> Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:

*not only Spotify

They had plenty of problems from people abusing their system to steal listens from actual artists.

Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.

Now you might already notice the flaw here - if you say, make a bunch of bots that just listen to songs to boost their revenue, not only your sub doesn't pay artists you listen, but also to fraudulent ones.

Then there was problems with using fake collaboration tags, AI music to hijack artist profiles, and few others.

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senko 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.

That's basically how radio is accounted for in royalties, as well.

With Spotify knowing exactly who listened to what, it could be more precise (and arguably more susceptible to the fraud), but tbh what they do is standard (compulsory licensing) industry practice.

	▲	Dylan16807 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		With radio, everyone that listens to a particular station is listening to roughly the same mix of songs, and they're "paying" (by listening to ads) on a per-hour basis. If either of those was true with spotify, the unfairness would go away. But when different listeners are paying very different amounts per hour, any correlation between payment amount and preferred content causes problems.