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Comment by pie420 | Hacker News Reader

they get paid by Labels to promote certain songs and artists, similar to how labels pay radio to play only certain songs. Everything, from Amazon, to Spotify, to the Google Play Store wants you to click on promoted bullshit, not search for what you actually want. Welcome to the internet in 2023.

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The difference should be that users pay Spotify for a subscription.

Raise the prices if they need to, but don't try and have a subscription + "whatever ad bucks we can make" model.

Vote with your wallet.

Guess for a lot of us spotify users that'd mean stop paying for their service? am pretty close to doing so after almost a decade of paying for spotify.

yes. there are good alternatives. switching can be easy or painful depending on if you're willing to use opaque 3rd-party services to transfer your playlists (also, when I exported manually, some songs just disappeared from my "Liked"). but I highly recommend taking the plunge.

Interesting, what services do you recommend? I’m not familiar with them. I’d like to just get the song/artist names from playlists rather than all the playlists themselves.

Get to hang out with a friend who’s a former Spotify employee tomorrow so this will be a likely topic of discussion

What are some good alternatives? More visibility!

Their business model has always been the latter.

Their advertising business is the only reason they succeeded and Rhapsody, Zune Pass, and Napster/PressPlay didn’t. It’s ingrained in the company

I thought it was because the major labels are also the biggest shareholders, and therefore incentivized not to hamstring the company?

Additionally, artists can sign up to get prioritization in the radio and recommendation algorithms... at the cost of some of their royalties. You're likely already missing out on artists who don't pay the troll toll if you rely heavily on Spotify's recommendations.

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