I wonder about the legality of buying your way into listeners discovery feed. When it's a blatant lie to suggest it's based on the listeners preferred music.
This seems like the return of radio "payola" to me.
Payola was deemed a form of commercial sponsorship and so not informing listeners that a station (or DJ) was being paid to play a song violated FCC rules about disclosing sponsorships.
The FCC doesn't regulate online streaming, but the FTC has analogous rules that they enforce with bloggers and various "influencers". I imagine that they might be interested in this as well.
The big record labels effectively have a lock on popular music. If you want to play any of it you have to deal with them. But now what are your incentives, right? You pay them whatever it is, high fees, to play one of their songs, so you want to avoid playing their songs. Play an indie artist who will give you a better deal because you're buying direct and cutting out the middle man. Play one of the labels' expensive songs if the customer specifically requests it, but not otherwise.
The record labels don't like that. Competition? They want to set up a scheme where their music is what's getting played and indies are screwed, so new artists have to sign with them to be heard. So if you want the back catalog for anything less than a bankruptcy-inducing fee, you have to take the payola and let the labels choose what you play, and they're not interested in letting people discover independent artists.
And then which of their own songs do they demand get played? The artists that signed a one-sided contract giving the label most of the money are going on loop.
This industry has needed a serious antitrust investigation for decades.
This seems like the return of radio "payola" to me.
Payola was deemed a form of commercial sponsorship and so not informing listeners that a station (or DJ) was being paid to play a song violated FCC rules about disclosing sponsorships.
The FCC doesn't regulate online streaming, but the FTC has analogous rules that they enforce with bloggers and various "influencers". I imagine that they might be interested in this as well.