Ghost artists on Spotify

Isn't this just like how supermarkets have their "house brands" that compete with name brands? If your consumption of music amounts to "whatever Spotify tells me to listen to" then chances are you were the type of person who used to just have the radio on for background noise anyway.

EDIT: If you think about this "scandal" in reverse, that is that Spotify was started as a background, inert restaurant playlist app that paid session musicians to record 50 songs a day for lo-fi chill ambient jazz playlists, and later tried to expand their reach by allowing musicians to upload their songs, it wouldn't be a scandal at all.

> Isn't this just like how supermarkets have their "house brands" that compete with name brands? I

1) A supermarket does not bill itself as a neutral discovery platform. It's not comparable to Spotify.

2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).

3) Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.

> What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.

That's a terrible analogy.

Spotify has tons of ways to access the real artists. Often including dedicated playlists for each one of them. They show up in search. In related arists. In radio playlists. In top music playlists. Etc.

Spotify isn't taking anything "off the shelf". A more apt analogy is a grocery store with a dedicated section for store-brand goods only. Where everything's still normally on the shelves where you expect -- nothing has been taken off the shelf -- but you can also visit the store-brand-only section.

It's hard to see why that would be a bad thing for a supermarket to do.

you missed what the article was talking about

yeah, they're available by search if you know what to look for; that's the same as asking the store employee if they carry X, as opposed to seeing it as you browse the aisle

> A more apt analogy is a grocery store with a dedicated section for store-brand goods only

No, that's not the right analogy and not what Spotify is doing. That would be like having a section for "undiscovered artists" on the front page where you can browse through them, alongside another section for "Spotify-sponsored artists" which you can also browse through.

The point of the article's argument is that unless you know you want Artist X and search for them, you're not going to come across them because they're not being added to Spotify playlists and content discovery mechanisms (obviously you can add them to your own playlist manually). You'll instead come across the content that Spotify owns, allowing it to keep a greater share of revenue and pay less to artists trying to distribute their music through its platform.