Sweet little lies: Deceptive statistics in the album charts
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Sweet little lies: Deceptive statistics in the album charts
There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.
Yash Bagal • A New Funnel for Music
To me, it’s not a problem of access to music. The problem is more like the way in which convenience culture has shaped a specific idea of what music is and what its purpose is.
Liz Pelly • 40: All the things Spotify didn't want you to know but Liz Pelly found out
Our society has a love/hate relationship with quantification. The consensus is that we’ve OD’d on numbers and need to step back into a more intuitive state. I certainly feel that and find value in it too, but I’m still a number-head.
The goal is to hook us as users, of course, but also to divert overall streamshare toward discounted offerings—works that have been licensed to Spotify at a lower price point, both through its ghost artists program and its algorithmic payola-like practices.