Yes, they are. This is a summary some of the points of a chapter from Cory Doctrow's book Chokepoint Capitalism, which lays this out in way better detail than t

Yes, they are. This is a summary some of the points of a chapter from Cory Doctrow's book Chokepoint Capitalism, which lays this out in way better detail than the blog post (highly recommended read). The labels are more culpable (and have been terrible way before streaming) and Spotify is at their mercy for a lot of things, buy they also hurt artists on their own. There is also the fact that at least for a time the labels owned a decent stake in Spotify and other streaming services, so to a certain degree, financially speaking, they are one and the same. Part of the bland algorithmic playlists diversion strategy is being able to control what content people are listening to via playlists to be able to sell listener data ("real time mood and activity data") to advertisers, and Spotify being able to strengthen its position by acting as a gatekeeper between artists and listeners. Spotify also uses placement on playlists as a form of payola, to punish even very well-known artists such as Katy Perry that give exclusive releases (even temporary ones) to rival streaming services and hold leverage over labels. When people listen to playlists they'll also be listening to more music, which also helps juice their user count/activity numbers for investors. When people don't care what artist they're listening to and just want playlists, they become more loyal to Spotify's algorithms than any particular artist. A lot of the most successful playlist "artists" come from music content mills (similar to the way advertisers can commission a knockoff song when they can't license an original) that churn out large amounts of music to game the algorithms, and Spotify then pays them a lower royalty rate than they do major labels and artificially promotes it to increase its margins. They can then use that leverage to force actual artists to accept lower royalty rates to get access to the same promotion. Spotify is definitely at the labels' mercy, but its "success" (if you can define being unprofitable but monopolizing a market as that) directly comes at the expense of artists. It can't negotiate better rates with labels but it does have the ability to stop engaging in payola and prioritizing fake content mill playlist "artists" over real artists. There's also the fact that royalty payments are zero sum game where a huge artist can reduce payments to smaller ones. In fact, it's a huge problem on Spotify that people upload fake "music" (faker than the content mill playlist artists) that they then stream with phone farms and steal money from real artists via fraud. Spotify is well aware but don't really care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whQ8UBoz-To https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whQ8UBoz-To