whose taste in music I share. The majority of them don't even have a "taste" and content with whatever their car-radio pumps out.

Does that drive me mad? Mildly.

Appreciating and recognizing great music is a deeply personal experience.

Like appreciating different culinary tastes that requires training and exposure (ideally from a young age), it's also hard work (the older and more settled our tastes get).

Most people are stupid. What an unexpected discovery! Considering the fact that the crux of the problem is that people love slop and always have, does the fact that slop has become AI-generated change anything?

Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music? I usually just wait to somehow stumble upon something.

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Give Pye Corner Audio, Craven Faults and Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan a go
Add to that: Floating Points, Rival Consoles, Brian Eno…
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See also Lustmord, Detritus, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Poppy Ackroyd, Moon Ate the Dark
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To me the really gross bit is the dishonesty around the slop. Same track with multiple different names appearing under multiple different artist names is egregious. Classic corporate disregard for customers.
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>I'm not sure there is a problem if a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop. I do, however, think its a problem if Spotify is giving preferential treatment to slop, as is claimed in this post. I also would prefer a system that better supported musicians, while having the ease of use of Spotify.

This is not only a problem for Spotify, but for every platform on the internet that publishes content, particularly for social media. Most people don't actively discern whether something they observe is slop or not, and it's a huge problem concerning the autheticity of information and the consequences of it. This issue began with text content back in the 90's when internet spam boomed after Eternal September and the reachable market audience for it boomed, but has been slowly evolving until recently until the "passable" capability of artificial content generation has both increased exponentially and become finacially feasible for bad actors.

There have been reports of Spotify being gamed by gangs in Sweden (and iirc abroad) to monetize artificial engagement[0], which I found tied in very closely to some of the amateur research I've done regarding bots on Reddit. Before the public availability of LLMs and other generative AI, most content that was "monetizable" was mostly direct engagements (views, likes, followers, reposts, shotgunning ads, etc.); this resulted in bot farms all over the internet that focused on providing services that gave exactly these results. On Reddit specifically, many of the more sophisticated bot networks and manipulators would feature content that was scraped from other sources like Youtube, Twitter, Quora, and others (including Reddit itself) and simply consist of reposting content. Some of the more novel agents would use markov generators to get around bot detection tools (both first-party and third party), but they would often create nonsense content that was easily discernable as being such.

After generative AI took off toward the late end of covid, these bot farms and nefarious agents capitalized on generative AI instantly and heavily. This is particularly known as an issue on Facebook with the "like this image because this AI generater "person" lives in a gutter and has a birthday cake and is missing all their 7 limbs" pictures, but the text content they can produce is insidiously everywhere on sites like Reddit and Quora and Twitter. Some small subset of these agents are either poorly made or buggy and have exposed their prompts directly, which is rather embarrassing, but others are incredibly sophisticated and have been used in campapigns that reach far beyond just gaming outreach on platforms - many of these bot farms are also now being used for political disinformation and social engineering compaigns, and to great effect.

Witnessing the effects of these agents in such mundane places as a music playlist is a dismal annoyance, but learning that they are in fact being used to alter public opinion and policy on top of culture and the arts is disturbing. Many people have scorned large production studios such as A24 for their us of generative AI[1], but not being able to trust even assumedly-mundane content anywhere online is something that most people, and especially the the average consumer, is not prepared for. People who are genuinely interested in anything are going to soon recognize that there is a market for gatekeeping content, but they are not going to want to participate in it because the barrier for entry is going to be completely different from that of the classic internet that we have all generally come to accept and build upon.

[0]: https://www.stereogum.com/2235272/swedish-gangs-are-reported... [1]: https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/a24-criticized-for-using-ai...

