Ghost artists on Spotify

The entire history of the music business is one of attorneys developing ever more inventive ways of screwing over musicians.

The sad thing (for artists) is that it seems like most Spotify listeners don't care.

Most of our music consumption today seems to be as a kind of background vibe rather than an appreciation of the music itself.

How much of my money am I supposed to fork over to streaming companies? Tidal, Qobuz, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Apple. And how much work am I supposed to invest in migrating my playlists between them? I don't want to invest my time in digging through every new artist (SoundCloud?), at the same time, I occasionally find a deep rabbithole I want to go down. How do I go spelunking if the archive isn't deep and rich?

The same way as it was always done: through effort.

Before you'd need to visit different record stores, hitting one every few days to check their latest in catalogue. Find the hidden boxes with low print releases, listen on a player and skip the needle around track grooves. Or have good friends recommending you stuff.

It got easier but I think we need to realise to find the signal on a sea of noise will probably require effort for a long time. Given time enough every new information discovery tool gets flooded by the noise, almost like a form of entropy.

I thought that technology was supposed to save humans from the torture of having to put forth any effort, so that we could just lay back and have all of our wants immediately satisfied. At least that's the utopia I was promised in Wall-E.