There is a problem though. If you mix high effort with low effort content you will get a distortion compared to the perceived initial market. The economic equilibrium in any platform is the bang for the buck in effort-per-engagement. This holds true for YouTube as well, where the most serious channels (like MentourPilot) can’t rely on YouTube rev-share alone. So they use different revenue channels, like Patreon etc. Without it, we would not see the amount of quality content that we do today. The highest engagement per effort is clickbaity. Now, go to LinkedIn or Facebook, where the dials are tuned differently, and observe a barrage of absolute garbage.
Profit seeking will land you in blandness, and here Spotify is even exacerbating by playing in a conflict of interest market, through playlists with massive reach that they control. Not even Zuck does that (afaik), but rely on high volume content farms that at least he has plausible deniability to claim that it’s not his hand moving the needle. It’s well known musicians pay a lot to be featured, so the monetary value of playlist placement is really high.
Anyway, this may not be enough to cause an exodus yet. But artists will become more aware and rightfully complain, and perhaps find different platforms. It also weakens Spotifys own market position since algorithmic low effort music is fungible and much easier to disrupt (although Spotify still incredibly dominant today). It’s not impossible that ambient music streaming breaks out to a cheaper alternative service, with white noise and yoga tunes. That may be a better tradeoff in the long run.
Profit seeking will land you in blandness, and here Spotify is even exacerbating by playing in a conflict of interest market, through playlists with massive reach that they control. Not even Zuck does that (afaik), but rely on high volume content farms that at least he has plausible deniability to claim that it’s not his hand moving the needle. It’s well known musicians pay a lot to be featured, so the monetary value of playlist placement is really high.
Anyway, this may not be enough to cause an exodus yet. But artists will become more aware and rightfully complain, and perhaps find different platforms. It also weakens Spotifys own market position since algorithmic low effort music is fungible and much easier to disrupt (although Spotify still incredibly dominant today). It’s not impossible that ambient music streaming breaks out to a cheaper alternative service, with white noise and yoga tunes. That may be a better tradeoff in the long run.