“I turned on the faucet in my kitchen and I said, ‘this is basically Spotify’… the water just keeps going on indefinitely”: Rick Beato thinks streaming has “devalued” music

By Pune Media On Mar 4, 2025

Spotify gets a pretty bad rap these days: whether it’s drawing criticism for paying out inadequate royalties to artists, creating fake artists to avoid paying royalties altogether, or belittling the effort that artists put into making music, it seems that the streaming giant can’t quite catch a break.

YouTuber, producer and musician Rick Beato has levelled yet another accusation at the increasingly unpopular platform – and streaming services as a whole – in a recent interview with Rick Rubin for the Tetragrammaton podcast, arguing that streaming has “devalued” music by making it “too easy to obtain”.

After the bearded superproducer asked Beato how he thinks that streaming has changed the way people relate to music, Beato argues that “the availability of having anything at your fingertips” has devalued music, comparing the experience of streaming to “going out, buying records and having a physical representation of someone’s art”. “It’s a completely different experience,” he adds.

“Maybe I had a Jimi Hendrix record that my friend didn’t have, but he had a Beatles record that I didn’t have, and we would trade the things, or we would go over and make a cassette copy, or whatever you would do. You would literally carry the record over to someone’s house.

“Now, people listen to music on their phone and everything is available to you there, between Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL and YouTube, you pretty much have everything that’s ever been recorded. It’s hard to wrap your head around.”

To illustrate the point, Beato references a video on his channel titled The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse, in which he compares the ceaseless flow of new music uploaded to Spotify – more than 100,000 songs a day – to the stream of water coming out of his kitchen tap, ultimately making the case that music is becoming too easy for listeners to consume.

“I turned on the faucet in my kitchen and I said, ‘this is basically Spotify’. The water just keeps going and keeps going indefinitely, and at any point you can interrupt the stream. I put a glass in there and said, ‘this could be Led Zeppelin’s entire catalogue, right here in this glass’. […] It’s too available; it’s too easy to obtain.”

While the convenience and accessibility of music streaming has undoubtedly made listeners’ lives easier, Beato is touching on a sentiment here that’s shared by a growing number of music fans dissatisfied with streaming that are returning to physical media and driving a resurgence of vinyl, tapes and CDs.

This isn’t the first time Beato has taken issue with modern technology; back in 2023, he claimed that Auto-Tune had “destroyed” popular music. It seems that Beato isn’t entirely averse to technological progress, however: when asked by Rubin to name the technological innovations that have excited him in recent years, Beato praises AI stem separation tool LALAL.ai, revealing that he uses it “all the time”.

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