Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.

E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.

Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.

Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.

This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.