It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now

[Artists on Spotify are paid from a common fund divided in proportion to their number of streams in each payment period. Audiobooks are also sharing from the same pool. Scammers can flood the platform with fake plays that reduces the payout from all the others.]

[Anyone can upload tracks to even verified pages for independent artists because there isn't much vetting on the distributor or platform side and the cost is almost negligible.]

[One dark practice is creating songs from royalty-free loops and setting the date as early as possible in order to block any usage of them via Content ID; this is also not vetted by distributors or streaming platforms.]