• crank0271@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    From the article:

    "…journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.

    "Now she writes:

    ‘What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.’

    In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels."

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      2 months ago

      Once they get maket shared they start extracting…

      To normal people this is called enshitification

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        This should theoretically at least be illegal, as they abuse the power of the platform to favor certain tracks unfairly.

            • Brewchin@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Spotify is AFAIK Swedish

              It was started in Sweden where its operations are still based, but it’s headquartered in Luxembourg and it chose to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

              Luxembourg screams “tax efficiency” to me, so their list of pre-IPO investors must be quite the thing.

            • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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              2 months ago

              All western regimes sold out us out, mate

              Exploiting us is the MO as workers and customers

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                I disagree, I live in Scandinavia in one of the best democracies in the world.
                EU is mostly OK IMO. Democracy can never be perfect, because it’s about compromises. But without the compromises you’ll have a real dystopia.
                But here is just about as good as it gets at our current level of development.
                So get real why don’t you?

                • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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                  2 months ago

                  Sweden has regressing with the rest of the west.

                  Sure they have it better than most of oecd but the corporate take over is underway, they botched the immigration policy which resulted with serious crime rates…

                  A tiny foil wearing person would think that this was done on purpose to undo Swedish strong socio economic policy

                  Time will tell but the trend for Sweden is not looking good same way as other countries…

    • verstra@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Can someone explain why this is bad? It seems like normal behaviour of corporations.

      Or has spotify previously committed to being a fair market?

      • yesman@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        This is like a soup joint that’s trying to see how much they can piss in the broth before customers notice.

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          That would be a health hazard, so it’s not really comparable.

          It seems more like a soup joint using cheaper ingredients in their dishes, which is just… normal? I don’t get what the big deal is.

          • jonathan@lemmy.zip
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            2 months ago

            It’s normal if you accept it. You do not have to accept it. There’s also a good chance that it’s illegal in Spotify’s case, if not in the US then likely in Europe.

              • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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                2 months ago

                Likely antitrust.

                That said if you’ve gone down the path of reasoning that says things that aren’t illegal are okay, then I don’t know what to tell you.

                • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                  2 months ago

                  I suppose you could argue that Spotify can abuse its position in the same way that Walmart bullies its suppliers and Microsoft freezes out competition, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Like I said, it sounds like they’re just preferring cheaper sources.

              • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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                2 months ago

                This is behavior is anti competitive under both US and EU and member states’ law.

                Issue is the regulatory capture along with strong corporate lobbying on these issues.

                If you are with it, that’s cool. But behavior has historical precedent and it requires the state to set boundaries on the extraction practices

        • mac@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          This is a completely disingenuous comparison.

          • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            yeah, it’s more like they piss directly into peoples mouthes, but it turns out a few people are into that and can’t get enough of it

            • mac@lemm.ee
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              2 months ago

              According to the RIAA, Spotify is a leading contributer to music revenue going up over the past decade plus https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf

              Prior to spotify, people bought songs or albums, and were locked into their favorites or pirated music, which obviously contributed nothing to artist’s pockets.

              Spotify is not the evil entity here, in my opinion. Record labels are.

              Edit: Unsure how reliable of a source this is, but steaming reduced piracy levels by ~20% https://www.alliotts.com/articles/streaming-has-a-consumer-and-a-piracy-problem-the-answer-lies-in-the-music-industry/

              I do think that we have become far removed from the old days, because music piracy was extremely prevelant before these services came out.

              • Gamoc@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                There are literally musicians with Only fans accounts because Spotify makes then such a pathetic amount of money. Every single artist I’ve ever seen comment on Spotify who hasn’t been amongst the most popular bands in their genre for decades have always said that Spotify is absolutely awful for artists.

                Albums/singles traditionally weren’t money makers, merch and concerts were. Nobody is saying record labels weren’t and aren’t shitty, but believe it or not it’s possible for both of them to be shitty at the same time.