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Comment by oreilles | Hacker News Reader

Did you guys not read the article ? The problem arises because of the way the music is distributed on Spotify and the way it is licensed. Spotify make deals with the companies producing this stock music so that it can fill its popular playlists with while paying close to zero royalties. The consequence is a decline both in music quality on the platform and in artists rights, revenue, and ability to be listened to overall.

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Those playlists become popular because of the music on them. If they decline in quality won't people will just listen to better playlists?

My Discover Weekly from Spotify used to be awesome. I found a bunch of new artists that I really liked and tons of great new songs. Recently it's been a bunch of old stuff that I've definitely heard of before. So I've mostly stopped listening to it.

Big agree.

Discover Weekly went from something I was excited about every Monday morning on the train, to something I forget to check most weeks.

There's a handful of songs it puts on every few weeks, for literally years now, despite me skipping them every time and never once listening to the band or song by choice.

100% guarantee that, once the technology is solid enough and the library is big enough, Spotify is going to train an AI off the tracks they own the rights to so they can mass-produce this music without paying anyone (except nvidia) a dime.

Hopefully someone will release a music ML model to just generate it locally.

Spotify isn't a monopoly, and if they want to fill their platform with stock music and presumably AI slop in the future, good luck to them. They're hollowing themselves out and making way for a new better service.

And in the end, the real money for musicians is syncs, shows and merch anyway. Spotify streaming revenue is tiny in comparison.

The discussion is not wether Spotify will benefit from this situation in the long run or not, it's wether the users of the platform (both the listeners and the artists) should be happy with it and the answer to that is, thanks this lengthy article, demonstrably no.

I don't think the article showed that listeners are unhappy.

Whether*

A wether is a castrated ram.

Yes, that’s’ why a switched to Apple Music

You don't think every platform will be doing the same within a year or two?

Same

Glenn Gould didn't tour past 31 and made money from recordings.

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