Benn Jordan: Why Spotify Will Ultimately Fail [video]

I like Benn Jordan’s videos. He provides a cutting criticism that includes data and transparency that I appreciate. I don’t always agree with his conclusions, but I always enjoy the ride.

This video starts off a bit weird where he seems to conflate a front desk job at a bowling alley with the manager position, which was odd to me. I think if I show this to somebody, I’ll just tell them to skip the first minute.

After that, I found the arguments put forward to be really compelling. I always found Spotify’s business model to be a bit shakey, but I’d never done much research. It’s nice to see an insiders perspective. I’ll probably do more research into this now.

As he states near end of video, nothing else right now beats streaming for convenience. I’d prefer a system where my monthly subscription gets divided up only between artists I listen to, but it seems in reality that hasn’t happened as a lot of the revenu goes to big record labels to persuade them to keep the big artists on spotify (and not even necessarily to those big artists!)

Spotify runs a monopoly in uncharacteristically bad ways. They strangle the life out of independent musicians and punish the most creative ones with no visibility. It's also a means of propping up rich artists and big industry over artists that can't afford to dump thousands if not millions of dollars into promotion of their music. I hope they fail, and that independent music stores and personal music libraries come back into style as soon as possible.

Under the covers, most unknown artists must pay Spotify to get their music played, otherwise they languish in low listener territory, which makes it almost impossible to be heard or to be taken seriously as a musician. This happens because Spotify prominently displays a monthly listener value at the top of every artist profile, that does not move until each artist has spent a certain amount of money on spotify ads, or generated volumes of external traffic to their user profile... It comes across as a subtle yet brutal form of extortion and gatekeeping, similar to mob "protection fees" levied upon store owners historically.... The store owners in this case would be literally any musician that wants to make their music available to spotify audiences.

It's collusion between many major interests, and likely why phone storage has been historically kept low, so as to encourage streaming as the only viable music playing option on mobile devices, which own the largest share of music listeners currently. It's no coincidence that bandwidth is also limited, in order to discourage device users from straying off of the path of promoted playlists and platform suggestions.

We would have no Led Zeppelin, No Prince, No Queen, nor Pink Floyd likely if this type of regime had a strangle hold on independent music in the past...

If you notice now, only pop music and old chart toppers get airplay now. New artists immediately make their way onto charts within 2 years, because they are sponsored by major labels, and funded straight to the top. Many of the artists that succeed are "Nepo Babies" with industry funding and connections that use the same ghost writers as major industry artists. This is why a lot of modern music sounds exactly the same.

There used to be multiple radio stations, record stores, and many venues where new music could be heard. As Internet social media, audio, and video platforms grow to strangle and gatekeep what is seen and heard, very little independent music makes it to people's ears -- often because big industry platforms don't own rights to the lion share of that work. Musicians that do "make it" often get terrible and exploitative contracts, to which (already) rich "nepo babies" that seek fame will gladly take, because losing money does not hurt their futures.

It's all grim... We're not even touching on the dismal payments Spotify makes for streams, which is well known as exploitative. Musicians are praying for change and the demise of these greedy platforms.