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I don’t get the problem here. You can listen to whatever you want on Spotify. I listen to it everyday, already knowing what I want to listen to, and never encountered this. However, it sounds like they are paying real musicians to create music directly for Spotify, to bypass record labels. That sounds like a good thing all around- record labels don’t seem to do anything useful.
If I have a playlist and I get Spotify to add to it, I expect it to add things that people who like the things that I like also like. I do not expect it to add whatever is most profitable for Spotify. Especially since I pay for the service.
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The problem is:

Step 1: create a music service and get on-board as many musicians as possible with attractive rates and the promise of a future with big audiences and less intermediaries

Step 2: the business grows because you have many famous/good artists in your catalogue

Step 3: Congrats, you are now the #1 musical service in the world! Many people associate "music streaming" with your brand. You get a lot of "musical normies" as customers in the process.

Step 4: start lowering royalties you give to musicians. They will stay anyway because you are the #1 brand and bring listeners

Step 5: add your own music to places where normies just listen to music, without caring who the hell the author is. So, you have to pay less revenue to the rest of artists, because they are now getting less listenings, even if the royalty per listening stays exactly the same.

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If they are paying musicians to create what is essentially “filler” and using this filler to lower their per song streaming costs, they’re simultaneously denying real artists, producing real music, an opportunity to appear in the stream. For listeners that care, this represents a reduction in the quality of their content, and aligns the platform towards pure profit, as opposed to being an ecosystem where working artists can try and carve out a living.
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"these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers" doesn't sound like real musicians making real music to me.

And honestly I don't want anyone making cheaper music directly for spotify. I want an even playing field where everyone gets the same rates. (But preferably with a way to kick out spammers.)

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It's a problem if Spotify is giving preference to its lower cost slop over other artists. If Spotify is going to be a marketplace for music it has to be a fair one.
Same here. I don't use Spotify as a radio (I have radio for that) but as a very big record collection. I listen to records or my own playlists. You can switch off the auto-play feature in the settings, so that Spotify stops after the record or playlist ends.

I learn about new music the old school way, opening and supporting acts at concerts and recommendations by friends. Sometimes I read a music magazine.

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I'm not a Spotify user, but people are really wild about it. The process is deceptive as Spotify has tried to hide this and pretend they serve music from "real" artists. It's enshitification. It used to be better, now Spotify is trying to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
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It’s a problem if the algorithms are bad and try to nudge you towards slop (path of least resistance).

But I don’t really get the part about “someone should tell Congress”—sir, this is an IKEA.

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My main grief as as a very long Spotify customer, their app is still bad and doesn't progress. It has often problems when the [edit] phone is offline e.g. and it doesn't work beyond songs - radio play, audiobooks especially in playlists are PITA.
Spotify has about 10,000 employees. Their software engineers make 6 figures. Their only actual product is, as far as I know, a music player.

Despite all this, I had an issue for a while where some of the play buttons didn't work. I would click the play button and nothing would happen. Other users posted about the same issue in the "Spotify Support/Complaint Megathread" on Reddit's r/spotify.

I don't know how to adequately describe how ridiculous it is that they managed to break their music player's play button, of all things.

It’s just absolutely dreadful. Using it on desktop is a laggy mess. I mean this quite literally what do the 10,000 people do?
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(Note for nongermans: Handy means phone in German, I think specifically smartphone but not sure. Edit: the word was edited out)

For me, I just use Spotify for music and that's what used to have real struggles with offlineness. Kept updating the app until a version worked properly and now I've stopped. I'm on 8.8.96 (installed December 16th 2023, going by apk file modified time) whereas 9.0.2 is the latest

No problems with this version, so I like the app currently. Let's see how long the servers work with this version. The only downside I've experienced so far is that the yearly overview requires updating every year again

LOL sorry yes, too early + sick ;-)

That aside, it feels to me the same, some versions work, some don't.

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> Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.

There’s a coop Bandcamp alternative being built right now: https://subvert.fm/

Hopefully

Is Bandcamp evil now then?
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> At this point, I need to complain about the stupid major record labels who have empowered and supported Spotify during its long history. At some junctures, they have even been shareholders.

I’ve warned repeatedly that this is a huge mistake. Spotify is their adversary, not their partner. The longer they avoid admitting this to themselves, the worse things will get.

I think this confuses record labels with artists. I don't see labels having a problem with replacing their artists with AI, as long as they still get the royalties.

