“The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
I get that the author wants to listen to "challenging" music that "pushes boundaries" and laments that Spotify's algorithms are surfacing up Muzak instead. But there are other places to go to find your challenging music. For lots of other people, however, music is not some intimate connection with an artist's soul, it's simply something that goes on in the background while you're trying to get something else done or just relax. People seem to want Muzak--who are you to argue with the market when it has spoken?