When I switched from Spotify to Apple Music recently, it took me some time to adjust to its interface. Everything that appeared on the screen felt strange and confusing for me, who was an irritated but loyally subscribed Spotify user since 2018. It was too… clean. Prior to that, I was a teenager listening to music for free online —  recordings on cheap Nokias, MP3 conversions passed around on thumb drives, the golden age of 8tracks when mixes felt oddly intimate — so the switch, and a paid one, to Spotify made sense at the time. The price was right, the catalogue was massive and when my entire family joined a shared plan, it easily became the default way to listen.

Apple Music made me realise how traditional and smooth music discovery is supposed to be. That the exploration should require effort — to listen to all kinds of music to know what’s for me and what’s not —  instead of opting for Spotify’s editorial and algorithmic playlists curated based on readings of my behavior that eventually led me to be stuck in my musical comfort zones. That discovering music online shouldn’t come at the price of knowing redundant details meant to disrupt listening behaviours, such as the artist’s monthly listener count, which benefits almost nobody but record label executives and obsessive stans updating their fan pages. That the platform interface should prioritise user experience first; instead, it succumbs slowly to enshittification, with its priority swinging from mood playlists to podcasts, back to mood playlists, and later to podcasts, depending on whichever benefits Spotify financially first.

Spotify’s game in the long run is seemingly to replace important parts of the music listening ecosystem and become an all-in-one, chronically dependent platform. Take their playlist editors, for example. Spotify’s playlist editors are a group of tastemakers hired to curate playlists like Lorem or New Music Friday with the intention to introduce or push artists they feel deserve bigger platforms and supposedly benefit the music community. Lorem, specifically, is known to be Gen Z’s favourite playlist, pushing then-small artists like Conan Gray, Omar Apollo, and Girl in Red to meteoric rise. A Billboard interview with the editors showcases the platform’s intention to drive away audiences of music journalism to become audiences of music streaming services, supposedly offering both editorial and curated work behind the playlists.

“As we look to the future, the editorial side is becoming even more critical. We are doubling down as human music editors in music discovery and trend forecasting in 2025,” said Sulinna Ong, Spotify’s global head of editorial. Where music journalism dies, shuts down and its people retrenched, Spotify seems keen to monopolise the tastemaker job, suggesting music you think you like. That could not be further from the truth.

Beneath the supposed human work of the editorial playlists hides a greedy behemoth gurgling. It was reported that where Spotify benefits from editorial playlists, they allow artists to be noticed by listeners in exchange for a 30 per cent royalty reduction. Discovery Mode, as they call it, means that the artists suggested to you — the ones who seem tailored to perfect fit to your taste — could be paid less in royalties just to get noticed, though it’s never guaranteed.

And then there’s Perfect Fit Content, a controversial Spotify internal program where the platform employs a few producers or stock-music artists for cheap to blast off exorbitant amounts of muzak into mood playlists. In her book Mood Machine, journalist Liz Pelly reported that these ‘ghost artists’ employed by Spotify are intended to “grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.” The program severs our relationship to arts and artists, where independent artists, for example, may lose the possibility of earning “crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC,” while ghost artists “who record PFC music themselves must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.” Essentially, while the playlist editors may convince you that it’s all human work of curation, Spotify is busy seeding anonymous and cheaply made jingles into lofi chill or Chilled Jazz playlists that you were never aware of. A future where playlists like Lorem or New Music Friday are absorbed under Perfect Fit Content — perhaps now with AI-generated music — may well be possible.

Beyond features that are detrimental to my personal listening experience, Spotify is already known to be — and it’s the most fitting word to describe them — an evil platform. There’s the fact that they are among the streaming platforms that pay musicians the lowest per stream, around $0.003 for every play. For a company that made a net income of €1.138 billion with their revenue rising 18.3% to €15.673 billion in 2024, the amount is unjustifiable. Of course, when attempts are made to display more awareness of their injustice towards musicians such as Spotify Unwrapped, a ‘Spotify Wrapped’ parody site that, instead of showing your annual listening summary, calculates how much an artist earns per stream, Spotify shuts it down with legal threats.

