Another anecdotal data point: This has not been my experience at all. Its recommendations have gotten more obscure as I've liked/plussed those kind of things. It's more likely that you're encountering the limits of Spotify's library and/or algorithms rather than some nefarious payola plot. (I agree that being able to remove songs - or at least thumbs up/down similar to artist/album radio modes - would be nice)

Absolutely. I actually started listening to discover weekly playlists without giving it any feedback and it started based on my previous trends and gradually drifted into the more main stream stuff.

Once I realized I just needed to give its recommendation engine more fuel to work with and started liking/adding things I actually wanted to listen to, it went right back to giving me cool stuff with loads of obscure artists I'd never heard before but liked a lot. (It really only took me about two weeks to right the ship).

Spotify's recommendation algos are excellent.

Either my playlist is the outlier or yours is, because this is completely opposite of what I experience in that playlist. Mine is pretty much all +20/30/40 years old "niche" music.

Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.

Maybe it depends on the genres you listen to, but I haven't found this to be true at all. My discover weekly playlist is frequently full of bands I've never heard of with monthly listen numbers in the 2,000-50,000 range - I don't think those bands have marketing budgets.

I also haven't found that to be the case...maybe, I guess. I don't really know which artists are heavily marketed and most of what turns up for me is pretty old. Only exception that comes to mind was "blood in the cut" which I liked so