Big Music Myth #1: Streamers are in the music business [Chris Castle]
Musician’s advocate and attorney Chris Castle builds on the work of Liz Pelly’s new Spotify exposé to uncloak what he sees as the myths perpetuated by the corporate music machine. In Part 1 of 5, Castle explores the narrative that streamers are in the music business.
This installment explores how they profit from fans while sidelining the artists and songwriters who fuel their platforms.
Stop back daily for parts 2 -5.
by Chris Castle from Music Tech Policy
There are five key assumptions that support the streamer narrative and we will look at them each in turn. Today we’ll assess assumption #1–streamers are not in the music business but they want you to believe the opposite.
Assumption 1: Streamers Are In the Music Business
Streamers like Spotify, TikTok and YouTube are not in the music business. They are in the data business. Why? So they can monetize your fans that you drive to them.
These companies make extensive use of algorithms and artificial intelligence in their business, especially to sell targeted advertising. This has a direct impact on your ability to compete with enterprise playlists and fake tracks–or what you might call “decoy footprints”–as identified by Liz Pelly’s exceptional journalism in her new book (did I say it’s on sale now?).
Signally, while Spotify artificially capped its subscription rates for over ten years in order to convince Wall Street of its growth story, the company definitely did not cap its advertising rates which are based on an auction model like YouTube. Like YouTube, Spotify collects emotional data (analyzing a user social media posts), demographics (age, gender, location, geofencing), behavioral data (listening habits, interests), and contextual data (serving ads in relevant moments like breakfast, lunch, dinner). They also use geofencing to target users by regions, cities, postal codes, and even Designated Market Areas (DMAs). My bet is that they can tell if you’re looking at men’s suits in ML Liddy’s (San Angelo or Ft. Worth).
“sometimes they break the law”
Why the snooping? They do this to monetize your fans. Sometimes they break the law, such as Spotify’s $5.5 million fine by Swedish authorities for violating Europe’s data protection laws.
They’ll also tell you that streamers are all up in introducing fans to new music or what they call “discovery.” The truth is that they could just as easily be introducing you to a new brand of Spam. “Discovery” is just a data application for the thousands of employees of these companies who form the algocracy who make far more money on average than any songwriter or musician does on average. As Maria Schneider anointed the algocracy in her eponymous Pulitzer Prize finalist album, these are the Data Lords. And I gather from Liz Pelly’s book that it’s starting to look like “discovery” is just another form of payola behind the scenes.
It also must be said that these algocrats tend to run together which makes any bright line between the companies harder to define. For example, Spotify has phased out owning data centers and migrated its extensive data operations to the Google Cloud Platform which means Spotify is arguably entirely dependent on Google for a significant part of its data business. Yes, the dominant music streaming platform Spotify collaborates with the adjudicated monopolist Google for its data monetization operations. Not to mention the Meta pixel class action controversy—”It’s believed that Spotify may have installed a tracking tool on its website called the Meta pixel that can be used to gather data about website visitors and share it with Meta. Specifically, [attorneys] suspect that Spotify may have used the Meta pixel to track which videos its users have watched on Spotify.com and send that information to Meta along with each person’s Facebook ID.”
And remember, Spotify doesn’t allow AI training on the music and metadata on its platform.
Right. That’s the good news.
