This evening, I am witnessing two things.
1. News about the Spotify lawsuit
The argument is that AI bots play Drake’s songs, he collects royalties, and it is cheating.
Everyone is sharing the lawsuit. Screenshots. Opinions. Drake’s name is the hook. The lawsuit is the headline. But neither is the story. They are only the visible tip. The rest sinks beneath the surface.
If you’ve never heard of payola
In the 1950s, American radio was rocked by a scandal that exposed the music industry.
Known as the “payola” scandal, it revealed a widespread practice where record companies secretly paid radio DJs to play specific songs, manipulating the charts and public tastes.
But payola never disappeared. We have “playlist pitching,” “marketing budgets,” “fan engagement services,” etc. The industry pretends the numbers are organic. Everyone else pretends to believe it.
At the core is a system that rewards inflation. Spotify pays artist royalties from a single pool. The artist with the most streams, takes the largest share. Fake streams do not evaporate. They steal from someone else.
But fixing one fraud inside a pro-rata system is cosmetic. The math itself is broken. It is theft even without a fake stream. It works because it looks like math. You cannot clean a pool that keeps filling from a dirty pipe.
The lawsuit is not trying to punish Drake. It is trying to make the machine show its gears. Everyone is staring at the tip of the iceberg. The rest is still underwater.
For years, musicians relied on platforms like Bandcamp to sell directly to fans without a middleman. Bandcamp was sold twice. It wasn’t killed the way AmieStreet was. But unlike Spotify, Bandcamp relies on a human algorithm these days.
Ventures like Magnatune could not survive either.
2. The new music platform Subvert is in its alpha phase
I am writing this as a founding member of the platform. A music platform owned by its users through a cooperative structure. Musicians, fans, and workers get ownership stakes. One member, one vote.
The clever part? They separated the co-op (which holds voting control) from the business entity (which can take investment). Investors can put money in but cannot control decisions. It is structurally different.
Co-ops aren’t new. They are 19th-century solutions to 19th-century problems, now applied to 21st-century platforms.
Why I joined Subvert
I am not Western enough for classical music, and not traditional enough for Carnatic music — wrong for traditional labels, too weird for algorithm categories. I generally exist in the margins between systems.
But here’s the thing: I need to sell music somewhere. The choice isn’t between platforms and no platforms. It is between platforms that admit they are platforms and platforms that pretend they are movements.
Every platform promises to be different until it needs to be sustainable. Then the math takes over. Co-op ownership doesn’t change the math, but it changes who does the calculations. That makes it different.
I am a founding member of Subvert the way I am a composer of classical music — using inherited structures without accepting their embedded assumptions. Even for someone skeptical, the co-op model is not worse than the corporate model. That is enough reason to participate while maintaining clarity about what participation means.
Subvert is a platform where being an edge case isn’t a bug. Co-ops don’t need to categorize you into pre-existing boxes to extract value. They need you to bring what you bring. The weirder the members, the richer the ecosystem.
If you are either an artist or a music lover interested in the conversation, you are invited
The bottom line
The Spotify lawsuit will pass. The headlines will fade. Platforms will adjust their language and continue as usual.
But with Subvert, ownership changes behavior. When the users hold the keys, manipulation becomes pointless. You do not need bots to steal from yourself.
A system built on extraction needs noise to survive. A system built on participation only needs signal. That is the difference.
That is why Subvert exists.
I don't dont know a lot about the backstage of streaming apps, but I do know that Spotify oays ammount low enough to be considered abuse. I use Bandcamp to purchase official music from my favorite artists, and I have just strated using Qobuz, because I heard It pays better and the audio quality is improved. I was interested on Tidal because of audio quality as well, and I also heard It pays artists better than Spotify, but I m not currently listening to music on a device that supports such high quality. I think people are mostly attracted to Spotify because of all the social buzz.
I've never heard of Subvert but it sounds interesting, I'll check it out. Thanks for writing about it! Just out of interest, what are your thoughts on Bandcamp?