[miunau]

A substantial amount (20% already back in 2014, I would imagine more now) of songs available on streaming never get streamed either. Kind of why that market has steered towards flat-fee upload distributors. 29 bucks a year is better than 10% of 0 bucks.

[XorNot]

Seems to bizarre to me that the "zero streams" playlist isn't a feature actually.

[datadrivenangel]

Most things with low popularity are rated appropriately. There are definitely some hidden gems, but most media that is created is simply bad.

[miunau]

This is a lazy take. The reason is that there is money involved in picking who is at the top of the playlists. It's no big secret the big record labels own large parts of the music streaming industry. They are simply getting their investment back. There is no incentive giving money to any small third parties in terms of promotion. Spotify doesn't even pay out for songs that get under 1000 streams per year anymore.

This is not even getting into the investment companies that buy artist catalogues wholesale, and therefore have a major interest in keeping old songs in constant rotation for the decades to come.

Saying any of it is a meritocracy is pure ignorance.

[lelandbatey]

I don't think they're saying it's a meritocracy, I think they're uncontroversialy saying that a playlist of songs with up-till-now zero plays would be a huge amount of garbage, e.g. poorly made FL Studio/Garage Band experiments, not even interesting music just kinda bad music.

[wholinator2]

Yeah, it seems like it could be a great feature for helping level the playing field a bit and discover some hidden gems that no one would have ever heard. But I imagine that at some point 'no streams' would have to turn into 'low streams' but that's fine.