You’d need labels at all then why?
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The ugly truth is that most people (I dare to say 99%+) don't care much about music. They just need to listen to something while doing their jobs.
Broadcast Radios (FM and AM) did a much better job. Their music was real and each station was more or less an algorithm.

There were ads, but as you mention, people don't seem to care much.

The quality check was the non personalized streams cathered to please its audience and competition among stations. So, the solution is to kill targeted algorithms and monopolies, ha.

Well, it's not a secret, no? I mean, if you use Spotify with big holes in non-mainstream music and only the latest butchering known as "remaster" of your favourite albums, you definitely don't care much about music.

Which is why you'll never see me get off the comfy "local only" train, buying CDs and sailing the high seas with my skull & crossbones flag if needed.

> Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.

Remember when the music labels themselves were the baddies?

> Remember when the music labels themselves were the baddies?

I remember when the biggest problem in music was how middlemen like labels had an oppressive role on music and didn't allowed artists to express themselves or even earn a buck from their work.

As far as I know, that didn't changed.

Plenty of indie musicians nowadays that self-publish on platforms like Spotify and YouTube. That just wasn’t possible 30 years ago.
Tencent Music own almost 10%, UMG and Sony own almost 5% together, there are vested interests here.
I forced myself to use YouTube Music 7 years ago and haven’t switched back (included with YouTube premium), also improved a lot the latest years
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YouTube wants you to pay for rubbish quality uploads by their users. You want to listen to an album and put on the playlist, track 3 was a single so you get a mono recording of the rock video complete with theatrical dialog that makes no sense to listen to when you want to listen and not watch. Is that playlist actually the list for the album? Maybe not but even if it is, how many tracks are missing because of copyright claims or similar?

YouTube does nothing but rely on the crowd for quality and it’s rubbish.

But sure, I’m sympathetic when they ask me to pay for “premium” - I’m sure it’s a premium rate.

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I don't understand what YT Music is, but I listen to all my music for free on regular YT. Just download it, use an adblocker, or an alternative viewer. Any album I've ever sought is available usually in multiple versions.
YouTube pays artists much better than Spotify, but artists still look at Spotify success as music career success
Why? (sounds interesting as a very very long Spotify customer)
Not the person you asked but for me, it's because Youtube Music actually has the music I care about (fan edits of songs, compilations, mixes, etc). Then I also get to watch the videos when I want to or just listen to the music when on the move. These two, but especially the first, are the big reasons I use youtube music.
I did it because why pay for Spotify and for YouTube music if I was going to pay for YouTube premium anyways. The one thing it is missing is when you are at a party on Spotify can have a shared playlist where people can just add songs to it from their own phones. But YouTube can’t do that. It also won’t crossfade songs which Spotify does. But I don’t feel like I’m missing out because of those reasons.
What is YT premium and why would you pay money to use YT? It's the best free service that still exists if you have an adblocker. A lot of content has baked in ads now, but you can skip or just view something else.

I've learned what Youtube Premium is: "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"

For me, that's nothing as I can already view with no ads, and download whatever I want.

>What is YT premium and why would you pay money to use YT?

To me, it's a matter of principle that evolved over the years. I grew suspicious of free services. So, I pay for what I use, at least, in the terms that the provider lays out. I pay for my domain, I pay for my email, and I pay for YouTube as well, as I use it heavily. I still think that the subscription cost absolutely doesn't compensate for my usage, there is just no way in hell. But I do really like the service, and so, I would like to contribute, so I like that I can have this subscription relationship with it. I also like to express my opinion with my wallet: "I don't like being sold to advertisers, I would rather pay directly". I think youtube is fair for offering this alternative, I wish more providers did.

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It also includes 256kbps AAC audio (vs 128kbps for free users).
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Lower price and just wanted to try. Forced myself to use it, started creating new playlists, listen to the radio created based on songs etc.

Now my YouTube Music is more used by the kids and the family than Spotify

You get YouTube premium and YouTube music with one subscription. For me it’s a no brainer, I’ve had it for years
This seems analogous to a supermarket selling its own private label product. Should be disclosed though.
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How is this any different than Walmart or Amazon having their own brands that are sold alongside name brands from other companies?
There are two concerns here.

