Spotify payola

Above are three screenshots I took of Spotify's "popular albums" section from a few weeks back, I would've brought this to my readers attention sooner except I felt this would've conflicted with my retrospective lists from the twentieth century. In any case, this is the best proof I have that these artists have bought into the system, mainly because we have singles in this collection along with what appears to be playlists in addition to several of these albums being quite old at this point (nearly two decades in the case of Kanye West's entry.) There are also no surprises when it comes to who is featured in this section as we have the likes of Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Morgan Wallen any other artists that are currently trending on social media. Honestly the only surprise here is that there's no signs of Drake despite Kendrick Lamar being accounted for here (I won't go into their pointless feud here.)

I make this post as a plea to my readers to avoid this section in their respective Spotify accounts as all it does is boost the numbers of all the artists in question, by all means continue to enjoy their music if you're a fan but explore the rest of their respective catalogues as well as checking out other artists in the recommended section on their artist pages. Also try not to go with the recommendations on your homepage on Spotify as it often recommends albums you've already saved as "new discoveries" which is obviously a way of getting you to relisten to these albums to boost their numbers in the mainstream, admittedly I've been guilty of this which has led me to being far more familiar with certain artists on my account (thankfully they're too obscure in this day and age to make an impact on the charts.)

Again, this isn't me definitively saying that any of these artists are gaming the system with this practice, rather that it's certainly helping them reach a wider audience than their peers who don't have the resources to plaster themselves all over social media and Spotify's playlist. I think we can all agree that these artists (ESPECIALLY Taylor Swift) are far overexposed at this point and can definitely step aside to allow more obscure artists (both past and present) to take the spotlight to await the discovery of music lovers unfamiliar with their work. This is a shorter post of mine, mainly because I don't want the music industry to die off and I feel bringing attention to this practice is a way to save it from doing so.