Musicians have long criticized the streaming service’s paltry payouts, but a new wave of boycotts is emerging
Provide an alternative with a better user experience, or users won’t switch.
Quobuz, Tidal, et al need to rapidly improve their feature set to match Spotify (primarily group / jam sessions, recommendation engine, and device / app support) or this proposal has less hope than convincing everyone to go back to pirating.
recommendation engine
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber since 2009 (you cannot shame me more than I’ve shamed myself), and their recommendation engine (algorithm, as I prefer to call it) is fucked. First of all, it will recommend music where they pay the artists the least, so they can take more money themselves. And it’s the same fucking songs over and over again, basically no matter the playlist “made for you”. It’s literally the same 200 songs.
I support this movement by never having had a Spotify account.
Something about algorithm recommended music never appealed to me.
You guys heard of Subvert?
No but sell me
Well, it’s an artist co-op. Artists own part of the platform, so they can control how it works and what decisions are made.
Instead of being at the whims of some profit-brained tech CEO, the artists vote on what the platform does – it’s a democratic way to control the future of the internet, or, in this particular case, of music streaming, sales, and merch for artists on the internet.
I think it’s pretty cool, but it’s not a thing quite yet. They’re aiming to open this year, though. We’ll see.
The nice thing about this model (band camp, subvert etc) is that they don’t have network effects:
Just because artists I like are on bandcamp there is no extra ‘cost’ for me to get that one artist from subvert. That means that artists are not locked into the biggest platform.
