I recently wrote about how the quest for “growth” in Spotify’s music catalog and the incentives for Spotify to create “ghost artists” (cookie-cutter simulacrums of popular artists and genres that Spotify owns the rights to and therefore doesn’t have to pay out royalties) have led to a downward spiral in Spotify playlists specifically and the music business in general.

Spotify is not only bad for artists, it is also walking headlong down the road to enshittification for users, with perverse incentives for record labels to release recordings like this one: “Jeunehomme” – Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 9 & 21 and other Piano Pieces from Stephen Hough.

Check the track listing in the description – 94 tracks(!) and a length of 1.5 hours. This gives you track lengths of between 41 seconds and 1:07. And these short tracks are for some new multi-movement avant-garde work. These are for Mozart Piano Concertos.

The first movement of Mozart Piano Concerto 21 is split up into 17 parts. Why? I’m sure to maximize listener “engagement” or whatever metric(s) Spotify uses to measure what to recommend for their algorithm.

As an aside, this is why I am currently trying out Apple Music. I think it’s slightly better for listeners, in that it relies on more human-generated (rather than algorithmic) playlists, but I don’t think that it pays artists substantially more for an individual play. However, the biggest thing it has going for it (for me, anyway) is that the Apple Classical Music app actually works well for classical music, where Spotify (and most other streaming services) definitely do not.

Interestingly, the only recording of Stephen Hough playing Mozart Piano Concertos 9 and 21 has the “correct” listings. This does appear to be a different recording of these concertos by Stephen Hough, but it is interesting that the music label (Erato) hasn’t released the “chopped up” album on Apple Music (at least not yet).