Spotify ruined music forever, but I can't stop using it

• Spotify pays tiny per-stream royalties, with many artists, especially indies, earning almost nothing.

• Spotify turns listening into passive consumption with playlists, shuffles, and hit-first algorithms.

• Still, I remain hooked because of the convenience and the service being free.

Spotify is the most popular music streaming service of all time, so it's a surprise to no one that it changed the music industry forever, mostly not for the better. It's altered how artists release music and how we listen to it. Yet despite everything wrong with Spotify, I still can't seem to quit.

Spotify has had a negative impact on the music industry

Spotify's impact in the music industry is long and controversial—in fact, it's so extensive that it has its own Wikipedia entry that's over 7,000 words long. One of the bigger controversies has to do with how much artists make from Spotify.

While Spotify and other music streaming services have made music more accessible to the masses than ever, making music free has also hurt artists who were already making pennies on the dollar with record sales. According to Free Your Music, Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream , and a good portion of that goes to the artist's label. The artist gets an even smaller cut.

For example, popular rapper Snoop Dogg claimed a couple of years ago that he received less than $45,000 for a billion streams . Spotify pushed back, saying it pays between $3 million and $5 million per billion streams. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: it's possible that Snoop Dogg only saw a tiny amount of the total royalties based on his contracts. Still, that doesn't change the fact that he's the artist and, despite that, he didn't receive the lion's share.

Snoop Dogg is still rich, though, so income from Spotify probably doesn't matter too much to him. For indie artists who publish music independently, the revenue received from Spotify is still pretty low and is unlikely to make a significant contribution to their finances. It's among the lowest when compared to services like Tidal and Apple Music, which don't have a free tier but pay artists approximately twice as much . These tiny payouts sometimes result in content withdrawals by smaller artists, though it's not the only one.

Spotify's politics outside the music industry can result in artists pulling their music as well. For example, several artists, including my favorite band, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, removed their music from Spotify after CEO Daniel Ek led a €600 million (about $693.6 million) investment in Helsing, a German defense technology company that develops autonomous AI-enabled weapons systems.

Another area where Spotify has hurt the music industry is streaming quality. Services like Deezer and Tidal have offered lossless audio streaming for years, but Spotify only added this version for Premium users in October 2025 after years of teasing.

While the practical benefits of lossless quality are hotly debated, the consensus is that it provides slightly better sound on the right audio equipment. In any case, given how much Spotify charges for Premium, it should have been available years ago.

Even now, it's not perfect . Spotify's lossless goes up to 24-bit / 44.1kHz, while many other services reach up to 24-bit / 192kHz. I won't go into the details here, but YouTuber The Headphone Show did an excellent comparison that's worth checking out if you want to learn more.

Spotify turned music listening into audio consumption

One of the biggest reasons why people hate Spotify is that it's actively destroying music creativity. It certainly added a lot of fuel to the mass-produced pop music fire—labels push artists to create short, catchy songs so that they receive lots of replays, with Spotify spoon-feeding you recommendations on the home page. Worse, still, it often favors some songs based on popularity and your listening behavior by featuring them in more of its randomized playlists and even the shuffle algorithm itself. If Spotify is the reason you got tired of a particular song that you initially liked, you're not alone.

I don't know if this is just my experience, but I listen to a lot of mixes that Spotify makes for me, and they're almost always the same old stuff. I initially loved listening to these mixes because they introduced me to artists that make similar music to what I already like, but this is now an extremely rare event for me.

I've also noticed that it tends to prioritize 4–6 of the more popular songs from an album from an artist I like, while ignoring the rest. I only realized this after I listened to these albums manually. When I open an album and listen to it, I find out that there are several songs on it that I've never heard despite knowing the lyrics of the other songs from the album by heart.

Speaking of album listening, it's another aspect where Spotify has diminished the music-listening experience. Until Adele's clash with Spotify following the release of her album 30 in 2021, Spotify automatically shuffled albums. In fact, it still does that on the free version on mobile.

This profoundly hurts the music-listening experience without the average user even realizing it. Artists put significant thought into the order of the songs on an album, so generally the best way to enjoy an album is to listen to it in order, from start to finish, especially when it's your first time. This way, you get to experience it exactly how it was intended.

As someone who started doing this earlier this year, I can confirm this. Unfortunately, Spotify's auto-shuffle on mobile means you'll either have to switch devices or go elsewhere if you don't want to pay for Premium. Perhaps there's hope that Spotify will fix the experience on mobile by making it more similar to the free version on PC. Until a couple of months ago , Spotify's mobile app was even more limited. It was restricted to shuffle mode, and you couldn't look up a song your friend recommended or pick a specific track from your playlist.

Because of these shenanigans, I've largely abandoned the mobile version of Spotify. Instead, I listen to my limited selection of old MP3s and YouTube Music when I'm at the gym or on the go, which isn't that often.

Why I still use Spotify

Despite Spotify not being a great app for either users or musicians, I'm still addicted to it, and there's no end in sight. Most of it comes down to convenience—Spotify starts automatically on my PC, and it always has a selection of familiar mixes ready for my enjoyment. Plus, most of my friends use Spotify, which makes sharing songs easier, and we love comparing our end-of-year Spotify Wrapped statistics.

Perhaps most important of all, Spotify is free. Although I listen to music for hours every day (especially when I work), I avoid subscription services as much as I can. And frankly, Spotify's $12/month individual plan seems like meh value compared to other services. Even YouTube Premium's $14/month plan looks like a steal in comparison because it includes ad-free, offline listening on YouTube Music as well.