I understand it’s trendy these days to shit on Spotify but when I read about this practice it kind of seems like a non-story. Spotify are adding low cost tracks to their curated playlists (which are usually quite boring) to save themselves some money. If you don’t like this practice just don’t listen to their curated playlists. There are so many better user generated playlists out there.
Something I've mulled over in the past is what a market-driven pricing model for streams would look like. Newer songs are generally worth more than older songs, and lean-in listening costs more because the user actually wants to hear a specific song, while in lean-back listening, anything with a similar vibe works.
It's probably a good thing it's hard to pull off because you'd see Taylor Swift streams going for 10 cents and aspiring artists paying you $0.0001 to listen to their work in the background.
the initial release of Discover Weekly 10 years ago gave everyone such uncanny recommendations that it was a cultural event, people were talking about it, it was written up in major newspapers. Apple Music had just released a few months before and was a serious threat to Spotify, so Discover Weekly changed the trajectory of the company.
It was also technologically interesting because it was one of the first times that a recommender system incorporated deep learning (on the actual song audio) in addition to collaborative filtering.
It was really amazing! Now instead, they are shoveling whatever garbage costs them the least. Depressing.
