Spotify caught hosting hundreds of fake podcasts that advertise selling drugs

Spotify furious that they aren't getting their cut.

And we're not concerned that they fund and heavily promote on their services extremist content and disinformation by the truckload?
- Concern? You obviously haven't considered all the money they're making!

I don’t get the anger or outrage or even mild concern here? Spotify lets people upload their podcasts and music. People abuse that.
Spotify didn’t do anything wrong, the people uploading this crap disguised as podcasts did. Spotify removed them when they found them.
Where’s the issue?
- It's because we've seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don't have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
  Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn't want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won't help you
  
  I'd imagine that you could even take podcasts and run them through a speech recognition app much like visual voicemail does. This could then parse the text and flag a podcast for manual review by a human to ban an account, could even auto suspend the account until its challenged or reviewed. You don't even need someone to listen to everything since Podcasts and usually spoke word.
  Hell I bet I could build a pipeline to run on a local server in under a week that does this. Download the audio. Parse it into text. Then parse the text for any trigger words or phrases.
  
  I dislike that you can't block NSFW stuff. My son found NSFW stuff on Spotify.. and I had to take it off our Living Room Tv and ban him from using it for now. I think you can block accounts, but there were so many.. Go ahead, search tits on Spotify.. fucking wild to me it's not moderated.
  
  You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!
  The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.

So they realised Spotify hosts Joe Rogan?

At least in the US, I'm absolutely destroyed that people just don't care. They talk like they care, but they just fucking don't. I don't get it at all. They will gripe about how evil and bad something is, then just keep using it. "If everyone else is, so will I" maybe. Group Inertia.
- People don't wish to help fight the war on drugs. Why should they? Are you destroyed by people's indifference to drug advertising or are you making a general statement not necessarily about this story? Are you okay with legal prescription drugs being advertised? Or is it the illegality that's a moral issue with you??
  
  Legal drugs should not be advertised either. Drugs or other treatments should be prescribed by a doctor based on a review of the actual symptoms and side effects to the patient. A drug advertisement will generally tell you the key words to tell the doctor and may be missing other factors.
  I have symptoms C, L and Q. What treatment plan will be best. Vs. I want drug X because I have symptoms X Y and Z.
  That said, I read the OC as a protest to Spotify and their predatory practices in general.
- I think it's more that most people just aren't aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren't any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what's the alternative? Sure there's a few Linux phones out there and that's almost an alternative but it's not there yet. You could go with a "dumb" phone, but for most people that's not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
  If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they'd probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
  
  What’s an example of an alternative with a really great recommendation algorithm?
  Things like recommendation algorithms are difficult for small companies/individuals to provide. Let alone the library of music.
- Why would people here care that much about this? This kind of material exists on any site that allows user submitted content, and the only solution is aggressive automated moderation, which winds up hurting everyday users. Would you prefer that anyone who uploads a song or podcast that names a drug be automatically removed and have to be manually approved?
  These are low-effort scams to steal credit card numbers, it doesn't seem like any of these had an actual avenue to purchase drugs. They should be removed for sure, but this is hardly some wild breach of responsibility.

It’s 2025, and Spotify still doesn’t offer lossless audio. Don’t understand why anyone would keep using it with so many alternatives available.
- The number of people with the audio equipment needed to even notice a difference with lossless audio is a rounding error, especially on their phones using their AirPods/galaxy buds.
  
  You don't need that much special equipment to tell the difference. I have a lil shitty Jelly Star. I can tell the difference between Spotify's High and a FLAC from bandcamp with it's speaker, Bluetooth headphones (Sony Link Buds) and my Car speakers.
- Really? This is your concern about Spotify?
  
  Seems like a more important concern than some people using Spotify to sell drugs
- Clearly most people care more about other factors than they do about audio quality that isn't even discernable through their Bluetooth earbuds.
  
