What Happened to Spotify

A lot of people are tired of music streaming, but people are REALLY tired at Spotify. Prices are up, quality is down, and the scourge of AI music spreads throughout the platform. With all that going on, the word enshitification has been thrown around. And this is exactly what it is, but it’s also an inevitability of the profit motive.

But let’s start with the basics, what is enshitification? I’ll keep this brief as many already know. Cory Doctorow popularised the term in 2022 in describing the process by which good services go bad. First, the company maximises focus on user experience to draw in as large an audience as possible, in this time the service is very often not even profitable, instead running off investments. Next the service gets worse, beginning to extract value from the users who previously enjoyed the free and open nature of the service, this is to begin paying back all those investors and new shareholders. Then the services reaches a point of terminal enshitification, where the user experience doesn’t even seem to be considered anymore and even business customers are getting fucked over, the service is stripped clean of any objective or subjective things users loved and the bare skeleton of the profit motive lays bare. Being on one of these apps or social medias when its reached terminal enshitification feels like management is just ripping the copper out of the walls to make as much money as possible before everything fully goes to shit. Tumblr users will know the feeling all too well.

This is the state spotify finds itself in now. The preposition of “all the music ever for $10 a month” sounds too good to be true, because it is. Spotify only achieved profitability in 2024, after many of the loathed changes had already taken place. The Spotify people loved cannot exist forever, even with its abysmal pro-rata payment system for artists, it could not break even.

One of the anti-consumer practices many have accused Spotify of now is the possibility to take a lower rate for increased visibility in discovery, a sort of digital payola. As we’ve seen with Google thinking it knows what you’re looking for better than you do, this often leads to what you’re actually looking for being buried in SEO and sponsored shit. The more appalling in my opinion, is the continued flood of “AI” content, with rumours spreading that Spotufy themselves is making this slop. Indeed, Spotify is developing AI tools “for artists” but denies outright making the music themselves. Regardless as to wether they make this shit, or just aid and abet its creation, it clearly shows a contempt for the artists and users. It demonstrates a clear disregard for the talent of human artists and suggest they think their users are simpletons who consume whatever piss-filtered, six finger slop they sell them.

One example of this is “Velvet Sundown”, an AI creation without accompanying “photos” to attempt to create the image of a real rock band. All the accompanying images of course look terrible, washed in yellow, with nonsensical hand deformities and non-euclidean geometry.