> 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.