All posts tagged: Spotify

Posted on Nov 24, 2025 at 11:52 by scott truitt

YouTube is full of ads.  Subscribe to YouTube Premium.  Spotify is full of ads.  Subscribe to Spotify Premium.  Both still track you and sell your data.  But you can’t stop that.  Everything has an ad  in front of it,  over top of it,  sandwiched in the middle of it.  Unskippable ads.  Unescapable bullsh!t. Accept our privacy policy so we can share data with our 837 business partners.  Accept our cookie policy so we can follow you everywhere and manipulate everything you see.  Everything h

Posted on Jul 12, 2025 at 23:00 by scott truitt

My experience in the music industry is slim, but I have studied the tech industry from the inside and out for 30 years. And I can say the following sentence with complete confidence: This moment is as good as it will ever be in the current system. It will only worsen from here, as it has since the needs of platform companies became more important than those of independent artists, labels, and fans. Spotify, YouTube, and the others will not suddenly come to their senses and decide to pay more

Posted on Jun 5, 2025 at 06:03 by scott truitt

“We pay a fortune for such a poor experience.” That was one of the first problem statements I wrote in the early days of Sawtooth last year. It referred to the enshitification of Spotify and other social and streaming services. It still resonates today for unexpected reasons. Now it’s the proliferation of mindless AI-generated art, music, and writing. Nothing prepared me for how quickly this slop would invade these human spaces, how willing so many would be to welcome it, and how much it wou

Posted on Apr 24, 2025 at 23:00 by scott truitt

The online spaces we use to be with our friends and family, know what’s happening in the world, hear music from our favourite artists, do business, and more no longer serve these fundamental needs. People crave authenticity, connection, and genuine community with other humans. Instead, they receive an increasing feed of engagement bait, time sinks, algorithmic gruel, and AI slop. Look around, and you’ll see it everywhere. Even here on LinkedIn. Same with Spotify. Meta is the worst. It’s even d

Posted on Apr 8, 2025 at 06:12 by scott truitt

Spotify likes to tell its story about the democratisation of music and money, but its strategy of rewarding only those at the top hides in plain sight. Last week’s Loud and Clear report noted that 12 million artists uploaded music to Spotify in 2024, but only 0.6% generated more than $10,000 in royalties. Let me be clear: artists who generate $10,000 in royalties do not earn $10,000 in income. They likely receive a tiny fraction of that after all their costs. And even if they did earn $10,000

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 at 23:00 by scott truitt

Ad-supported and subscription-based monetisation business models punish the music industry, especially indie artists and labels, for its success. How? Both limit how much money artists, labels, and rights holders can earn on their music. Why? It’s more profitable for Spotify and the like to collect money from everyone and reduce artists, labels, and rights holders to fighting for leftover scraps in a royalty pool model. They also hurt users, but we’ll cover that one next. Let’s dig in. Ad-

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 at 23:00 by scott truitt

No restaurant can legitimately sustain an all-you-can-eat buffet for £11.99 per person per month. This business model can only work by shifting the cost of serving unlimited food to their workers and suppliers. In other words, the restaurant can only profit when everyone else loses, including its customers, who likely receive substandard meals and an awful experience to make the numbers work. Does that sound familiar? Because that’s what’s happening with streaming music. Artists and labels ear

Posted on Mar 19, 2025 at 08:39 by scott truitt

I could write volumes (and already have) about the insights Mark Mulligan shared in his post on LinkedIn yesterday (this post is a response, and I even used the same title to anchor it). I want to focus on three things that resonated most: 1. When you read artist-centric licensing, you should translate that to UMG and Spotify-centric licensing, as “UMG and Spotify get richer, and the rest, well, who really cares?” See the shocking number Mark Johnson shared on LinkedIn yesterday about the effe

Posted on Mar 17, 2025 at 09:17 by scott truitt

Spotify likes to tell its story about the democratisation of music and money, but its strategy of rewarding only those at the top hides in plain sight. Last week’s Loud and Clear report noted that 12 million artists uploaded music to Spotify in 2024, but only 0.6% generated more than $10,000 in royalties. Let me be clear: artists who generate $10,000 in royalties do not earn $10,000 in income. They likely receive a tiny fraction of that after all their costs. And even if they did earn $10,000

Posted on Jan 27, 2025 at 13:54 by scott truitt

Duetti’s 2024 music economics report prompted a nonsensical, fact-free retort from Spotify on Friday, and I’ll bet that was because of these two damning details: 1. Spotify lost a meaningful 2% market share to YouTube, including a 17% shift in electronic music alone in 2024. That’s at odds with the story it tells investors about its runaway growth. 2. Spotify paid 14% less per stream since 2021, even after increasing subscription fees by 20%. That’s at odds with the story it tells artists and

Posted on Jan 2, 2025 at 09:06 by scott truitt

Enshitification was my favourite word last year, but I only recently realised that it is hiding deeper and darker truths about the concentration of wealth and power. Now that I see it, it’s everywhere, and I want you to see it, too. The idea behind enshitification is simple: as platforms gain users (aka customers and partners), the service, experience, and value they receive degrade while the costs of using the platform increase. That fact alone is awful and a reason to rebel. But there’s

Posted on Aug 22, 2024 at 11:59 by scott truitt

Cory Doctorow’s enshittification thesis describes how platforms exploit their markets by luring consumers (with low prices) and businesses (with mass adoption) into an inescapable trap. Once we’re hooked, they reduce their costs, increase ours, and extract all the profits. You may also know this playbook as “Privatise the profits. Socialise the costs.” Enshittification harms more than the people and companies using their services. We all pay the price. When Spotify gives away music for free o