[antoinebalaine]

The shocking thing about Spotify's UI was that it was never modeled to be a record collection or a record store. It was always modeled to be a database front end.

The ui design and the business model always reflected that prerogative: poor discoverability, poor user-favorites, poor classification, absolutely no blobs, credits or liner notes. An artist uploading is just another entry in the database - the service sells access to the DB, it doesn't sell music. By extension, the user is also more and more a "yet another entry" in the whole process of "consuming" the data.

It's just dehumanizing, yet consumers would rather this than having to deal with the friction of purchasing records (which are outrageously expensive, which also points to the record industry's responsibility in this...) or pirating under they eye of copyright trolls. Long story short: they'll fail, sooner or later.

[parpfish]

i think this is largely due to the fact that spotify has shifted from being a streaming platform to being a content creator AND streaming platform.

they've got misaligned incentives now because one half of the company is trying to make the best audio streaming platform that they can, and the other half is creating content and trying to get it injected into as many ears as possible.

the big round of layoffs in january included pushing dawn ostroff and de-emphasizing the podcast moves, which (fingers crossed) will lead to less emphasis on the content creation side