On Spotify
My RSS reader is usually chock-full of articles about AI bubbles, whatever the US government did this time and environmental issues. My own fault, I know.
But more often, I also see articles about music streaming. Ditching them, switching them, praising them and shitting on them. Recently I read a blog post on Quailblog about pulling their music from Spotify.
One thing that stood out to me, was the fact, that they are not getting any stream revenue from Spotify, even when Spotify themselves are showing them, that they have more than the required amount of annual streams.
Every month, Spotify sends us our "Your month on Spotify!" showing how many people streamed our music. Ok that's neat. Sure; but then I realized that so far, in every month of 2025, streams of our music on Spotify by these "active listeners" has been "ineligible" for revenue - with no explanation of why.
This is just the best capitalistic new-tech invention of all time! Set up some rules with questionable oversight, hidden behind a blackbox algorithm, controlled by a questionable company. Trust us! Everybody else is using our service, there is no need for you to be alerted!
People often tell me, that Spotify helped them discover new music. That might be true, if your primary music discovery prior Spotify was the fucking radio. But nowadays Spotify is even worse than your local radio station. Full with AI music, playlists generated not by the things you want to hear, but by labels paying to be included. Artists not being paid, service quality being entshittified every year. Once you become a music enjoyer it is time to leave Spotify.
I am not going to preach about how to consume music. People switch over to Tidal or Qobuz (if available in their country!). People switch to owning their own music library (my case). The best way to support artists you love is to buy their music, merch, support them by going to their gigs.1
Obviously it makes no sense to support artist like Taylor Swift or Metallica, they have no trouble surviving, I was talking about smaller, better artists.↩