this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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I've been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.
But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.
So you mean it's convenient. That's a valid reason. Evil shit aside, that's literally why music streaming exploded the way it did.
Unfortunately, the evil shit is pushing me away. Why can't we just have a regular music streaming service that doesn't inevitably suffer from feature creep and enshittification? Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?
I think that's the nature of publicly traded for profit companies. The shareholders don't care about the product. They just want their portfolio's value to go up.
The leadership doesn't care much about the product. Not in the long term. They get paid a big salary, and the higher-ups have equity they want to go up in value. So long as they cash out before the product dies, they're golden.
The actual labor building the product might care. Some are just working for a paycheck. (I knew a guy who worked at spotify, actually. He didn't personally care much about music. He was just a database guy). But the ones who do care don't have any power.
So most of the forces that would push the company towards being long term good don't have power. The forces that want more profits, now, do.
Yeah, I know how capitalism works, unfortunately... I'm just ranting into the void at this point.
There’s something to be said for curated “auto” playlists, both for background and discovering stuff.
That being said, Pandora is waaaay better at this. So are free broadcasts/channels like Radio Paradise.
I don't trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I'll never hear again.
I do like bandcamp's "people who bought this also bought this" recommendations, though.
Spotify’s payment model also adds a ton of bias to their suggestions. Artists need to hit a threshold number of listens a month to get paid at all, so Spotify ends up just suggesting music from artists they are already paying, rather than letting other folks hit that threshold. It’s also why the “shuffle” feature never actually shuffles a whole playlist before starting to repeat songs. If you really pay attention the songs that get repeated by the shuffle algorithm are the ones from bigger artists to try and keep smaller groups from getting paid at all.
My wife is one of those people and I beg her over and over to just let me host her music.