First, that Spotify doesn't make clear when a track is produced by a Spotify "ghost artist".

And second, Spotify is in an unfair position as both the controller of the marketplace/platform, and as a participant on it. The allegation in this article is that Spotify are using their platform position to promote their own PFC program tracks over third party artists/labels.

To be clear, it's not necessarily consumers who are being harmed here. These tracks are supposedly targeted to cases where the consumer doesn't really care that much about the songs that are being played. Rather the party harmed are third party artists/labels who are competing for Spotify playlist space on an uneven playing field.

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The consumer is harmed if they are given the impression that playlists contain tracks voted up by other listeners like themselves, when in fact they are voted up by Spotify. Not sure if this is the case but if so, it would be clearly misleading the users.
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You know they are Walmarts brands
They do have different prices, too. And the supermarkets try to nudge people to buy the higher priced variants for greater revenue.

The underlying problem that makes it tempting to promote cheap music is the flat rate.

Disclosure aside, would you say their own brand doesn't influence the original brand at all? It still hurts them
Mp3s still work great
The TLDR is that Spotify is flooding it's platform and padding playlists with cheap and generic music. They've went full "buffet" strategy, serving lots of fries so you stay away from the meats.

I think calling this payola, as the article insinuates,is wrong.

I was always more interested in finding artists than I was in finding songs. I've noticed Spotify recommendations being worse and worse, and I can happily say I've left the platform half a year ago. Didn't regret it a single bit.

I don't think it says generated, but music made by people (presumably simply paid a fair wage by the hour or so) who don't then get royalties but it can just be played infinitely many times at no cost to Spotify besides bandwidth
I left when they gave Bro Rogaine hundreds of millions of dollars to promote harmful conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

Between Bandcamp, Tidal and YouTube (latter are more likely to face these same issues), I've never looked back. The odd exception is when a friend wants to share a song but I can usually find it elsewhere.

For anyone considering leaving Spotify for Tidal but fearful of losing their followed artists, playlists, etc., there are a number of (paid) services which will programmatically export and link your data. They're not perfect but I think my success rate was 80%.

i agree that we need a cooperative streaming platform. well, it already exists: https://resonate.coop/. please give it some love.

in addition, its original stream2own model allows you to automatically spend more on the artists you listen to more and even own (= stop paying for) and download the tracks you listened to at least 9 times. i think that it is a much fairer revenue-distribution model than “the big money-pot” model used by spotify (and almost all other music streaming platforms out there) where people listening to the most tracks decide where other people’s money goes.

The questions is really are the other platforms doing the exact same thing? You have to use playlists generated by other users. Any playlists or radio generated by the platform is obviously going to direct you to the music the platform wants you to listen to.
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It was inevitable that if most of your user base is just listening to AI generated playlists that Spotify would look to cheaper versions of songs to save costs.
The next obvious step is AI generated songs. Music will get much cheaper when we can completely avoid cost centers like record labels, recording studios, and bands.
When models are capable of generating music better than humans can, Spotify might be disintermediated entirely.
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It’s from the same country that have managed to automate most of service work at Klarna using ML, so not surprised
I don’t really understand what being from Sweden has to do with anything.
All I know about Spotify is their embedded player, that gets added to music articles, has been designed to nag you.

A popover will randomly cover the controls with a signup banner so that you can’t play the next song without saying no.

It’s a subtle tell but when you see even a small dark pattern you know the company behind it has no moral compass.

Have nothing to do with them.

> the company behind it has no moral compass.

The people behind it. Companies have no sense of morality, everything you see was conceived and implemented by individual people.

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The only way for the music industry to fight back is to ensure diversity in streaming platform, and fighting for easy way for users to port their data between them. This for one will both benefit users and the industry.
There’s another way, which HN’ers won’t like and that’s to borrow a page from the video streaming playbook and have the labels start their own individual services.

Which of course will also eventually push Muzak on the bgm playlist/channels

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There are so many “so what?” responses to this that I can’t help wondering what an analogous situation would be for programmers?

