Spotify has made a name for itself in the music streaming industry, one could say the platform runs the distribution industry. With that being said, in recent years, Spotify users have noticed a significant falloff in ease of use and quality.
The first major controversy Spotify was involved with was the criminal underpayment of artists who uploaded their music to be streamed. Artists are paid significantly less on Spotify, around $0.003, compared to parallel streaming services such as Apple Music or Tidal, both of which pay artists around $0.01 per stream.
Several big artists have called Spotify out for this in the past, most notably Taylor Swift. From 2014 to 2017, Swift pulled all of her songs from Spotify. The reason she gave was that Spotify was not paying its artists nearly enough for their work. This situation remains unresolved to this day, and Spotify has yet to increase the amount it pays its artists.
Another grievance that has appeared in the Spotify-using community is the sudden price rise. Users of Spotify have noticed that there is no reason to warrant this sudden price change. Spotify has hardly changed its function, yet the cost of Spotify Premium went from $9.99 to $10.99 to $11.99, a whopping twenty percent increase, in 2 years. Part of the speculated reason for this is that the company laid off thousands of workers, which would raise the price of operation. However, Spotify is a distributor, so the worker count should not affect the cost of its goods.
Not only has Spotify been spiking the price of Premium, but at the same time, they have been making strides to reduce the usability of their free version. Features that are behind Spotify’s paywall include: lyrics, karaoke mode, all AI features, song selection, and queue control. Spotify is much less accessible in the free version when compared to other music streaming services, for example, YouTube Music allows for skips, playlists, and shuffle, but the only downside is ads between every song.
Spotify has been no stranger to delving into the AI market. In 2023, Spotify debuted DJ X, an AI-powered radio station that plays songs a person may or may not be interested in. This feature was met with mixed reviews, and many feared that Spotify would replace its workers with AI. Lo and behold, later that year Spotify downsized by 15%.
Thousands of workers for Spotify got the boot that year, most notably their Wrapped team. Spotify Wrapped is in some people’s eyes the biggest event of the year because people enjoy seeing what they have listened to throughout the year, and the Wrapped team tried their best to make it enjoyable each year. In their absence, Spotify sought the quickest and easiest way to put out Spotify Wrapped, AI.
The 2024 Spotify Wrapped was significantly shorter than last year’s and left out key information such as a user’s top genres. In place of a user’s top genres, Spotify listed listening “eras” using the same technology as their Daylist. The Daylist is a playlist that gives a user moods based on the day of the week and time of day. Users got eras such as “Pretty Pink Demure Diva” and “Dark Witchy Forest Emo.”
Through all of this, Spotify’s user base is growing, and it has been making massive profits. Spotify is maintaining the grip it has on the music streaming industry, despite all of the controversies that it has been involved with.
