The end of November used to mean something.

It wasn’t just that the festive season was mere weeks away, or that Black Friday shopping madness was imminent, but that something fun and exciting was about to drop at any moment: Spotify Wrapped.

But this year, the internet is uncharacteristically quiet during the period when Spotify Wrapped typically appears. The lack of anticipation comes during a challenging time for the streaming platform, as it faces backlash on such issues as artist compensation, AI-generated music and ICE recruitment ads.

First, there’s artist compensation. Spotify has long been criticized for its dismal payouts to artists. Earlier this year, some Grammy-nominated songwriters even boycotted a Spotify awards event in response to the company’s decision to reduce royalty rates for songwriters and publishers by merging its premium music service with audiobooks last year.

Then there was the outcry around Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek’s investment in Helsing, a German defence company. When the news broke that the CEO had been funding the AI military tech company through his investment firm Prima Materia, indie artists like Massive Attack, Deerhoof and Godspeed You! Black Emperor pulled their music from the platform in protest during the summer.

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
      2·
      13 hours ago

      This isn’t true, royalty payments are fairly similar across streaming services, on account of how much money gets in via the subscription prices. Trying to divide the royalty payments by stream count is largely irrelevant on account of them having no correlation with the royalty payments, these are instead based on the fraction of total streams on the platform.

      It’s even less true on account of artists not getting directly paid through streaming services, it’s all getting funneled to the people who own the rights to the music itself, which is the labels.

      • zqps@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        14 hours ago

        Does it perhaps have the “remote control session” feature that Spotify has when logged in on multiple devices? I’ve ditched Spotify but am still looking for a platform with this feature.