📑 Tears in Rain

Slipping in the qualifier “outside the top 10,000” is key to that statement, which sidesteps the question of what the switch would do to the top earners from streaming, and to the platform itself. If you understand that user-centric accounting might significantly reduce earnings for the winners of the current system, Spotify’s next remark may read differently too:

“We are willing to make the switch to a user-centric model… However, Spotify cannot make this decision on its own – it requires broad industry alignment to implement this change.”

Translation: we’re never going to switch to user-centric unless we’re absolutely forced to. It seems that Spotify – and their major label partners, who helped create this system and eagerly support it – are just as invested in pro-rata accounting as Stef Van Vugt.

In other words, they benefit from the same type of fraud.