Spotify – 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.

INVEST IN YOURSELF, NOT META

Olivia Rafferty on one of the ways you can gamble… er, I mean invest in your career:

His course on Meta adverts for Spotify conversion was £150. Plus I’d have to have at least £10 a day to spend on adverts.

It’d be worth it, to get the numbers on Spotify up. Worth it, to get new ears on my songs. Worth it, to look credible to future bookers and collaborators.

It was a good investment into my art.

£300 to Zuck, £150 to this guy, and… minus £450 to me.

Worth it, right?

I’d be sending money to Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, to then drive engagement to Daniel Ek’s platform, so that I could receive…

£0.003 per play.

Worth it… right?

Thankfully Olivia went to the Austrian alps instead.

Being your best, whole, most complete and fulfilled self will help your career more than giving your money away to the techbro industrial complex.

Here’s an interview I did with Olivia, talking about how she quit Spotify and made her latest album.

SPOTIFY IS HORRIBLE

Hearing Things is done with Spotify; “we will no longer be making playlists on Spotify or linking to the platform.”

Also, “Don’t publish your podcast only on Spotify“

“Spotify uses dark patterns to make it difficult to distribute podcasts hosted on its platform to rival apps.”

Just because streaming music is convenient doesn’t mean it’s great.

The idea that it helps bands get discovered is one thing, sure, but is handing over music discovery to computer algorithms a good idea? And then what? The band gets a zillion listens and makes $12?

INDIE ARTISTS NEED SPOTIFY

From Queen Kwong in ‘Why Quitting Spotify Won’t Help Indie Musicians,”

“indie artists like me can’t afford tо ignore and abandon Spotify, nо matter how much we despise it. If I want tо book a live gig, a promoter will check my streams first. If I want tо get label interest, A&R will glance at my numbers before deciding іf I’m relevant enough tо even respond to.”

This is also true for social media – some media outlets won’t feature you if you don’t have a big enough social media following. See, they think when they publish your feature, then you’ll share it with your big social media audience.

Which is fun, since we all know barely 5% of anyone’s audience will see that feature from the band’s social media feed.

But then, with Spotify numbers – they can be fudged, right? You can artificially boost those numbers. Make a song called “lofi-beats playlist” and hope for the best.

I wrote this a few years ago:

Right now Spotify is for the masses. Easy to consume. It’s a never ending buffet, and while your music is on the menu, you’ll never make enough to buy groceries for the week.

SPOTIFY IS UNSTOPPABLE

From Variety:

“For the fourth quarter of 2023, (Spotify) reported revenue of €3.67 billion”

That’s $3,946,534,500 in US dollars. Oh, and they added “28 million total monthly active users overall, to reach 602 million.”

In one quarter.

And you’re still posting “check out my new song” on Twitter, or wasting your time publically shaming a company that made almost $4 BILLION in one quarter.

They’ve no shame, they’re rich. They do what they want.

The question is this: what’s our next move?

“If not Pitchfork, with more daily visitors than Vogue or Vanity Fair or the New Yorker – or GQ – then who in music journalism can possibly thrive in this economic environment. And if no one can… then all we’ll have left are streaming platforms, their algorithms, and the atomized consumer behavior they push on us. A self-checkout counter for music, with a scanner going beep – beep – beep –”
Damon Krukowski