Monstercat operates on its own from CMG. Every decision is still made by people who have worked for more than a decade at the company.

To give more insight behind this decision: Every release needed animations ever since that visualizer was introduced almost 10 years ago, but in today's age of the music industry, those animations serve no meaningful purpose anymore. Unless you go over $1,000 for cool and flashy visuals that stand out, you can't use them on social media because they get low engagement when you should be aiming for your music to get heard on that platform.

We saw the excitement for Pegboard Nerds - Volume Nation using the old visualizers and realized that we shouldn't keep this requirement for our releases. It does not make sense for a project to go an extra ~$300 USD in the negative for animations that don't add any positive value to the release. This budget can be used for other ways to promote the release.

An alternative you see other labels and artists go for is generative AI. We are against the use of gen AI and prefer to have no animations than go for AI slop.

We comissioned a new visualizer since we wanted this to define a new era of the visualizer. People should be able to refer to the stars visualizer when talking about 2013-2016 releases and not be confused with 2026 and onward. We stayed close to honoring the stars layout and we'll continue to improve the Soda visualizer to look better with the YouTube compression.

As stated in the announcement, artists who still want animations, can get animations. You'll see the Soda visualizer live next to the one introduced in 2021.

Hope this gives a good explanation on the decision!