Just because I know RAI has talked about the crappyness of Spotify for artists for a number of years, here’s a snippet from a 6 month old interview that’s relevant to the original conversation.

https://igloomag.com/profiles/five-questions-with-rafael-ant...

> In this day and age, it is incredibly challenging to start a label. Streaming has massively depleted the revenue potential for artists and labels, and even those with a good following are struggling. For those starting out, it’s an uphill battle to build an audience and be successful.

> Only a small percentage of songs make a decent amount of money with streaming, so recording budgets for independent artists are next to none. I remember when an album had the support of a team of people devoted to realizing the artist’s vision. Something magical happens when you get that collaboration of people working together to achieve the same goal. Nowadays the artist/producer does the recording, the mixing, and in some cases, even the mastering. Consequently, the production quality has declined drastically over the last decade, and it’s not helped by how most people consume music (illegally downloading it, YouTube lo-fi, or paid streaming subscriptions) but rather contributes to the decline.

> For those who remember the world before streaming took over, this is a very different one in which we now live. Music is no longer the product being marketed or sold, instead, it’s the listener’s data. The artist is a “brand” and they create “content.” We are in a time where we are constantly bombarded with “content” on social media and streaming platforms. Take the so-called “Spotify Ambient.” This sound has become watered down and generic, thanks partly to all the Muzak clearing houses creating material for most of the “sleep” and “stress relief” style of playlists.

> Whenever an actual artist shows up on those playlists, let’s say the great Otto A. Totland for example, you can immediately hear the difference between his music and Muzak. Otto writes music that conveys rich and nuanced emotions with many layers of meaning. His music wasn’t solely written for the sake of playlisting it. His music was written because it genuinely meant something special to the composer. Muzak clearing houses have been discussed ad nauseam in many industry exposés about “Spotify fake artist” trends with companies like Epidemic Sound and their catalog of ambient rip-offs.

> Some companies exist solely to create content for playlists. Think about that for a moment! Composer staff are paid to make royalty-free clones of well-established artists. The companies see which songs are performing well on Spotify-curated playlists, and the clearing house creates a similar-sounding song so Spotify can remove the original from their curated playlist without paying royalties. This practice exists in advertising, when agencies create music for an ad “inspired by” (i.e. ripping off) the music they don’t want to pay the licensing fee for. Somehow, this is legal. You end up with “artists” like Jonci (yes, that’s Jónsi with a “C”) who have millions of plays, sounding exactly like Sigur Rós, and you have zero information about the artist.

> Clearing houses can now easily create thousands of meaningless ambient-adjacent tracks to be put on playlists with the unsuspecting consumer having no idea. AI technology makes this all even easier. The lack of credits on streaming platforms is another massive problem, particularly for music workers like myself who depend on album credits/credentials to generate business and get gigs as engineers, producers, etc. The music is stripped of production, artwork, recording, mixing, and mastering credits. I could go on, but the point is that there are many challenges for artists, labels, mastering engineers, and anyone making music now.