Streaming has conquered the music industry and is dragging it through the mud to a grinding halt. Gone are the days of classic albums with every song delicately crafted to expand the art as a whole, and instead we get musical slop being through at the Spotify algorithm until something sticks. We need to fight back against this downward spiral and do what we can to show our favorite artists what we really want.

Spotify has already become the go-to option for music listeners around the world with over 675 million active users in December 2024, according to sec.gov. We live in a world where most people don’t even own technology to play physical music. Why would they? Spotify is so much easier and cheaper than vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and digital downloads. While this is true, we need to do things to stop Spotify’s negative impact. Spotify cuts the emotional impact out of music, pays artists terribly, and encourages poor music habits in listeners and musicians.

The Algorithm

The algorithms of Spotify reduce music to simple adjectives and reject all deeper meaning of songs in favor of their AI-assembled playlists. These playlists rarely accurately describe the songs within them, giving listeners the wrong impression before even pressing play. Countless generalizations of the intricate meanings of songs get labeled within a user’s Spotify recommended “Chill Mix”. Playlists like these strip the songs of the context that would normally surround them within their original albums. This can cause the original emotional ties to be dismantled in favor of an easily digestible playlist devoid of thought. This can also cause artists to just forgo the context of an album entirely, creating singles for the purpose of these playlists.

The Death of the Album Format

Spotify focuses listeners’ and musicians’ attention on hit singles instead of albums by pushing singles in their playlists instead of the countless amazing albums being released on their platform. This push is also supported by the increase of accessibility of music creation. With anyone being able to load up a digital audio workstation, aspiring artists prefer to release anything they create without putting in the thought to craft an album. Singles remove the thought and risks that come with album releases, but they also usually make for boring, risk-averse music. Albums give the artist and listener time to enter a soundscape and immerse themselves in the lyrics and instrumentals.

Abysmal Pay for Artists

Spotify pays roughly $0.004 per stream. This means a song with 1,000,000 streams, an extremely difficult milestone, would generate $4,000. That’s barely enough to cover the expenses of creating the song, and definitely isn’t enough for the artist(s) to live off of. Spotify is an over 100 billion dollar company, and they can’t bother to pay the artists they make all profits off of. Spotify also has many policies that are supposed to deter fraudulent streams, but in reality they only hurt hardworking upcoming artists. Variety writer Ari Herstand wrote “I take great offense when Spotify calls these artists “bad actors.” In part because I am an artist who hired a marketing agency (back in 2017) that used tactics (unbeknownst to me) that got my album flagged for fraud and removed from Spotify! This continues to happen all the time to “hardworking artists” who are just trying to figure out how to play the game and don’t know any better.” Here, Ari displays how Spotify’s policies don’t punish the real offenders like sleezy labels or marketing agencies, instead they punish upcoming talent. The music industry found within Spotify punishes the backbone of their company just trying to make money off of their art.

For artists to make a livable wage off of the art we enjoy, fans have to support through means like the purchase of physical copies, merch, and concert tickets. I urge people who enjoy music daily to take the steps to support the artists they love. Directly supporting artists gives them more reason to put their heart into their music instead of chasing streams for their fraction of a penny.

Addressing the Appeal of Spotify.

While Spotify undoubtably makes music easier to listen, this isn’t a net positive. Spotify allows you to listen to whatever music you want, anytime, anywhere. Music isn’t just supposed to be put on in the background. Music should be treated with all the same care the artist put into it. The best art is meant to have your full attention to fully immerse the audience. Other means of music listening like vinyl encourage deeper and more intentional listening by forcing full album listen throughs. When a musician knows the listener can skip any song, they are less likely to put in the thought and effort of sequencing an album and cutting songs that detract from the art. Limitations of music-listening alternatives force the hand of creators to be intentional with every moment of their work and produce a better art piece.

In Conclusion,

We need to support artists in different ways than Spotify for things will continue to go downhill. The thought behind music is being lost out of necessity to fit within Spotify’s need and it has lowered the quality of the music. We are sick of the awful practices encouraged and enacted within the music scene and it’s time we push back.