Sound quality on Spotify is not great - I have a pretty nice hifi system in my living room and I did extensive AB testing between Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal, with Tidal obviously having the best quality by a margin, then Apple Music (still noticeably better than Spotify) and finally Spotify (flat, one dimensional, poor detail).
I barely use Spotify’s algorithm, not because it doesn’t occasionally produce interesting results, but I listen to many different genres and I feel Spotify is very slow in following listening behaviour and barely integrates different genres at all - example: I once spent a mere week sampling 70s soul tracks with my MPC in a rush of nostalgia for 90s east coast hip hop…my freaking discovery list was exclusively 70s soul tracks for the next two MONTHS or so.
I also often feel overwhelmed by the amount of music available on any streaming platform, which makes it harder to enjoy a track or album with focus, but that’s just me I guess.
Most importantly though, I think most of these streaming services are dickheads. Some 8% of Spotify are owned by Sony Music and Universal directly - and Tencent Holding, which holds another 9% of Spotify is owned by Universal, Sony and Warner Music - that means these guys benefit from artists putting their music on that platform through the amortisation of the shares they hold, so earnings per stream don’t really matter to them.
Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s recent comments about artists being lazy and that they cannot expect to live off one or two albums every three years just shows you how little understanding and respect these guys have for the work and hustle that goes into making music and albums.
Yet, these very musicians with their very lazy work have made the man and his co-founder rich to an absurd degree in the span of 14 years…no one should expect to get that rich by simply writing some code and cutting a few deals with record labels…
my point is: Ek and Co are CLEARLY benefitting from the work musicians do, more so than musicians do.
The fact that he has little respect for that work and that the platform itself captures most of the value in the value chain for itself and its shareholders is akin to worker exploitation in the early 20th century, only here the workers are musicians without a regular salary, health insurance, or even just employment status. I mean, I know people that sell placement on their playlists for more money than some of my artists make through streams despite getting streamed by a million people every month.
Unfortunately this is true for the streaming model as a whole - we haven’t worked out a decent strategy to redistribute value across the value chain more fairly in this model.
In a way I’d love for musicians and labels to go on “strike” or for governments to step in like they have with Uber and other ride share companies. The exploitation of drivers in these cases have been lamented and fought against all across Europe (unfortunately still losing though), but I think the bias in our societies towards creative work as something that has no economic value has blinded us to the fact that streaming platforms exploit creatives and their output just the same.
I don’t know if collective action would have any impact on the supplier side, as the majors are intimately in with Spotify specifically and so they are unlikely to complain about its exploitation since they benefit from it…maybe a musician owned platform?
ah, the structural challenges of internet capitalism of the 21st century…