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The music industry is engineering artist popularity – listeners are right to be angry

Numerous tactics, including payola-like deals on Spotify, are promoting artists people haven’t chosen to hear – but the industry refuses to discuss it

Every other week, a post goes viral on X asking why Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe!, or Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, or Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, are constantly being put into a user’s autoplay queue by the streaming service’s algorithm, regardless of what they were listening to previously. One user got Carpenter’s recent hit Please Please Please after the extremely different vibe of Get It Sexy by St Louis rapper Sexyy Red; another complained to NME that Espresso was constantly playing after the “sad music and songwriter types” she often listens to. Taylor Swift has maintained a chokehold on the charts not just because of widespread listenership of her album The Tortured Poets Department, but because she has savvily released geolocked alternate versions of the record when a competitor, such as Charli xcx, comes within spitting distance of the No 1 spot.

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