Spotify is built to keep you listening, not to make you hear something new. For a band that writes eight-minute songs and expects you to sit through the whole record, that design is a problem, and it shapes who gets paid. This piece was written in January 2025; the rules and figures below are as of then unless marked.

The playlist is the product

Open Spotify and you get playlists built for parts of the day: something for the gym, something to fall asleep to. The system learns what you already like and serves more of it. That is comfortable, and it is the opposite of how most of us found heavy music, which was a friend's tape, a support act we showed up early for, a record that took three listens before it made sense.

Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, published in January 2025, makes the case that this design pushes music toward background listening. Music that works as wallpaper fits the system. Music that demands attention fits it less well.

The clearest example is Johan Röhr. In March 2024 the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter reported that the composer's work sat behind more than 650 invented artist names on Spotify, with about 15 billion streams between them. Most listeners never knew a name, because names weren't the point. The playlists were.

The money follows the same logic

Since April 2024, a track on Spotify needs at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months, plus an unpublished minimum of unique listeners, before it earns recorded royalties. The rule is applied per recording.

Think about what that does to a metal album. The single clears the line. The instrumental interlude and the ten-minute closer might not. The band wrote a record; the platform pays for tracks.

When the Living Wage for Musicians Act was introduced in March 2024 by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, its sponsors put the average streaming royalty at about $0.003 per stream and proposed a floor of one cent, funded by a new fee and a tax on non-subscription revenue. It did not pass that Congress. (Update: Tlaib reintroduced it in September 2025 as H.R. 5664.)

What a band can actually control

You can't fix the algorithm, and pulling your catalog mostly hurts discovery. What you can do is stop treating the platform as your home base.

  • Treat playlist adds as a bonus, not a plan. A placement can vanish next week. A fan who bought your record and joined your list is still there next tour.
  • Release with the album in mind. If the record is meant to be heard front to back, say so, and give people a way to own it whole: Bandcamp, vinyl, a tape at the merch table.
  • Send every listener somewhere you own. Bio links, end screens and the back of the shirt should point to a page where people can buy or sign up.
  • Talk about the deep cuts. Play them live, film them, write about them. If the platform won't surface the song you care about most, you have to.

The part that's on listeners

Fans will pay artists directly when the option is in front of them. Bandcamp reported in December 2025 that its fee-free Bandcamp Fridays had paid $154 million to artists and labels since March 2020. Buying the record, following the band on the platform that pays it, and going to the show still work.

Spotify is useful for being found. Build everything after that first listen somewhere you control.

Pick the one song on your record the algorithm will never touch, and plan one live clip and one post that put it in front of people this month.