Spotify's business model is a mess. The company doesn't reliably put profits, yet they managed to completely overhaul the industry in a very short time span. This changed the landscape irremediably (as happened with many other initiatives during the internet age), and (as happened, too, with the other initiatives) with unintended consequences.

TG: You’re very much tied into this kind of outsider, left-field pop tradition for me, but I was thinking about that and… there’s not really an “inside” anymore.

MB: That’s true, it’s a strange time. The streaming model eats a lot more, and it’s never satisfied. The previous model wasn’t great — it was gatekeep-y, it was slower, more expensive. There were tons of problems, but this model is new and it doesn’t work for anybody. It really only works for the streaming companies. Labels are still making money, but I don’t really know how (laughs). Even with Spotify now, I’ll talk to label people and they’re talking about monthly listeners. It blows my mind that a private corporation can have so much sway over an entire industry, and they’re just like “okay, this is the new thing.” Even YouTube, a million views is much harder to come by now than it was ten years ago. In America we have so much smoke and mirrors and, like, fuckin’ day-glo and “aaaahhh” hiding the real truth, but with streaming we’re seeing the reality of how easy it is for corporations to just change everything.

Nourished by Time's Marcus Brown, interviewed by Tone Glow

Small musicians have a hard time getting proper compensation (and it is getting worse in 2024), but I feel the worse came with the decoupling of ownership from the availability of content.

Two comments on a Reddit thread better illustrate my point:

Yup. I get negative comments about still buying CDs. I have a FiiO player and I around 40,000 FLAC songs on one of my 1 Tb cards. Not certain how many on the other. Also 1579 LPs.

The reply comes from a completely different point of view:

I have nothing negative to say about owning your music but I fail to see how it’s economically viable for most people. I spend $100 a year for streaming I have access to every song ever. If I spent $100 a year on music I’d access to like 10 albums. I listen to way more than that in streaming.

Of course, a user doesn't have access to every song ever. This is another issue with Spotify and other streaming services: the availability of content depends on the company's catalogue management, which has much different motivations than, say, a proper library, or other sort of digital archive (I have found a similar perspective on Paul Morley's A Sound Mind.)

Up until very recently (err — almost ten years ago, because time flies) The Beatles catalogue was not on major streaming platforms. In the meantime, Neil Young, Radiohead and Taylor Swift have withdrawn their catalogues from the platform — only to reinstate them later, except for the case of Young. Spotify has released a more detailed report on its revenues, how much it pays artists and future strategy.

The person behind Every Noise At Once worked at Spotify, and got laid-off recently.

Machine learning applied to Spotify playlists

[...] A ideia da partilha física da música é já um reflexo do passado, embora não muito distante, numa altura em que a nossa cultura ainda era maioritariamente determinada pelo nosso meio geográfico (a cidade, o bairro), sem a influência da Internet como meio de comunicação global. Havia, ainda, uma diferença entre a nossa cultura e a que nos chegava pelos media do resto do mundo, pré-globalização. [...]