  It's actually worse than lossless being discernable or not on bluetooth - people cannot reliably tell between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio generally. This has been studied to oblivion - the jury is out, there's no more discussion to be had on the subject.
  
  i dumped spotify because they raised the price so they could include podcasts that i couldn't give less of a rat's ass about. also the ai bullshit and the refusal to allow me to block artists. spotify can get fucked
  
  Yeah seriously; unless you're an audiophile who spends extra on quality headphones, your Bluetooth buds are probably using the SBC codec, which cuts off frequencies at 16kHz and thus is hardly better than listening to a 128Kbps MP3. (In Android you can see what codec your headphones are using by going into the developer options.)
  And to be honest, if you care enough about sound quality to spend extra on the high res tier in your streaming service of choice, you're probably using wired headphones. Audiophiles don't fuck with Bluetooth.
  
  Just the other day I was listening to the new Linkin Park album on Spotify in a car with a friend (no fancy speaker system)
  We both thought it sounded kinda low quality so we switched to youtube and the improvement was instantly noticable to us. Spotify just sucks. At least if you are used to HQ audio
  
  it's the social features and the network effect. if you want to make a playlist and share it with your friends the easiest way to get them to listen to it is to host it on spotify. also blends, collaborative playlist, jams, and now listening all provide the illusion of connection through a shared listening experience. and it's not so much that these things are better than what we used to have for sharing music, it's that corporations have all killed our ways of sharing music. that's what they really hated about groove shark. artists made more money in the groove shark era, but umg, sony, and warner didn't control how we shared on it.
  
  Just switched from iPhone to Android. If your Bluetooth headphones support aptx you can definitely hear the difference
- It’s not the artist exploitation or their generally predatory practices, no, it’s the lossless audio that really got your attention lmfao
  
  Not OP, but probably all of those still register, only he was using lossless audio as an example of how it's not even that good comparing with other platforms who actually do better by the artists they host. As in, a lot of people are willing to turn a blind eye to unethical practices if the product is great, but it's not even that great, comparing with other existing services. Whether or not people actually do care about lossless audio is a different thing, though.
- The recommendations are hard to beat, but I hate how these moderns streaming platforms make you a passive listener. My most enjoyable music listening days were when I actively managed my music collection.
  
  I haven’t even thought about recommendations - I’ve never used the recommendation system on any music streaming platform. I’m fully hands-on with my music. I actively use the internet to discover new artists and curate my own playlists and library.
- I use it because it's free and tolerable when modded (on pc at least), and a lot of my favorite artists drop there. I get to check new releases, and if something isn't there I'll check other platforms. I will never pay for spotify on principle though.
- I am interested in alternatives. I stopped paying for Spotify when they were pushing Joe Rogan so hard, and YouTube Music isn't really doing it for me for a variety of reasons. Any good suggestions?
  
  I use Apple Music, and I’ve also tried Tidal and Deezer. They’re all good. I recommend taking advantage of the one-month free trials each service offers and seeing which one you prefer. At the end of the day, it really comes down to personal preference.
  
  This is a bigger change, but I switched to Bandcamp and listen to music I own. I like the process of finding music I like and saving it to my wishlist, and I mass-purchase whenever Bandcamp Friday comes around so the artist gets the whole paycheck.
  It depends how much music you listen to though, and how much variety you need day to day. Realise it's a bit more involved than algorithm based streaming but I also feel a lot more like I've built a library just for me.
  
  I would also recommend Pandora. I've had a family plan for years so I don't know for sure but there used to be a free (ad supported) tier that you could check out. And to reiterate comments from above, custom playlists and song/album play on demand is available (though some tracks are only available in discovery mode).
- I second this.

🌈 Enshittification 🌈 in all its facets. This one's pretty bad though.
- Enshittification is not when Spotify doesn’t immediately notice and purge new uploads with scam content.
  Enshittification is when Spotify takes away the free-tier, or makes the ad-free tier have limited ads while raising the price.
  
  or does something by making features worst than before.