> Paying musicians cheap wages

Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.

"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?

The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.

> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote

1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own

2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).

And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.

Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).

As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".

And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".

Performative outrage is performative.

> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams

1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.

> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform

Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.

So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).

Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.