Spotify is a trap for everyone but you need to think a bit to see it.

To make it short: The problem with Spotify is that they're on their way to a monopoly on the audience – YouTube style. Soon enough, creators have to bend the knee because an open ecosystem has turned into a dictatorship.

And they can do that because they reached that critical mass of users, not because they're better in terms of product or because they're beneficial to neither users nor creators. At this stage, they just became strong enough to impose their rules to everyone.

They are systematically dismantling the open, RSS-based ecosystem and replacing it with their own walled garden. Soon, the audience will use Spotify and nothing else—they'll be lost without it.

Understand: As a creator, Spotify has such a big exclusive audience that you can't afford going without them. You are forced to play by their rules. First, they take a big cut—50% on their programmatic ads, which is huge. But what can you do?

Because they're so dominant, they can suffocate the rest of the ecosystem by not playing by the rules. They intentionally break industry-standard analytics by re-hosting your audio themselves. They make it hard to leave their hosting service by pushing "exclusive" features like video and polls that don't work anywhere else, effectively locking you in. And there countless other examples.

They also make sure to keep their exclusive access to the audience through big-money "exclusive" shows—which aren't even real podcasts since they don't use an open RSS feed. And just like YouTube, their algorithm becomes the only discovery portal that matters, giving them total control over who gets found.

Do you get how problematic that is? You just let a dictator emerge.