"Race to the bottom"

How can Spotify be profitable? Ambition, hard work and ingenuity? No, think again. It's greed, cynism and moral poverty that have made them profitable. Their business model is no longer to convert their freemium users to premium users. Their new strategy is to replace real artistst with fake ones. The bean counters have concluded that this is more profitable. In short: price dumping on real music and cutthroat pricing on real artists. The new strategy is called "perfect fit content", which is an euphemism for massproduction and playlists. One anonymous "creator" can fabricate tons of fake artists. Despite their biographies the fake artists are nowhere to be found. They don't exist. The "creators" have a strong incitament to be placed on a "curated" (which here means manipulated) playlist. The original Spotify motto jars: "Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it." If the supply side is built on fake, what about the demand side? Well, Spotify users have never cared about music, have they? Real or fake, it's all the same to them. They can't even explore or choose music for themselves, hence the playlists. The gravity of the situation could not be worse. I'm surprised that the record companies still put up with Spotify. When streaming came along the companies were desperate and struck a terrible bad deal. They left their artists out to dry. Since then, record companies haven't been able to change the playing field or change the rules. It's now a race to the bottom as to who can care less. Spotify will must likely win, while music dies in the dark. Save what can be saved. Buy music and merchandise directly from the artist or through Bandcamp.