One question has been plaguing pop fans for months: Why does Spotify play the same song over and over again?
Every other week, X sees a viral post questioning why the streaming service’s algorithms constantly add Chapel Lawn’s “Good Luck, Babe!”, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” and Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” to users’ autoplay queues, regardless of what they’ve listened to previously. One user listened to Carpenter’s recent hit “Please Please Please” after listening to the very different vibe “Get It Sexy” by St. Louis rapper Sexy Red. Another complained to NME that “Espresso” always plays after listening to “the types of sad music and songwriters” he tends to listen to.
The furor has turned online pop fans, who are already relatively paranoid, into full-on conspiracy theorists. Taylor Swift fans claim that Eilish turned on “mass autoplay” (there’s no such thing). Last month, a post went viral claiming that Loan is an “industry rigger,” a nonsense term used to discredit artists who have risen to fame quickly (if the industry could “rig” stars, there would be a lot more of them). Others have described the proliferation of autoplay artists as “payola,” a revival of the term used to describe record companies paying radio stations to play their music. The idea is easy to understand.
Pop has always given listeners the illusion of choice: whether you listen to Roan, Eilish, or Carpenter, your $0.003 goes into Universal Music Group’s coffers. But things have steadily gotten worse in recent years as artists and their teams have developed new ways to game the charts and algorithms. Taylor Swift has continued to dominate the charts not only because of the sheer number of listeners for her album The Tortured Poets Department, but also because she cleverly released regional variants when competitors like Charli XCX came close to reaching No. 1.
There’s a fundamental disconnect between feeling popular and being statistically popular that creates this weird tension among pop fans: Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” was released earlier this year and garnered media attention, but only made No. 16 on the charts. UK Official Charts Company’s list of the best-selling albums so far 2024It lost to Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and five of Swift’s albums.
And, of course, there’s “Discovery Mode,” Spotify’s controversial new feature that lets artists give up some of their royalties in exchange for preferential treatment in the app’s algorithm-driven zones, like the autoplay queue, radio, and “Smart Shuffle,” a feature that adds recommended songs to users’ playlists. It’s not technically payora, but it certainly feels like 21st-century payora to users.
Discovery Mode is now widely available in 2023, but it remains to be seen how widely it’s being used and what success artists are having with it. Spotify says that “on average, artists saw a 50% increase in saves, a 44% increase in user playlist adds, and a 37% increase in followings in the first month,” but these metrics are specific to the Spotify ecosystem, so it’s hard to say whether musicians are actually making much money from these new “discoveries” of their music.
So it’s no wonder fans worry that the mechanisms through which they listen to music are being tampered with. The industry is also failing to educate listeners about the possibility of them being subject to a new type of payora. In talking to label heads, publicists, and artists (all of whom were wary of going public), I learned that many in the industry feel that Discovery Mode sets a dangerous precedent for how technology can invade music. I also heard questions about whether the tool is really worth it, given that there’s a natural limit to how many songs can be boosted to listeners’ feeds.
But many artists and most labels fear retribution from Spotify in the form of less editorial or algorithmic support, making it dangerous to criticize them publicly. There’s also an element of paranoia here: no one knows how aggressive Spotify is at enforcing its algorithms, meaning the fear of being “blacklisted” looms large, even though there’s no evidence that upsetting Spotify actually results in such a thing.
Spotify didn’t even speak to me officially. The lack of information from all sides makes it difficult for anyone to listen to music on the service in an informed way. A representative from a major label said he didn’t think their label actually uses discovery, but there was speculation that they do. This is fitting for a roundabout response to such an arcane topic. The promise of the internet was that it would cut out the middleman and let you buy music directly from artists, but the reality is the exact opposite: we’re faced with a system that’s even more horribly complicated. Spotify users are left in limbo, guessing how much of their feed essentially amounts to private advertising, and how much, at the other extreme, is completely random.