There’s also the news that streams below 1,000 are not eligible for payment, as Spotify claims that those tracks that earn 1–1,000 streams generate, on average, $0.03. “Starting in early 2024, tracks must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate recorded royalties,” the platform said in a statement. Because labels and distributors get paid a portion, Spotify assumes that artists aren’t making money at all off these low-stream tracks, so it’s best for them to not earn at all and instead give the “tens of millions of dollars annually to increase payments of eligible tracks.” Essentially, putting your music on the biggest streaming platform as independent artists means working even harder just to qualify for monetisation. We used to call this bloodsuckers for leeching off someone else’s hard work. Nowadays, it’s just another Spotify policy we adhere to.

As if their Perfect Fit Content isn’t sinister enough for allowing ghosts artists on the platform, another form of Spotify’s ghost artists is AI-generated bands. In July, attention shifted to Spotify for hosting The Velvet Sundown, a band whose music, promotional images and backstory are all AI-generated, though nowhere on their profile does it disclose that the band was created using artificial intelligence. The band, which released two albums in June alone, garnered millions of streams within weeks. This quiet but loud embrace of AI bands shows that Spotify is okay with AI band profiting off music trained on other people’s material, usually without attribution. Without transparency on AI music, Spotify makes it harder for its consumers to make informed decisions about what they are listening to. Meanwhile, human artists are being removed from the platform when artificial streams are detected. Case in point: Takahara Suiko, whose 2024 Hikayat Lagu Rakyat album under the name VIONA was taken down after alleged detection of artificial streams.

“If anything, I performed in the Philippines, so maybe one of the songs, or a few, got played by people there. Spotify probably flagged it as fake because the track was released ages ago, then suddenly there was a spike in streams from the Philippines,” Takahara explained to me. The issue made her consider taking her music off Spotify. But Takahara’s reasoning wasn’t just about her music being forcibly removed.

It was also related to the recent news that Spotify CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek has partially funded a new €600 million investment into AI military defence company Helsing. Based in Germany, Helsing’s AI technology is reported to assist with battlefield operations, helping to identify and assess multiple collected forms of data via sensors in order to assemble a picturesque viewpoint which military agents could then use at their discretion. Ek’s investment firm, Prima Materia, acted as the lead investor in the latest round of funding for its activities. But Ek has also been investing since 2021. That year saw Prima Materia invest €100 million in Helsing. Four years later, his investment has skyrocketed into almost a billion, marking it  as one of Europe’s largest defence-technology investments to date. So not only am I paying for a music streaming service that gradually severs my relationship with music, I’ve also been unknowingly contributing to war with my streaming. What is there left to defend?

These days, I sort my favourite songs on Google Sheets. Too archaic, I know, but it’s a process that frees my listening behaviour from being analysed by artificial intelligence that would later do more harm to my music exploration than good. It’s also about not having emotional attachments to the playlists, which explains why I didn’t second-guess unsubscribing from Spotify Premium, knowing what I left on the app were mere songs and not a representation of my growth as a person, no matter how the internet suggests we romanticise our digital footprints. (I’d like to believe why Spotify opted for this playlist-first ploy is so that the emotional attachment we’ve built with the playlists makes it harder for many of us to leave the platform too.)

Opting for personal music exploration means, instead of depending on Spotify to suggest to me artists its algorithm thinks I want, I personally scour new music through recommendations from music magazines, buying random CDs (I’ve yet to personally contribute to the vinyl boom), friends with different music tastes, angry music discourses, and critically analysed reviews to find out my preferences. Switching to Apple Music by no means suggests Apple is free from sinister practices — for instance, Apple Music hosts The Velvet Sundown without flagging it as AI music too. But as of now, Apple Music is accessible enough to continue my work with noisy headspace, pays musicians better and its sole role in my personal music exploration is merely to provide me access to the music, which is the only reason I paid for the service in the first place. Not for music recommendation, nowhere near to listen to AI-generated curation and artists unknowingly. How I treat streaming services now is that they serve a lower priority in my music listening habits. To discover new music, I’m going back to where I first started: it’s gonna take a lot of work, but it’s gonna give me a ton of satisfaction.