I'm a major music lover and heavy daily listened to many genres. I actually really like Spotify and it's 95% of my music source nowadays. I used to maintain a huge well-manicured collection of MP3s loaded onto a 120GB iPod Touch, and still miss that, but ever since What.CD got taken down it's just too much of a pain. I can count the very few songs that I've found not available instantly on Spotify on one hand. Offline mode works great for weeks at a time travelling or camping. So, sounds like they've focused on what their customer wants over all else, which I can't really argue with.

Bought it on vinyl, sometimes more than once. Bought it on cassette. Some I also bought on 8-track. Bought it again on CD. Bought it again in digital formats because it easier than trying to copy it over. There are tracks I've already bought 4 or 5 times.

Then switch to streaming, were we bought it a fraction of a cent at a time, every time, frequently with ads, for just 13/month, 156/year to rent the music.

Now we'll get to buy it again in whatever is next, but this time direct from the artists.

Sucks,

Spotify has been profitable since 2024 and projects increased revenue and profit for the foreseeable future. Maybe other stand-along streamers are having problems, but Spotify is doing fine. Not defending their treatment of artists exactly, but the premise of the headline is nonsense.

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quot... [yahoo.com]

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/

> And guess what -- when the platform's margins are structurally squeezed, guess who gets squeezed first? The artists.

The artists are already getting fuck-all from Spotify and have been all along, so... so what? 99.999999% of them are already getting nothing relevant for these plays.

> 'The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete'

They need some sort of "doomsday" clock for this, like the one atomic scientists [1]have [thebulletin.org] for the end of the world, so people can ignore it as much too.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

I don't always agree with him, and he does go on a bit, but his opinion is usually interesting, at least. Especially on this topic.

[1]https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/... [lefsetz.com]

[1] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2025/08/12/spotify-myths/

The music labels - the copyright owners - are barely mentioned in this article at all, yet they are where all the money is going, incrementally, for every stream played.

They're the rentiers sucking it out of everyone else. Spotify does make a profit, but not a large one, because the costs of paying the copyright holders are so large. Yet the share of artist money from the copyright holders is tiny, so the big labels end up rich while artists end up screwed (especially smaller artists, as the article correctly points out) while the record labels end up on top.

It's really not Spotify sucking everyone dry here - it's the record labels, and it always has been.

(I have nothing to do with Spotify, I'm simply pointing out the vampire squid behind the mere octopus this article is blaming).

There is absolutely nothing worth reading on a substack/medium unverified opinion fluff piece, why would this get passed off as a "news" for nerds article ?

The entire bases is faulty, Spotify has been profitable for a few years now.

Last fall I bought a knock-off iPod mini with the intentions of switching off but haven't come up with a good way to load my daily podcasts on it before work each morning (without some manual step). I keep meaning to quit it, but haven't managed to do it yet as playing music on the smart speaker is part of our kid's bedtime routine. I loathe spotify, i loathe their not-an-ad ads, I loathe the pop ups, i hate everything about it. If they go out of business so much the better it will finally force me off thei

This is just another attempt of how do we take something you already have and make you pay more for it. That's literally it, and trying to push people to do it by being all "The times are changing! You're going to lose out! Fomo! Switch to this system where we take more money from you and you get less!"

It's not going to happen bruh, at least I don't think so. I use streaming platforms, and spotify itself for the longest time. I do not, I repeat, I do not have time to personally invest into every artist I li

I don't understand the attraction of streaming. Especially streaming that you have to pay for.

I have all of the music that I want as mp3's and play them on whatever devices I choose, at no ongoing cost.

I guess that doesn't get me any "modern music" but I have no interest in that anyway.

Maybe I'm just an old coot who's out of touch with modern culture.

Nothing I'm sharing with or accessible by others, mind you, it's for my own use. It's a proper radio automation setup, complete with scheduled blocks of music and all that. I rarely program specific songs, but rely on category-based scheduling to fill the bulk of the schedule, and then I don't touch it and just let it play. It's that nice balance of my favorite songs and a forced feed of things I don't normally listen to.

I've bought more music to throw at this project over the past couple of months than I h

> "It's a platform that sucks artists for everything they have"

This is the biggest lie in the industry, and that artists are buying it at all is part of what's going on here.

The problem is NOT the streamers. The problem is the record labels. The labels are making a TON of money from streaming platforms, because they (not the streamers) have managed to setup contracts with artists that don't pay artists their fair share of the streaming revenue.

prime is for free shipping and nothing else. no one has prime for the basic music catalog nor prime video

First of all, as others have already pointed, the premises of the opinion are very flawed. Spotify is profitable and the big earners are the labels.

Second of all, I'm all for artists owning their own music and receiving better payment for that. And although I'm a heavy Spotify user, I really don't care if it explodes tomorrow.

But, what I would definitely NOT want is fragmentation, just like we had with TV and movie industry. I don't want every other label launching it's own platform and creating silos so I

This is written from the perspective of artists. But most people who care aren't artists- they are consumers.

Hardcore music fans and hipsters may be interested in "micro communities" where they buy a bunch of merch from a band you probably haven't heard of, but most people just want to be able to play whatever random music suits their fancy at the moment. They aren't going to engage with private discord servers to curate a special playlist from their micro community just to put some tunes on in the car.

Musi

I have Apple Music and it's FINE, but I'm annoyed at how often I have to authenticate myself for my own goddamn music. Now, a lot of the music is stuff that I already own that I've uploaded to Apple to match for me, but I want to be able to say that I own my music, that I can take my ball and leave any time I want.

The main reason I still use Apple Music/iTunes is that there is STILL no music player with smart playlists as good. I still have playlists that are things like, "select 25 songs by least recently

What's the M in ATM machine again?

This has touched a raw nerve. I like nature photography in remote places, and music gets me into the creative flow state. One time I was driving from one New Zealand coast to the other and before I did that, I saved all this music to my phone using Apple Music. But in the middle of NZ, Apple Music wouldn't let me play the music as it wanted to log online to make sure my fucking subscription was still valid before I could play the music already synced to my fucking phone, and i couldn't do that as i had no f