You should read Spotify Teardown and watch Red Means Recording's video on all the ways Spotify has taken an axe to its own legs by cheating and degrading the material base of the artists that make it a business in the first place. but I think that what gets lost in the fog of fraction-of-cent royalties and esoteric copyright legalese (what the fuck is a mechanical license???) is that Spotify is just a soul-sucking app that hates you.
i used spotify for just over a decade (2014-2025) and i hated certain things about it the whole time. here's those reasons.
shredding the liner notes
it's such a treat to open a CD and get a little booklet with more pictures and essays and lyrics, or to open up the gatefold of a vinyl record and get a gorgeous 2-foot wide spread like the inside of Joni Mitchell's For The Roses. yeah it's a wasteful capitalist piece of ephemeral forever-plastic but it's nice to have a little art piece.
there's not such thing with spotify. you get a smorgasbord of releases with no context, no sense of time. the most an artist can add in terms of peritext is a little biography at the bottom of their page. remember when it was a big deal that they added an option to view the fucking credits of a track?
it's this level of anonymization that let spotify get away with flooding their playlists with royalty-free and gen-AI muzak so they don't have to pay real people. you can't do a lividity check if nothing is alive.
the infinite shopping mall
there is so much shit on spotify. the joke that underpins the meme of writing out absurd sentences with song titles in playlists is that there is more content indexed on the platform than can be comprehended. every word, letter, punctuation mark and unicode code point is the title of a track in spotify's akashik record.
the moment you step outside of your tiny circle of meticulously curated playlists, it's an endless firehose of content. playing the dopamine slot machine in spotify's infinite shopping mall is migraine-inducing, so you give up and just shuffle "sad girl vibes" again. choice paralysis was my primary experience letting spotify do the curation for me.
in the future everything will be the apple store
The SaaS-ification of everything has put us in a tier of hell previously thought impossible.
artists have no control over how their music is presented on spotify. it's all tiny squares and green accents. there's no place for the aforementioned peritext or art or anything. for christ's sake there's just a fucking solid color background based on the cover art, which is less than we even got with itunes. Why did we accept this?
to make it even more insulting: remember when spotify had that tie-in with Stranger Things where the UI changed when you played the stranger things soundtrack? they have the fucking technology. It doesn't even have to be that complex, you just could've given the label some custom CSS inputs. fuck, you can even put it behind a fucking paywall. spotify also has a custom qr-code-type thing that they've used for exactly 0 things. what if you just issued these to labels for them to insert into physical media (like they already do for download codes) and if you scan it with the spotify app you can get a fun custom skin for your spotify app. but god forbid we get even that paltry, 90's-ringtone-scam level of self-determination.
making choices was taken from our hands, so we've decided that letting companies shuffle around context-menu options every three months so we spend more time on the app because we accidentally deleted a playlist is the superior option.