Spotify
NEW YORK – Spotify faces another lawsuit over its streaming music, as a New York woman alleges that her listening experience is sold to the highest bidder.
Genevieve Capolongo says she spent years creating playlists and discovering new artists but when Spotify played the “same major-label tracks” and created allegedly personalized playlists with music that didn’t fit her habits, she took issue. She sued the company Nov. 4 in New York federal court.
The suit calls it “payola” – the music industry promoting performers who pay it to do so. Spotify called the allegations “nonsense.”
“Users invest time and attention – saving and skipping songs, building playlists and following artists – to help Spotify’s algorithm ‘learn’ their preferences,” the suit says.
“Spotify exploits that trust by marketing itself as a platform that offers organic music recommendations – whether through its algorithmic or curate playlists – only to secretly sell those recommendations to the highest bidder.”
The lawsuit came two days after the rapper RBX sued Spotify for allegedly not noticing when bots constantly play the music of certain artists. The more an artist’s music is played, the more they take from Spotify’s pool of money provided by subscription fees.
That lawsuit says Spotify’s most-streamed artist – Drake – had more than three years of abnormal streaming activity. A VPN was used to trace 250,000 streams of one song to the United Kingdom when they actually originated in Turkey, it says.
Capolongo’s lawsuit points at Spotify’s “Discovery Mode” and goes into the history of radio DJs trading exposure for money. Being featured on one of the discovery playlist can boost streams by nearly 20 million, the suit says, generating up to $163,000.
While RBX’s suit included the specific example of Drake’s streams, Capolongo’s suit points at a conspiracy theory from 2024 that claims a Sabrina Carpenter song would be played for listeners with wildly different tastes in music and some who had never listened to her.
“The allegations in this complaint are nonsense,” a Spotify spokesperson said. “Not only do they misrepresent what Discovery Mode is and how it works, but they are riddled with misunderstandings and inaccuracies.
“Discovery Mode is a feature artists can use to flag priority tracks for algorithmic consideration in limited contexts: Radio, Autoplay, and certain Mixes. It doesn’t buy plays, it doesn’t affect editorial playlists, and it’s clearly disclosed in the app and on our website.
“In the app, an ‘About recommendations and the impact of promotion’ explainer appears in each of the select surfaces in which Discovery Mode applies, and it is further detailed in our Understanding Recommendations page.”
Spotify pointed out that Discovery Mode has been praised by the independent music company.
Lawyers at Faruqi & Faruqi and Stephan Zouras represent the plaintiff and seek to pursue the case as a class action under New York’s consumer protection law.
