It's bad because these types of practices directly contribute to the degradation of culture and is destroying the market for quality music. Putting aside TikTok

It's bad because these types of practices directly contribute to the degradation of culture and is destroying the market for quality music. Putting aside TikTok for a moment, spotify is largely filling the role that radio used to play. The problem is that by doing this kind of thing, they are taking advantage of a largely captive audience to feed them derivative, second rate music, knowing that many can barely tell the difference. This ultimately lowers the quality for everyone, in no small part because it makes it so difficult to make a living as a musician (not that it was easy before streaming). This then makes a feedback loop where in order for most musicians to make money, they must feed the algorithm. Then of course the streaming services get to say, look, people can't tell the difference! In fact, they prefer the algorithmically generated music, our listening stats say so! This increasingly just becomes a circular argument. Feed people the algorithm and then say that the algorithm is just giving them what they want which is a good thing. Really what they are doing is capturing whatever little profit exists in the industry and redirecting it from artists to executives. It's really not very different from what uber did to cab drivers except that there is far, far more intrinsic value in music than in cab driving.