Does the contract say anywhere that Spotify would never provide their own generated music to users of their platform?
If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
> Again: users do not know they are being fed this stuff.
Users are actively listening to those slop playlists. It does not seem to bother them (otherwise they would stop listening). If they are satisfied with the offering, what exactly is the issue?
> Spotify are doing this in secret because they know it is fraud on likely a contract level but certainly on a cultural level. They'd be rolling it out with press releases if they didn't know it was underhanded.
This is plain bullshit. The claim is that people are listening to those songs when they are added to Spotify generated playlists. It wouldn't matter if the song had, say, a tag indicating that it was published by Spotify themselves. Most likely people are not even looking at the names of songs and artists when the slop playlist they are listening to is playing as background noise.
> That is the issue. But then again HN is a place where people really don't mind if companies break laws on an epic scale, destroy worker protections, and deliver worse products like AI chatbots replacing human support, if customers don't really notice.
If you saw my comment history, you would be surprised.
The problem here is that users are actively listening to slop, but they don't seem to mind it. They are fine with slop. They keep listening to slop. For those users, it really does not matter. There is no abuse taking place.
I am a Spotify user. I think their app is bloated, but it works alright? I can find albums I like, I can create my own playlists, and I can completely ignore whatever Spotify generates I always did. How exactly are they abusive in their relationship with me as a customer?
What you are really angry with is that Spotify found a way to give users that are fine with slop their own cheap slop.