Spotify furious that they aren't getting their cut.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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And we're not concerned that they fund and heavily promote on their services extremist content and disinformation by the truckload?
Concern? You obviously haven't considered all the money they're making!
I don’t get the anger or outrage or even mild concern here? Spotify lets people upload their podcasts and music. People abuse that.
Spotify didn’t do anything wrong, the people uploading this crap disguised as podcasts did. Spotify removed them when they found them.
Where’s the issue?
It's because we've seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don't have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn't want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won't help you
I dislike that you can't block NSFW stuff. My son found NSFW stuff on Spotify.. and I had to take it off our Living Room Tv and ban him from using it for now. I think you can block accounts, but there were so many.. Go ahead, search tits on Spotify.. fucking wild to me it's not moderated.
Huh, I had never thought to search for tits on Spotify, but now I see I was wrong for not doing so.
Jesus that's just straight up porn
We gave the kids access to Spotify Kids, I think it's ok so far.
Yeah it was okay here too, until he hit middle school and a classmate mate told him about it ..sigh..
They don't stay little for long, I know but I was not prepared!
I'm not sure anyone can be prepared.
I'd imagine that you could even take podcasts and run them through a speech recognition app much like visual voicemail does. This could then parse the text and flag a podcast for manual review by a human to ban an account, could even auto suspend the account until its challenged or reviewed. You don't even need someone to listen to everything since Podcasts and usually spoke word.
Hell I bet I could build a pipeline to run on a local server in under a week that does this. Download the audio. Parse it into text. Then parse the text for any trigger words or phrases.
You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!
The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.
Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn't need to listen to every podcast:
The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found. CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.
It’s 2025, and Spotify still doesn’t offer lossless audio. Don’t understand why anyone would keep using it with so many alternatives available.
The number of people with the audio equipment needed to even notice a difference with lossless audio is a rounding error, especially on their phones using their AirPods/galaxy buds.
You don't need that much special equipment to tell the difference. I have a lil shitty Jelly Star. I can tell the difference between Spotify's High and a FLAC from bandcamp with it's speaker, Bluetooth headphones (Sony Link Buds) and my Car speakers.
As audiophile as I am (own very expensive (> 1k) headphones for instance) and additionally I'm musician/producer.
I don't think you can hear the difference between 320kbit bitrate vs flac in a blindtest (this is important, to avoid biasing yourself). I could notice what was a 128kbit mp3 and flac in a blindtest and already that was minimal (and is likely mostly related to the 16k cut-off of 128kbit mp3), but 320kbit, nope...
If you notice a difference it likely has to do with different mastering/LUFS etc. not the compression artifacts themself.
I don't think Spotify's High bitrate is as good as it says it is, though. That's what I'm getting at. Sort of like how YouTube's encoding for whatever setting you pick is never as good as a local file with the same specs.
You really can’t. With Bluetooth earbuds you absolutely can’t. With car speakers you’re not fooling anyone.
You absolutely can. It's not massive. But Spotify does sound muddy in comparison. And I'm not some crazy audiophile either. But I've definitely heard more clarity in some of my favourite songs and noticed certain parts of them that I've never noticed before just because I was using a FLAC vs using Spotify where I used to listen to it.
At a certain point, you're right you're not going to notice a difference on shitty speakers but there's something about Spotify's lossy compression that even at high you'll notice the difference between the two.
Completely disagree, and I have tens of gigs of FLAC music to go with my 10s of gigs of MP3.
I also don't think Spotify's High setting is as good as an mp3 of the same stated bitrate
Really? This is your concern about Spotify?
Seems like a more important concern than some people using Spotify to sell drugs
Clearly most people care more about other factors than they do about audio quality that isn't even discernable through their Bluetooth earbuds.
Yeah seriously; unless you're an audiophile who spends extra on quality headphones, your Bluetooth buds are probably using the SBC codec, which cuts off frequencies at 16kHz and thus is hardly better than listening to a 128Kbps MP3. (In Android you can see what codec your headphones are using by going into the developer options.)
And to be honest, if you care enough about sound quality to spend extra on the high res tier in your streaming service of choice, you're probably using wired headphones. Audiophiles don't fuck with Bluetooth.
Ldac only for me.
Nah I have a few different ones and aptx adaptive is pretty solid.
It's funny because it wasn't until I started producing music and driving samples that I realized 320kbps mp3 IS NOT the same nor is it comparable to lossless audio
As for the whole "audiophile" thing I don't even know what to make of that.
It's actually worse than lossless being discernable or not on bluetooth - people cannot reliably tell between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio generally. This has been studied to oblivion - the jury is out, there's no more discussion to be had on the subject.
Just the other day I was listening to the new Linkin Park album on Spotify in a car with a friend (no fancy speaker system)
We both thought it sounded kinda low quality so we switched to youtube and the improvement was instantly noticable to us. Spotify just sucks. At least if you are used to HQ audio
Happened to me too with the same album. Then I remembered I hadn't configured the audio quality after switching to a new phone. So I did that, and then it was fine.
Hm could be that. Though I vaguely remember he checked the Spotify quality setting before going on Youtube
i dumped spotify because they raised the price so they could include podcasts that i couldn't give less of a rat's ass about. also the ai bullshit and the refusal to allow me to block artists. spotify can get fucked
I'm so confused, I'm a Spotify user and there are multiple artists I've selected "don't play this artist" on that Spotify blocks for me; it won't even play those artists when I click playlists including them.
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At least in the US, I'm absolutely destroyed that people just don't care. They talk like they care, but they just fucking don't. I don't get it at all. They will gripe about how evil and bad something is, then just keep using it. "If everyone else is, so will I" maybe. Group Inertia.
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