naw that shit is just capitalism. I mean Spotify is a Scam scam. Capital S, actual, literal scam

Ok so yall know how Spotify will pay artists royalties based on the percentage of total streams they get, right? and how, if an artist gets more streams, that means the other artists get paid less royalties (because that necessarily means that they got a smaller percentage of streams)? Now, some people create “fake” music to simply rake in streams and get paid royalties (essentially stealing from Every Other Artist on Spotify), or record labels will buy bot nets and hack phones to Keep Playing a song from their artist to artificially inflate their stream counts and thus get a bigger share of the royalties pie. All this could be easily avoided if spotify had two-factor authentication (which they claim they have been considering, but its been what, 8 years, 9? and they still havent implemented it, bc obviously they also profit from this since the slice of the revenue they take is fixed, so while artists get less money when this shit happens, spotify actually gets more money), which is why this shit doesnt happen on, say, apple music.

But okay, until now this doesn’t prove that spotify is a scam, just a business with questionable security, morals, and treatment of artists. HOWEVER: You know the Spotify official playlists? The ones you put on when you don’t wanna look for music? Lots of people listen to those, so if you managed to put a fake song there you would get a shit ton of money. Thankfully, Spotify claims that you can’t pay to get into an official playlist, since that would be “streaming manipulation”, which goes against their terms of service. Now, here’s the “but”: BUT, there are tons of music from “artists” in those playlists that are actually made by fake artists. Not “fake” as in “they make shitty music”, “fake” as in “those people DO NOT EXIST”. Their pictures are stock photos. Their names are fake. They are all from Sweden (where spotify is headquartered, coincidentaly).

Those 2.85 BILLION streams from fake artists where just between the years of 2017-2019. That’s a LOT, even by digital streaming standards. Now, Spotify CLAIMS that they “never created any fake artists”, but, those ‘artists”, as far as I’m aware, were all created by the company Epidemic Sound. Epidemic Sound, for its part, is partially owned by Creandum, which, in turn, was one of the very first investors in Spotify.

So, Spotify doesn’t “create” fake artists, they just let their investors create companies that create fake artists that in turn get PLACED IN THE SPOTIFY OFFICIAL PLAYLISTS (which you can’t PAY to enter, remember), earning a ton of money in royalties that gets invested right back into Spotify. Padding the official playlists also has a secondary, but very enticing benefit for Spotify: Remember that each artist gets paid according to the percentage of total streams they get. By making their artists get such a big share of the streaming pie, every other artist necessarily gets paid less, making Spotify “waste” a lot less money paying royalties (since the money from those billions of views that would be “spent” paying artists royalties now goes to the fake artists, ie, directly back to Spotify itself).

So yeah, Spotify is, and most likely was from the beginning, a scam. Their main thing was always getting money from ads and investors, streaming music is literally just a façade, so they create fake artists to artificially diminish the amount of money theyre contractually obligated to pay in royalties.

wasn't this specific scenario representative of a huge group of women who were part of a midcentury sexology study? i can't remember if it was Kinsey or someone else (yes i know Kinsey had questionable research practices), the fact remains he had a Lot of survey responses from adult women about their interior sexual fantasy lives describing a lot of stuff that would put the average Tumblr prude into anaphylactic shock

Nancy Friday's book My Secret Garden (published 1973) compiles a number of womens' fantasies like these.

wasn’t this specific scenario representative of a huge group of women who were part of a midcentury sexology study? i can’t remember if it was Kinsey or someone else (yes i know Kinsey had questionable research practices), the fact remains he had a Lot of survey responses from adult women about their interior sexual fantasy lives describing a lot of stuff that would put the average Tumblr prude into anaphylactic shock

y'all are mentally ill

i want to study you in a lab

no david bowie, voted 1