How to beat the Spotify algorithm

It's not perfect, but Spotify is still the dream platform to serve up your favourite (or soon to be favourite) tunes. Spotify's algorithm seems to have changed and listeners worldwide are complaining about being served up the same songs, from the same artist. How great is Spotify? One hundred million music tracks at your fingertips... no need to hunt for that CD or record... suggestions for new tunes you'd otherwise never listen to. More than one million New Zealanders have an account. But lately it seems there's been a change in the algorithm, and if you've been a victim of the perpetual Sabrina Carpenter playlist you'll know what we're talking about. It's something that's been bothering RNZ's Music 101 host Charlotte Ryan, who says the new Kiwi releases she looks forward to are getting more elusive on her feed. "To have every single song that you'd ever dream of at your fingertips to listen to, every single catalogue, and then bonus unreleased songs... you can get it now and listen to it anywhere you want in the world. So that is a dream," she says. "But there are many downsides to this platform as well." It's long been an industry belief that the musicians lose out from all this freely available material, needing millions of streams to get paid. But Ryan talks to Mikee Tucker from Loop Recordings who says the updated figures are improved. "I think the people who are complaining are people who in the CD era wouldn't even have got their CD on the shelf and would have been lucky to sell 100 at their gigs. They probably need to look at their career trajectory and place themselves in past iterations of the music industry and actually compare themselves to that. When you do end up even as a medium-sized artist on Spotify, it pays well," he says. Last year Spotify paid out nearly NZ$15 billion to the music industry worldwide. Another gripe from Ryan is that Spotify's system of showcasing single songs is likely to lead to the death of the album as a concept, which she says is "bad news for music purists such as myself, who love the album as a full piece of art.""Some artists are thinking about not even releasing albums in the future and just releasing singles, because that's the way that music listeners are listening to music on Spotify. They just get gifted all these new singles and playlists rather than being introduced to the full album…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details