The Greedy Heart is a Prodigious Thing, Indeed...

"Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders."

Who could have guessed? Turns out Spotify is a prime example of enshittification, just an elaborate rigged game. A money-making machine built to line the pockets of it's executives, board members & shareholders. It's a dominating, wildly-successful, obnoxiously-ubiquitous app that resides on everyone's smartphone. It's also a scam and a total hustle. I mean, fuck, knock me down with a feather, of course.

Did you know that, as Liz Pelly writes there are "ghost artists", fake artists churning out tracks for Spotify, completely b.s. creations used to just to goose the company's profits? Cutting out legitimate musicians. Ha. Not surprising. It is always amazing how the Tricky Monkeys will hustle and scheme to squeeze every last drop of juice from every last buck. We are amazing and so fucking predictable.

So yeah, what might have started as a nice idea has turned into an elaborate hustle. Music and musicians be damned. What does the future portend? Probably, let's just cut to the chase, have AI create the tracks, and then maybe have the AI create fake listeners to listen to them endlessly 24/7?  Maybe they can just eliminate the Human element completely?

Turns out we are all just hustling each other with this internet thing. Fake shit gobbling up all of our time and attention. What's a Pilgrim to do? Dust off that turn-table and go back to analog. Or fire up that Sony Walkman and spin those silver discs. That is more real world. Wake up Bunky, there is a world beyond the veil, beyond the world wide web. Maybe put that fucking smartphone down? I know, a radical idea, right?! 

Open the window. Go outside. Smell the roses. Take it to the streets. We have created this alternate reality and it's just an enormous Hall of Mirrors, we use it to hustle and lie to ourselves, a load of mumbo-jumbo and madness. Fuck it.

BTW - I was alerted to this subject by a musician I know very well. We make music together, totally on the fringes of the "music biz."

Here is an excerpt from a conversation via email:  "We were recently talking to another record label (chasing rabbits down rabbit holes) and for them it's all about the Spotify algorithm, they talked about it like it's some unholy god. They wanted to analyze our tracks with some kind of app that somehow predicts how the algorithm would respond. Very creepy way to think about music. It makes sense that the insiders at Spotify would rig the game to benefit themselves. The greedy heart is a prodigious thing, indeed. Yikes. What a world."