I think this will tie in with updates to the CDR legislation coming soon. These digital wallets hide a lot of data from the banks. Bringing them under banking legislation allows banks to pull CDR data from the wallets as a condition of use.
You mention your discover weekly. Do you know how that algorithm works? It suggests songs that you have not played, that other people who played songs that you played. It’s the same positive feedback loop. It’s songs already popular that it promotes to be played more. Which makes them more popular so it recommends them more. And thus you end up with the most steamed artists only making 15% of the content.
Does it work? Passably. For the majority, mostly generic listeners. Is it a fair way to structure a platform and to dispense payments? No. A great business model however.
If you make a great song, and Dua Lipa makes a crap song, which one would be featured and added into playlists by Spotify’s algorithms? It’s not a level playing field. It doesn’t promote content that isn’t already popular.
Which is mostly due to Spotify’s playlist and algorithms. Which fall victim to the positive feedback loop issue. Those popular artists are suggested, promoted, and played more frequently so more people hear them and thus play them more. It’s not a level playing ground. It’s a self generating walled garden of artists.
95% of the royalty pool goes to 200000 artists who generate 15% of the content. Sounding less fair the more you look at it.
You mentioned a Bluetooth issue. Do they have a hearing aid that may be your phone is broadcasting to via Bluetooth by mistake?
A lot of third party integrations to improve accessibility for visually or physically impaired users were caught up in the restrictions designed to destroy RIF Apollo etc. Spez vaguely said reddit would fix that, but it basically just resulted in improvements to base reddit for those users thrown into the bottom of a low priority dev list never to see the light of day.