I was today years old when I found out that Spotify’s entire existence started with selling ads. From Nick Heer’s review of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine:
While Spotify’s founders tend to describe a noble birth, Perry points to a 2015 interview with co-founder Martin Lorentzon in which he describes the idea to build a targeted advertising platform first. How it would acquire users was an open question — “[s]hould it be product search? Should it be movies, [or ‘Godfather’], or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music”. That is not necessarily a bad thing. What is bad, though, is that Spotify reportedly began with an unlicensed library and made money on the back of it. That combination does not sound to me like the result of a love of music.
This explains a lot about why it feels like Spotify’s interests don’t align with my own. Most of their decisions don’t line up with the decisions people who love music would make.
For example, when attempting to fight spammy AI-generated music:
In an attempt to disincentivize these behaviours and reduce Spotify’s costs, the company announced in November 2023 it would stop paying royalties for tracks with fewer than one thousand annual streams. … How much it actually hurts low-effort spammers is a good question, but it impacts legitimate indie artists — what [Universal Music Group CEO] Grainge calls “garbage” — for whom Spotify now presents no advantage over piracy.
I can understand how this decision was made, but its ramifications — and the lack of consideration for them — are damning.
All this to say that Nick Heer’s essay is excellent, and I highly recommend it.