Music Was Never Meant to Be a Product, And Here's How to Take It Back

There was a time when music hit differently.

90s hip-hop carried eloquence. It raised thought-provoking questions and was built on instruments that had body and soul. Something happened between then and now. The product cheapened. The sounds of today stand in sharp contrast to what came before, and looking back, you can see exactly how gradually it was allowed to happen.

Today's mainstream output praises women as sex objects and men as violent street figures, wrapped in auto-tune and engineered to keep you in a loop. It isn't really music in the traditional sense. It's a hypnotic commercial product designed for one thing: the cheapest possible investment at the highest possible return. At its most deliberate, it functions closer to manipulation than art; frequencies and repetition used to hold people in a low state.

Then Spotify accelerated all of it.

When music became a streaming product, the incentive shifted away from artistry and toward virality. The same sonic templates recycled for a decade. Sound-alike releases built on the same tools, chasing the same algorithm. The craft of musicianship gave way to a simpler question: who can we turn into a product and blast to the masses? Hip-hop's market share peaked at 30% in 2020 and has hovered around 24% through 2025.

Hip-hop once had lyrics that were poetic, statements against society, against politicians, against the system. It was art with a point of view. Today it feels more like a loop designed to keep you distracted. There are exceptions worth naming. Kendrick Lamar is proof that mainstream hip-hop can still carry poetic weight, sophisticated arrangements, and confrontational substance as genuine art. But he is the exception. The vast majority of what reaches people today does not carry the eloquence of yesterday.

DJs weren't immune either. Artists once valued entirely on their ability to read a room, to feel a crowd and move it, became brands. Tour schedules maximized. Music released to fit the commercial sound. Even parts of the underground began mirroring the mainstream rather than resisting it.

The question worth sitting with is this: how does music, something so intrinsically human, so bound to our emotions, our memories, our bodies, become a tool used against us? Or worse, just another product sold to us?

Here's What You Can Do About It

Stop using Spotify. As a listener and as a distributor. That's a tough ask, but the case for it is straightforward: Spotify pays artists the least of any major streaming platform and is actively investing in AI-generated music. The more you stream, the more you fund a future with fewer human artists in it.

The alternatives are better than most people realize.

For full albums, YouTube and Apple Music have everything you need. Apple's AI moves have been more focused on features, tools for musicians (GarageBand, Logic Pro), and adaptive playback. YouTube and Apple Music are far from perfect. Both are investing in AI, but they pay artists meaningfully more than Spotify and haven't gone as far in flooding their platforms with AI-generated content. For now, they're the better choice.

For discovery, SoundCloud has become one of the most powerful tools available. You can follow selectors, record labels, festivals, clubs, and artists directly, and their uploads arrive on your feed like a curated music news channel. Independent curators on YouTube are equally valuable. Search for a sound, filter by playlist, and you'll find entire worlds you didn't know existed. And of course, Bandcamp enables direct purchases where artists typically keep around 80–85% of revenue after fees.

Go to a Record Shop

Then take it further by supporting physical music.

There is something irreplaceable about walking into a space built entirely around the love of music. The people behind the counter are selectors, collectors, and obsessives who have spent years developing taste - music historians in their own right. They will point you toward something you never knew you needed, and it will change how you listen.

Record shops are also among the last places where music is treated as an artifact. Something physical and worth protecting. When you buy a record, you're investing in a piece of culture, and a high percentage of that goes directly to the artist.

We've been exploring exactly this, visiting record shops across São Paulo and beyond, filming inside these spaces, speaking with the people who run them, and sharing the tracks they love.

Places like Fancy Records in São Paulo, where owner Pil Marques has spent years keeping vinyl alive through a collection of rare pressings spanning every geography and style of electronic music. Shops built for diggers. For people who still believe the best music is found in a crate.

You can follow the full Brazil series here. And if a record shop near you is doing something special, go in. Buy something. Tell them you appreciate what they're doing.

For Artists

• Diversify your tools. Use live instruments or field recordings to build sounds that are distinctly yours

• Prioritize quality over quantity

• Produce often to sharpen your skills, not everything needs to be released, and push your sound so its more original

• Be deliberate about where you distribute. We're handing too much power to platforms that don't share our values

For Labels

• Don't distribute everywhere. Be selective, and align with platforms that reflect what you stand for

• Engage with genuine music tastemakers to get music heard. Be curators yourselves

• Sign music that offers something to people's lives. Take the occasional risk on a new artist, a new project. Don't sign variations of the same thing until everything sounds identical

The gatekeepers don't get to decide what you hear. You do.

Ditch the algorithm. Follow the humans. Dig for the records.

Choose accordingly.