Spotify, et. al., are wonderful for discovery but the chances your esoteric finds will stick around are precarious.

Their entire economic model relies upon providing the least amount of money possible to the rights holders. This seems to often mean removing access to "expensive" content in customer libraries.

I don't think it's a simple coincidence that some of the best tracks wind up getting removed arbitrarily. It's almost like I can trigger this to occur by listening to anything "not mainstream" too many times.

Their economic model is also based on trying to come up with new content all the time (hence podcasts), because once people realize they mostly listen to the same songs over and over again, they will resent the cost of a subscription.

This is the main difference between video and audio. One rarely watches the same movie or show more than once (it can happen, and there are people watching Succession or Friends on loop, but they're a minority). But we often listen to the same songs / artists and like the familiarity of it.

Subscription for music is not just detrimental to the artists: it's fundamentally a bad deal for users.

Nah. All of Spotify’s discovery is paid placement payola.

It’s annoying and gross and ruins the product.

> Spotify, et. al., are wonderful for discovery

Was. They deprecated their API which allowed you to lookup for more songs of the same type.

Probably just to piss me off. SpotifyQT + that was great.

Now I'm stuck shuffling through playlists.