The Truth Behind Spotify

Video Summary of "The Truth Behind Spotify"

Spotify, which launched in 2008, is the world's most popular music audio streaming subscription service. The program that can be utilized on numerous different devices such as a laptop or mobile phone, allows anyone to stream any music they desire. According to newsroom.spotify.com, Spotify offers over 82 million tracks and 3.6 million podcasts. 

More Information on what Spotify is

Although listeners can use Spotify for free, there will be ads and you will be more limited while using the app. Most people pay for Spotify Premium, where they can download songs to listen to offline, and you are less limited while selecting which song you want to listen to. The app's average rate for the premium membership is $9.99 a month, but there is also a student or family plan.

So many people enjoy streaming music on Spotify because of the number of songs and or podcasts offered, the user-friendly app layout, and its affordability.

Although Spotify is very user-friendly, it is not artist-friendly. Businessinsider.com found that Spotify has paid artists as little as $.0033 per stream. This means that it would take about three streams for an artist to make a penny. 

More on Spotify's lack of pay per Stream

This is especially unfortunate because music-streaming programs like Spotify are how everyone listens to music now, therefore artists cannot make a living off of people solely listening to their music anymore. Since artists do not make a lot of money from people listening to their music, most of their revenue must come from other avenues such as merchandise, touring, etc.

On top of Spotify not adequately funding their artists, they have also been a part of several scandals because of some questionable situations that have occurred within Spotify's operations.

One scandal that happened in 2017 was called the "Fake Music" or "Fake Artist" scandal, which was discovered because of the strange "songs" and "artists" that sometimes appeared while people were using the streaming platform. 

These allegedly fake artists and their songs appeared on the mood-based playlists that Spotify recommends to users that quickly gain popularity since they appear on every user's home page. People began to notice these false artists on these playlists because they all had very vague artist logos, and they were nowhere to be found besides Spotify.

According to a Project MUSE article, these artists appear to be ghosts who have created tailored tracks to thereby rack up listening ratings and revenue for the platform. 

More on the "Fake Music/Artist" Scandal

Another Spotify scandal that was more recent was the Joe Rogan Scandal. As I mentioned before, Spotify also offers podcasts to its users, and one podcast that is on Spotify is "The Joe Rogan Experience" where the famous American commentator Joe Rogan talks to guests about their lives or recent events.

Rogan is known for having very strong political opinions, and he has previously said controversial comments numerous times. 

According to a New York Times article, Spotify was called out by the public in January when Rogan was accused of promoting Covid-19 misinformation on his show while hosting a guest who had previously been restricted by Twitter for spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines. 

Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive responded by saying that they were not going to take action against Rogan because of the company’s commitment to free expression. 

More on the Joe Rogan Scandal

This situation as well as Spotify's reaction to it was very upsetting to numerous artists and users of the app since Covid-19 is a deadly virus and people should not be misled because of misinformation spread on entertainment media such as the podcasts on Spotify.

Although Spotify has its setbacks such as underpaying artists and the numerous scandals that have occurred, people continue to use the platform even when they learn about these discrepancies. Since Spotify is accessible and affordable to people, the general public will continue to utilize it to stream their favorite songs or podcasts. 

The majority of people still love Spotify, but how many scandals or mistreated artists will it take for individuals to recognize that Spotify is unethical in its ways?