Independent artists were told Spotify was a level playing field. It wasn't.

While real musicians earn fractions of a cent per stream, Spotify seeded its most-followed playlists with fake artists through a secret internal program called Perfect Fit Content — designed to reduce royalty payouts to real musicians. Meanwhile, the shuffle you trust is engineered, the algorithm is pay-to-play, and Wrapped is a surveillance campaign you share voluntarily every December.

Brian and Eve open the full case file: the shuffle algorithm, Discovery Mode payola, the Discover Weekly filter bubble, a decade of ignored search failures, the 1,000-stream royalty threshold that cost indie artists $46.9 million in year one, and the ghost artist program Liz Pelly exposed in Harper's Magazine.

Two victims. One platform. Case closed.

UX MURDER MYSTERY HOSTED BY Brian J. Crowley Eve Eden EDITED BY Kelsey Smith INTRO ANIMATION & LOGO DESIGN Brian J. Crowley MUSIC BY Nicolas Lee A JOINT PRODUCTION OF EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden Email us at: questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening!

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the hosts are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. All discussions about real companies, individuals, or organizations are based on publicly available information, media reports, and personal opinions offered for the purpose of critique, education, and storytelling. We make no representations or warranties about the accuracy or completeness of any information discussed. Nothing in this podcast should be interpreted as a factual assertion about the actions, motives, or intentions of any individual or corporate entity. Listeners should conduct their own research before drawing conclusions. The creators and guests of this podcast disclaim all liability for any loss, harm, or damages arising from reliance on any information or opinions presented. Names, characters, and events may occasionally be dramatized or fictionalized for illustrative purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental.

Brian Crowley goes solo to answer real questions pulled from r/UXDesign — covering the job market, AI, stakeholders, and what UX even means anymore.

The Case of the Double Murder

Meta didn't just fail. It failed twice — in completely different directions — and both failures trace back to the same root cause: a company that designed for its own vision instead of its users.

Crime #1: The Metaverse. $40 billion. Legless avatars. A platform nobody asked for, built to solve a problem Wall Street invented. By February 2026, Horizon Worlds was mobile-only and Reality Labs had laid off hundreds.

Crime #2: Platform Design. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for addictive design that harmed children. The damages were $6M — a rounding error for a $1.5 trillion company. But the precedent? That's where it gets expensive.

Brian Crowley and Eve Eden break down both crimes — the metaverse collapse and the social media addiction lawsuits — and ask the question the design community needs to sit with: if a jury can find a platform liable for its design choices, where does corporate accountability end and designer responsibility begin?

Topics covered:

• Why the metaverse was a solution to a Wall Street problem, not a user problem
• How Meta's internal research documented harm to teen girls — and didn't change the roadmap
• The "Big Tobacco moment" framing and what it means for Section 230
• 1,500+ pending cases and a federal school district trial on the horizon
• What the UX community should take away from both verdicts

UX Murder Mystery: Where true crime meets product design.