@jonhicks@mastodon.social I stopped using Spotify when the Joe Rogan shit broke. But I think it's fascinating that 9 months ago, when the new payment scheme was announced, this article estimated that 60% of streams would not be monetized. The number turned out to be 88%. But I think we have to be careful with percentages. As Spotify's blog makes clear, there are tons of bad actors out there spamming the service with low-effort, artificially short, pointless tracks and AI-generated garbage. They're making SEO-oriented playlists and hoping to make some bucks from accidental clicks. It looks like there's 253M tracks on Spotify, "65.2m got 1-10 streams....[and] 55.3m tracks got zero streams." So it could be as high as 120.5M streams (47%) that are low-effort bullshit. (Obviously some amount of that 47% is unpopular/undiscovered real artists, but that's not released anywhere near the rate of bullshit releases). Spotify sucks. I don't use it and I urge people not to. But there's a lot of scammers who they don't pay thanks to this policy, and that much is good.