Maybe something like “I don’t see the problem with this app being buggy and almost unusable - I just like having nice icons on my HomeScreen. I don’t see anything unethical about this [MEGA-CORP] fixing the market with their own cheap and poor quality programmers - most people don’t care if their apps work anyway”.

I mean, the actual problem is that people listen to playlists and recommendations from Spotify itself. They voluntarily eat turds, then complain that what they just ate tastes like shit.

The solution is simple - curate your own playlists, or find people with tastes similar to yours that shared theirs.

Don't give a company power to pick music for you, then complain that they have such power.

> The solution is simple ...

Another worthwhile solution is to listen to independent radio -- locally or online. You'll find more new interesting artists and music in an hour of listening to (quality, non-Clear Channel/i-heart) radio than you'll ever find using Spotify or any other service's suggestion algorithms.

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if true, beyond the pale. actively making music worse for everyone.
Yes, this totally tracks with what I know about Spotify. I am in touch with numerous employees of Spotify and they all said that the biggest threat to Spotify are the music publishers who have them by the balls. I think they have now realized that the only way to make it into a successful business is to deploy AI generated music or at least music in which they are not paying extremely large royalties.
Doesn't seem any different to me than when Netflix started making original content, or as others have said, Target having their own in-house brands that they stock alongside everything else. It's just good business sense. If the product is bad, people will stop using Spotify, and Spotify will stop doing it.

I'm not sure why discourse around this seems to be coming from the perspective that people have no choice but to use Spotify and that Spotify will secretly replace all the good music with bad music and no one will be able to do anything about it, all musicians will be out of work, all will be lost. Spotify is just one music service, and we don't even need to use a music service to enjoy the music we like. If Spotify destroys itself with slop music, what's the sinister plot, the "ugly truth", really?

If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...

> Doesn't seem any different to me than when Netflix started making original content, or as others have said, Target having their own in-house brands that they stock alongside everything else. It's just good business sense. If the product is bad, people will stop using Spotify, and Spotify will stop doing it.

And yet it is different, because of the production scale involved. Own brands are actually hard work, especially own brand food, which has to be reverse-engineered at some expense. Own brand food provides price discrimination and usually does not particularly impact the sales of the headline brands.

Netflix’s own content, presumably, pays a large number of creative people’s wages and is of a quality. It is often scratching a creative itch that major studios won’t risk.

Music and music tech, on the other hand, is such that if your audience doesn’t care, it’s quite easy to churn out songs —- one person who particularly hated human culture could write half a dozen fully produced songs in a day.

> If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...

I do wish this particularly nihilistic new form of argument was considered to be toxic itself.

But to answer the point: many outstanding, culturally significant musicians have small fan bases for their personal work. They know they do. That is in the nature of diverse culture. They rely on complex chains of discovery systems —- word of mouth, eclectic radio, old style auteur playlists, live gigs, to find their people, and they often support that by writing songs for major musicians who love their work and who want to do one song they wrote.

It is not their failure at all if the system that is supposed to deliver some of that discovery starts cynically acting against them. While every musician wants a hit and many will dedicate at least some time in their lives to exploring what is necessary to write a hig record, “You should have had more mass market appeal” is not universal creative guidance.

It is not that listeners have no choice in music services. Musicians have no choice but to engage with Spotify. If it is secretly working against all musicians simultaneously at the most basic level —- drowning them out with slop that is deliberately inserted into playlists to water down everyone’s incomes —- then how is it you are more interested in the way musicians are somehow failing, when nothing they do can stop it?

Honestly I am terrified for culture that so many people in the tech world seem to be so aggressively jealous of creativity that they are taking the "anti-anti-slop" stance (to borrow a phrase from politics used for the "yeah well all this criticism validates the choice I am not in any way saying I am making" argument).

Also the argument that people don’t deserve good quality music because they ‘don’t care’ is breathtakingly cynical.

Why shouldn’t people be exposed to good music? Maybe they’ll get into it.

Does that slop mentality extend to other things? Food, clothes, consumer goods? Do people deserve rubbish just because it’s not something they’re particularly interested in?

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