Everyone on Team Meljoann is now on board with the idea that Spotify is a fuckin’ evil cesspit that can — and should — be boycotted. I’ve submitted takedown requests, and my music should be off it within a week.

We’ve watched CEO Daniel Ek’s heartwarming journey blossom from platforming and enriching fascists ¹, ², ³, to finally fulfilling his bloodthirsty manifest destiny and directly funding the war machine ⁴.

Culture jamming on me way out

For your convenience, here are some re-useable images I used to communicate, I hope effectively, why I’ve left the platform.

• Blank 🗑️ square overlay
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Spotify hates art

Almost as a side-effect to Daniel Ek’s scumbag techbro nature, Spotify’s “contentification” of art has all but decimated the independent music scene ⁵.

Yet, most artists are still clinging to the hope of winning the algorithmic lottery. It’s understandable: we are fucking poor. At 0.003c per stream, artists need an unbelievable amount of ’em to reach minimum wage.

Couple that to being directly told by music industry “experts”, several times, that the notoriously game-able Spotify “monthly listeners” metric is the key to any A&R’s cold, data-driven heart? We have ourselves an extreme reliance on Big Tech. The whole thing is a dodgy pyramid scheme, where independent artists are encouraged to waste time making ourselves more acceptable to the platform by “driving our listeners to Spotify with social media ads” ⁶.

Here’s a rundown of my experiences on the platform.

Me: a case study

I am a data ghost. I’m invisible to Spotify.

Spotify claims to playlist 20% of pitches ⁷. 2020 to 2023, we pitched 20 hype amazing songs to them. By that metric, 4 of those pitches would have been playlisted, unless my “songs” are absolute “shit”.

It’s never enough

Lest you believe my “songs” are “shit”, here is some #incredible proof:

• Hype reviews in Pitchfork, Line of Best Fit, RTÉ, Irish Times, Hot Press, Nialler9; and many, many more.
• Queen of niche radio airplay, including BBC6music, BBC Radio 1, RTÉ 2FM, RTÉ RnaG, KEXP. Live sessions on BBC & 2FM & multiple tracks of the week on BBC & 2FM.
• Real cash-money grant awards from the Arts Council of England & Help Musicians UK.

If it wasn’t for those grants, it would’ven take me another 10 years to release my new album, ‘Status’. Squeezing recording sessions in between shit jobs and crying.

Your social media fans want your Spotify links in their faces at LEAST 20 times a day

Lest you think we just “haven’t played the game”, we have tried:

• Massive social media campaigns of pure bullshit, doing everything you’re supposed to do, including that pre-save nonsense that literally no-one likes.
• Loads of 3rd party playlists (shout-out to my BOYZ: SubmitHub, PlaylistSupply, and a really expensive PR company). You pay a “donation”, and all their “listeners” turn out to be bots.
• Social media ads, when we had a budget from our arts grant. Just a little more Arts money flowing straight to Big Tech.
• A ton of pointless radio edits, begging for editorial playlists each time.
• A shitload of pointless “artist playlists” that no-one would ever conceivably want to listen to.
• Embodying The Grindset by means of supernatural invocation.
• Positive Thinking to Attract Limitless Abundance.
• A REALLY good profile picture ⁸.

Incredible metrics

60k tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day ⁹. Currently, 153 out of 14k+ Spotify employees are down as curators on LinkedIn. I honestly don’t think they are reading the pitches, or listening to the music.

Internally, Spotify use audio analysis tools ¹⁰ developed by The Echo Nest ¹¹ to (presumably) make playlist and recommendation decisions. This reduces all of humanity’s music to universally accepted metrics such as “danceability”, “valence” ¹², and “hotttness” ¹³.

Ligeti is 0.0002 hotttness, probably. All of human reactivity to art, reduced to a handful of numerical values. Michael Jackson is 3.004 danceability. Hildegard von Bingen is 1.02 valence and John Coltrane is faring slightly more valent at a disappointing 1.023.

I don’t know, I didn’t even bother to put them into the Spotify API to find out their actual “hotttness”. Random values off the top of my head are as meaningful as whatever is gonna be farted out of that thing.

Data ghost

I consulted the Spotify API, like some sort of oracle.

curl "https://api.spotify.com/v1/artists/07UZ44ZNlh6DxdOMyWuJa8" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer  <my auth token>"

Here’s what we got:

...
  "followers" : {
    "href" : null,
    "total" : 279
  },
  "genres" : [ ],
...
  "name" : "Meljoann",
  "popularity" : 0,
  "type" : "artist",'
...

Personally, I like that my genre is [ ] ¹⁴. However, this isn’t gonna help me algorithmically.

The Spotify for Artists customer support person tells me there “isn’t enough data” to determine my genre, despite us laboriously filling out the genre field on each release upload and fruitless song “pitch”.

The terrible truth, revealed now for the very first time on meljoann dot com

The ‘Content Creators’ have already been chosen by algorithimic lottery, way back when these websites were too new to be enshittified ¹⁵. Meanwhile, smaller artists have been “demonetised” completely ¹⁶, while others are bullied into accepting even lower payments ¹⁷ in a race to the bottom.

A wild alternative appears

Enter, the Fediverse.

I’m hoping this can be a place free of the profit motive, where Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or Steve Huffman or Jeff Bezos or random Google Shareholders can’t greasily slide in between us, inserting themselves into every relationship and every piece of art.

Fellow data ghosts, let’s be Fedi Friends. Find my accounts here.