Bandcamp

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

And unlike streaming sites, you own what you buy, and the artist gets paid much better; you'd have to stream the same song 200+ times with a premium Spotify account to generate the same profit for the artist as just buying the song outright on Bandcamp.

I'm using Qobuz. Seems alright so far, unless someone knows something I don't (totally possible lol)

not exactly a competitor since it’s a music marketplace, not a streaming service, but bandcamp does not allow ai-generated music

I think in business attribution is really difficult. Like figuring out why a click/purchase happened. It might be that these systems are so opaque and difficult to penetrate that nobody notices when hundreds of millions are missing. Or maybe the actual situation is a little different, like maybe real people do listen to AI music. I've heard a bit about that anyway. Though I've also heard about organized criminals combining affiliated artists and bot listens to launder money.

I think that it is less about the ad revenue and more about decreasing the total proportion of streams that they have to pay royalties for. Spotify pays people to churn out AI music that they own, and they place that music on their popular playlists (to increase plus from actual listeners) and also have bot armies streaming it endlessly. Since royalties are not a fixed per-play fee, but rather a calculation based on the total amount of subscriber money divided by the total number of plays, massively increasing the total play count with music that does not require royalty payments means they pay out a lower proportion of what they take in each month.

Avoiding ai content isn't exactly a choice I can make currently. On virtually every streaming app, if I use any kind of recommendation or auto play function, ai comes up. Because AI music creators tend to release literally thousands of songs vs human creators who release a handful, even if the algorithms are randomized between available options, it skews heavily towards ai content.

So, yes, I want the owners of those platforms to remove the AI content altogether rather than just put a small icon in the corner of the song name or whatever.

Letting users choose for themselves isn't exactly what is happening. Forced feeding of garbage would be more accurate.

top down control

That ship has sailed the moment the user made a Spotify account