there are two reasons you can end up here. the first is that you just like my words. the second is that someone sent this to you because you were caught using a service like spotify.
this post is for the latter. others welcome to read
artists are paid disastrously. some sources claim it's between $0.004-0.006 per stream, but there're good reasons[1] to suspect it's less than that (particularly for relatively smaller artists) and has been decreasing[2]
spotify is substantially worse than other platforms, too[3]. other platforms are also not paying well enough, but this post is primarily targeting spotify specifically
sometimes spotify (or your distributor, who is probably also evil[4][5]) just decides that your music should be removed from their platform for reasons that you may or may not ever get to know about
i would also like to mention whatever the fuck was going on with those swedish artists they had filling up various curated and autogenerated playlists to cut costs[6]
if you are paying for premium, your money is mostly not paying for artists
there are so many advertisements. a quick google search indicates many users see 1-3 ads every 1-2 songs. ads on spotify are up to 30 seconds by default, sometimes up to a minute. assuming 3:30 songs (close to, slightly above average), that's around a minute of ads for every 6 minutes of music. this is dismal
the shuffle functionality is also notoriously bad. you can literally just search "spotify shuffle" and you will be inundated with frustrated users complaining about the shuffle feature, which notably does not shuffle your songs. ?????????? what are they even doing
spotify has been running at a loss for at least a decade. you can check out their annual[8] and quarterly reports (since 2018, some numbers to 2014) yourself to verify this. a pretty silly term to ctrl-f for is "operating loss". i love how they stop even trying to sugarcoat it and just bluntly say they are bleeding money and could very easily bleed even more. this would be hilarious if people weren't still trying to use their fucking platform
this makes the fact that premium costs so much more than is actually needed to pay artists (see above) particularly egregious
they also laid off a bunch of people in 2023[9]
i didn't even mention a bunch of stuff
so you want to ditch the bullshit. here's a good solution
if you want to support artists, buy their stuff on platforms like bandcamp or donate to them through whatever means they have set up. whatever you pay will probably exceed whatever spotify would have given for the amount of listening to their music you do. if you can't pay, sharing artists' works is good too. many artists will allow you to download their stuff completely for free, they probably even want you to.
other options for expanding your library include p2p sharing like through soulseek, downloading from really fucking sketchy websites (they're so sketchy oh my god), and straight ripping that shit from like youtube or whatever. these are already commonplace ways to get music and there are safe ways to do all of them
i intend on writing more about listening to music without streaming in the future, but it is really late right now so i'll just end this post here. be on the lookout for that post later, tho
BORN TO DIE
SPOTIFY IS A FUCK
Kill It Off 2025
Spotify is trash man
410,757,864,530 DEAD MUSICIANS