Spotify are effectively parasites. They pay poorly. Dominate the market. Force everyone to accept their poor treatment through their market domination. (Go watch some Youtube tutorials on paid spotify placement services) And thus, this youthful tech CEO is speaking from a position of extreme privilege with an eye towards what is good for HIS business, but bad for musicians. I hope Spotify goes away, but it probably won't. The consumer side is pretty good/enticing etc. The musician side is 2-tiered. The vast majority of the POOLED streaming revenue goes to large labels who manage global pop stars. Indie artists can just go die under a rock... ermmm "try harder"

I don't really want to read 20 hackernews' argue about how hard it is/isn't to make a hit album. Quality music takes more effort, training, and skill to make than low-quality music, and this is not about the production alone. Expert-level musicians are generally disregarded by Joe Q. Public in favor of Joe Q. Publics "favorite" musicians, training and knowledge and compositional skill notwithstanding. The limiting factor is Joe Q. Public's musical listening skills, which certainly will not improve in a world that is racing to achieve cheaper mass-produced conformist "music" that likely will be replaced by algorithmic generation in the near future.

I am hardly a great composer, but even I could describe formulaic "genre music" in such a manner that a decent music AI could iterate it nonstop.

The subject of people "liking genres" rather than following individual artists of talent across their works as they explore all genres, etc... that's a different topic for a different day.

I will also contend that grooming a public to like simplistic rhythms that are easy to program on 16-note step sequencers is not accidental.