> locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting

Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.

Spotify pays on a pro rata model. Something like 70% of their operating revenue is divided amongst license holders based on the number of plays. The only way the majority of artists make more money is if Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake and The Weeknd suddenly fall off the face of the earth and their record labels burst into flames.

All streaming platforms realistically pay out close to the federally-set royalty rate.

Spending that money was part of their strategy to go for a "bundled" rate for royalties, which 99% (their number) of the US customer base now does. In a nutshell, they can downrate the royalties for music as long as they bundle other things with it- that's why there's books on there now as well. UMG is now fighting it [0] but all the indies are basically fucked as there's no global leverage.

The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.

[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-...

if you are a l33t h4ck3r you too can despotify your life:

- get youtube premium, has youtube music with it. youtube music is basically straight superset of spotify.

- https://github.com/jam3scampbell/music

It may be the worst thing that's happened to musicians but as a listener, I feel like it's been the best for listeners?

really which part? that ui where it switches songs if your finger grazes it even slightly? and starts over completely when you try to flip it back, forgetting where you were? the loud non audio adjusted ads?

Presumably they mean the part where it gives you easy access to a huge amount of music all in one place (unlimited and ad free, if you pay for a subscription). Most of the time I'm listening to music in the background so the UI isn't really much of an issue.

The part where you don't need to spend hundreds upon hundreds on CDs and can listen to any music wherever as long as you have an internet connection?

I'd say with very few features I miss from Spotify, that yt music is simply a better platform (even more so with owning yt premium)

Not to mention axing third party API access instead of coming to a licensing agreement, forcing DJs, dance class teachers and others to jump ship to Tidal/Beatport/whatever at high cost, losing all their carefully curated playlists unless they go through the time consuming process of converting them.

They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened… the best we ever got was a set of watered down APIs that’s curiously missing what one would need to build a third party client.

They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.

Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.

> They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened…

It exists... but only for employees: https://xcancel.com/rogueops/status/1656349863968112680

> to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive

It seems like most podcasts do everything they can to make downloading an MP3 impossible. This isn't just a spotify problem. Just about every website for every podcast I've seen does the same thing.

That "DJ" is the worst because you cannot remove it from your library list.

>they faked spotify wrapped numbers

That would explain why mine were definitely wrong too. Although I wouldn't attribute it to malice since it makes little sense to tell me I used their paid service much less than I thought, at least compared to the opposite.