Spotify has once again enraged a section of the independent music community.

The streaming giant caused dissent among the Scottish music community with its publication of a ‘Scotify’ playlist, purporting to showcase the “The best new sounds from Scotland.”

Although its unclear what was featured at the time of the list’s inception in March 2019, it was compiled with the assistance of Scottish Women In Music (@Scotwim).

However, an Instagram post detailed how analysis of the current list found that 68.5% of the acts featured were male, with this discovery being described as “deeply upsetting” by Edinburgh-based alt.r&b / trip hop act Kohla.

Other acts such as Gefahrgeist, Kohla, Pinlight and Josephine Sillars have tweeted their support – although rather than calling for a boycott of Spotify, have instead appealed for a more equal representation.

Kohla also expressed concern about “repercussions” that acts might experience from Spotify UK by speaking out.

Inevitably, there have already been many ‘Scotify’s on the service, but the controversial playlist is created by Spotify UK and is therefore perceived to have some ‘official’ status. At the time of writing it has more than 4,300 likes, but should not be confused with this rather good playlist (and which has a 36% proportion of acts which are not all male). And scotify.com is, contrarily, a tribute to cassette culture.

Previously the world’s most popular streaming service has enraged music fans – in common with all other services it has received criticism for the rates of pay to artists as well as its distribution of subscription fees favouring the major acts. However, CEO Daniel Ek’s recent pronouncement that acts should produce more music more often, followed by the recent announcement of the introduction of a payola-like system to boost plays, has damaged the company’s reputation among artists even further.