There’s a moment that most Spotify users have probably had without giving it much thought. There are a few big-name artists that keep coming up when you read Discover Weekly or listen to the radio. Drake. Justin Bieber. Zach Bryan. There may be artists on your playlists that you have never looked for, but the app says they were chosen based on your tastes. It seemed odd for a long time. That thing is now the subject of a federal lawsuit.
A woman from New York named Genevieve Capolongo sued Spotify in federal court in November 2025 on behalf of a group of people. She said that the company was running what she called a “pay-for-play scheme” that looked like a personalized listening experience. Her main point is that Spotify’s Discovery Mode, a feature that lets artists and labels pay less in royalties in exchange for higher algorithmic visibility, is basically a new form of payola. It used to be illegal for radio stations to take money from listeners to force certain songs on them without telling them. This was called “payola.”
It is written on Spotify’s website that “commercial considerations” may affect the songs that are suggested through Discovery Mode. Capolongo’s suit says that what it doesn’t do is tell users which songs were commercially boosted and which ones just happened to be in their queue. That difference is more important than it sounds. You trust your playlist more when you think it shows what you like than when you know a record company paid for the spot.
Right away, Spotify fought back, saying that the lawsuit was “filled with misunderstandings and false information.” A representative for the company said that Discovery Mode is not a system that sells plays, but rather a tool that lets artists mark priority tracks for algorithmic consideration. It’s important to note that Spotify has a page with official information about the program. What the courts will have to decide is, more or less, whether that disclosure is clear enough to really help users.
In the middle of 2026, another case started getting a lot of attention while that one was still going through the courts. Mark Kratter, a musician from Connecticut, sued Spotify on his own behalf, saying that the company used “opaque rules and undisclosed filtering criteria” to push other artists to the forefront while ignoring or ignoring independent artists. Kratter’s case added a new angle: this wasn’t just about users being lied to; it was also about artists being pushed out of the algorithmic spaces that now keep listeners out. It’s easy to understand why that way of putting things works. For independent artists, a playlist slot can mean the difference between not being seen and being found.
Look a little further away. These lawsuits don’t just appear out of thin air. Since the beginning, Spotify has had a long and complicated relationship with artists. The company gives about 70% of its profits to people who own the rights to the music, but most of those people are labels, and labels keep most of what they get. It has always been frustrating for artists to see that their songs are being listened to by millions of people but only earn a few cents per stream. In that situation, Discovery Mode might seem like one more tool that helps people who already have resources and power.
Still, it’s not clear how far these cases will go. Most class action lawsuits against tech companies end without a fight, if they go anywhere at all. It’s likely that Spotify’s legal team will say that its disclosures, even if they are buried, are enough. In the past, courts have given platforms a lot of freedom when it comes to things like this. The main difference this time is that the topic of algorithmic curation is being talked about in wide public. There are people who don’t believe the answer that it’s just the algorithm who are curious about why they keep hearing the same songs.
Music should be available to everyone through streaming. That was pretty much the promise. This is a question that should be thought about, especially as the lawsuits go on and more information about Discovery Mode comes to light. Does Spotify’s current behavior match that idea?
