To me the really gross bit is the dishonesty around the slop. Same track with multiple different names appearing under multiple different artist names is egregious. Classic corporate disregard for customers.
But they instead treat this process as an assembly line instead of an artistic pursuit. They give a template, so every song is going to sound similar, only giving a few freedoms to each artist.
Templating is almost second nature in tech, but in something like art it feels like there's this ethereal barrier being breached. It's like making a song then paying 10 other people to remix it. But worse because at least remixes disclose the template.
You can listen to whatever you want on Spotify. It containing shit music that you will never listen to harms you in which way?
If people are genuinely listening to those tracks and are alright with it, how exactly are they harmed?
I already consider most contemporary pop music to be slop anyway, and people seem to be fine listening to it.
I don't think this is the most egregious act of dishonesty in the article, though. I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace.
You have to actively accept the recommendations from the algorithm. If the algorithm ia recommending slop, and you are fine with it, actively listening to it, who was harmed?
> I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace.
Nobody is forced to listen to the slop playlists generated by Spotify. Spotify puts them in the front page, but they can be ignored.
If people are listening to those playlists and are satisfied with it, what is the issue?
If the consumption is genuine and not bot activity, I fail to see any wrongdoing on Spotify. If people like listening to slop, who am I to judge?
Is consumers are actually listening to is, I fail to see harm.
Musicians are harmed only in the sense that consumers don't mind listening to slop instead of listening to their music.
Somebody works at Spotify, or is a hopeful Spotify wannabe themselves.
You may think I am excusing Spotify, but I am not. At least not really. I am just completely unsurprised that people listen to bottom of the barrel musical slop as background noise and are okay with it.
Spotify was smart that they figured out to give people what they wanted in a way that costs them less.
But people in this thread act as if Spotify is committing a crime, using some very charged language. My approach is from another angle - if users are legitimately listening to crap, and they are alright with the crap they listened to, why are we making a fuss about it?
Your angle is "enshittification isn't illegal, peopel still buy it. Why complain?"
By deinition, complaints are always brought up by a minority. If we ignored that minority, we wouldn't have acts like GDPR and its offshoots. Nor recent enforcement on making it easy to unsubscribe. We may not even have physical consumer protections, like refund windows or false advertisement".
Well that's the issue. I don't accept slop but it will sure keep trying to push it to me, no matter how many thumbs down and dislikes I throw at it. I'm still fighting all the stupid crypto recommendations from Youtube despite years of "I'm not interested in this" that I post everytime it comes up. In the end, the only proper fix was to remove my entire history.
Algorithms these days stopped even pretending they appeal to me, they appeal to what advertisers want you to consume.
>Nobody is forced to listen to the slop playlists generated by Spotify.
in the sense that "nobody is forced to use spotify, I suppose". But if spotify is the house and the dealer, spotify listeners have to go under a lot of friction to push back even if they don't like what is being dealt.
Then again, if people are using these features and they are fine with the results, I fail to see the issue.
If this is only a little bit worse, people will likely not notice. But they will miss out on new music. Certainly this is how I normal find new music.
You see, I don't like Spotify. I don't trust any of those huge platforms, I expect them to actively work against my interests. I always disable or avoid anything they want to suggest me, and view it with suspicion, if now outright contempt.
More people should act the same way.
I thought that was always the default behavior unless you paid or something? You find a song you wanna listen to, and then Spotify just spits out a playlist for you, in a Pandora esque radio way where you don't have control over the susequent songs played.
I liked Pandora back in the day, but there was something offputting about how Spotify implemented this. So I never really bothered and made my own playlists.
I’ve used Spotify since it was a closed beta and their library was from the pirate bay.