Spotify doesn't sound right - here's why

Are you a Spotify subscriber?

If you are a Spotify subscriber your music tastes are being seriously manipulated and eroded. Its all about the Autoplay : when an album/playlist/podcast finishes playing, the Autoplay feature generates a new queue “with similar content” so that the playback never ends.

We have all heard these complaints:

“Even if I have auto play off it will still play songs I don’t want it to and I don’t like most of them”

“It just won’t stop sometimes I try to play particular song and it plays something else”

“I am paying for Spotify. I kept skipping the recommendations *hoping* it would get the message. It did not.”

“Spotify recommends is pissing me off and messing up my music. I don't want to hear what it recommends. I want to listen to my music on the service I'm paying for.”

Spotify’s strategy is to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC).

Artists arrive uninvited on these playlists simply as “mystery viral artists.” Such artists often had millions of streams on Spotify and pride of place on the company’s own mood-themed playlists, compiled by a team of in-house curators. And they often have Spotify’s verified-artist badge. But they are clearly fake. Their “labels” are frequently listed as stock-music companies like Epidemic, and their profiles included generic, possibly AI-generated imagery, often with no artist biographies or links to websites. Try it for yourself - Google searches often come up empty.

The declining playlist algorithm and cluttered UI is also driving many away.

I’ve reposted Liz Pelly’s piece about Spotify, with thanks, so that you know what’s really going on.

Ghost Artists or Spotify’s Perfect Fit Content program

Liz Pelly argues the Spotify initiative to fill playlists with music from fake artists was inevitable that platforms began tinkering with algorithms to promote their own content. The temptation was too great.

Why pay creators (or in Spotify’s case artists) when a substantial portion of the audience is indifferent to the quality and provenance of the content?

…listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.

This topic doesn’t get nearly enough airtime because it’s elitist to discuss people’s lack of discernment (or taste)—but that doesn’t make it untrue.

Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living.

It’s easy to upset people with tales of Spotify nickel-and-diming virtuosic pianists and iconic jazz musicians. Things will get interesting when platforms like Instagram and Facebook figure out how to operationalize their AI internet personalities. Will anyone mourn the obsolescence of influencers?

What’s your experience with Spotify?

#Spotify

#mymusic

#streaming

#music

#Perfect Fit Content

#autofit