Podcast – HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

THE FAKE MUSIC ON SPOTIFY IN 2020

The beauty about keeping a blog is you have an archive about certain subject and quotes from certain people.

I’m hosting Sean Cannon today (Aug 21, 2025) on my Escape Pod Zoom call, a weekly gathering of the paid members of my Social Media Escape Club.

I searched his name on this blog, and found this post “Streaming Problems,” from January of 2020.

I clicked the source link, his Twitter feed, and then found this gem, regarding Spotify:

“So you have the biggest company in the space creating “fake” music to drive up margins, trying to create user habits that promote NOT interacting with artists or their songs, and trying to crowd music out of everyday users lives.”

Oh, how unaware we were at the time at how fake the music would get! He was talking about “fake bands” that made music for a fee, thus removing the royalty aspect. Fill the playlists with “freelance” bands, and profit!

But here we are five years later, and Spotify is littered with music created by AI.

SUBSTACK PODCASTS ARE MORE PLATFORM LOCK IN

So I had a handful of video interviews on Substack. They were sent out as newsletters, but they were also posts that I wrote. Not just show notes, but like… full posts.

Well, I didn’t like the way Substack handles podcasts… I mean, no individual episode art? The organization was a wreck, too. I just didn’t like how it felt.

I signed up a free trial of Transistor – for $19/mo you get unlimited podcasts. And they’re all just, like, in their own sandbox. Like, if I just delete one, nothing else is touched.

I learned the hard way that this is not the case with Substack. I uploaded all the audio from these videos to Transistor, and it worked great. Seriously. What a solid system. Everything just laid out in a way that makes sense, unlike how Substack sort of blurs together a post and a podcast episode.