ᔥ in How Spotify hacked our ears (and our data) — Switched On Pop ()
Marginalia
Introduction
Hook users and reduce amount paid in association streamshare
The goal is to hook us as users, of course, but also to divert overall streamshare toward discounted offerings—works that have been licensed to Spotify at a lower price point, both through its ghost artists program and its algorithmic payola-like practices
Chapter 1: The Bureau of Piracy
Instead of challenging capitalism on the back of the pirate culture, it is really an ultra-capitalist advertising company.
From this idea of ‘let’s challenge these power structures’ came a paradigm shift that just became a new power structure that did not benefit musicians at all. It did not challenge capitalism at all, but became an ultra-capitalist sort of thing.”
Beginning as a “de facto pirate service”
As recounted in Spotify Teardown, the book Fleischer coauthored, Spotify began as a “de facto pirate service”—because its beta product was made using pirated files—delegitimizing its stated mission of offering an alternative. But what’s possibly more telling is Spotify’s ambivalence about being grouped in with pirates. It simply aligned itself alternately with piracy or with industry interests when it was convenient to do so.11
Really Spotify is an advertising company
If you start looking at Spotify as an advertising company rather than a culture company, a lot of things make more sense.”
Chapter 2: “Saving” the Music Industry
Built on learnings from torrent sites.
The goal was to create the effect that every file was already on the user’s device, using learnings from BitTorrent, which would break files into small pieces before transferring and reassembling them on arrival. To achieve this, they hired a programmer named Ludvig Strigeus, who was known for creating uTorrent, a peer-to-peer software similar to Pirate Bay.
The magical illusion of frictionless. Like processed food, it ignores everything involved
similar to other app-enabled magic tricks of recent history, such as overnight packages and instant food delivery, frictionlessness is always an illusion.
Chapter 3: Selling Lean-Back Listening
Every track is a test
“Spotify considers every track a beta test.”
Passive soundtrack to pur lives ignores rhe many ways we listen.
Choosing the music that soundtracks our lives can be part of how we process who we are. But Spotify’s ideal mode of lean-back listening feels different, less an act of choosing than testing one’s tolerance, how much one prefers the sound of “Deep Focus” or “Brain Food” to nothing at all. It follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration. Plus, passively soundtracking your everyday moments through song is not the only reason people listen, and the escalation of this single listening mode in service of boosting engagement is a disservice to artists, listeners, and music as an art form; it disregards the many different reasons why someone might listen to music.25
Only competition is silence
They’re not providing music. They’re filling people’s time. And he said at a company meeting, I remember he was like, ‘Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.’ ”26
Chapter 4: The Conquest of Chill
Mood music is not music that anyone knows and does not create fans.
One producer who has released music with Lofi Girl, and landed on some of Spotify’s official lofi playlists, told me that despite his three hundred thousand monthly listeners, if he “played a show in L.A. and promoted it really hard, maybe twenty people would come.”
Algorithmic stuff doesn’t create fans either.
When monetisation is built around repeats, this influences the music created. Often flattened, less challenging.
“Monetization is shaped differently,” Van Arman told me. “It’s based on what gets repeat listens. It didn’t take long for artists and labels to make that connection. It’s not sustainable to put out challenging records. To be sustainable, you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops. That people are going to want to listen to over and over again, and that are going to be playlist friendly and easier on the ears.”
Chapter 5: Ghost Artists for Hire
This flattening leads to PFC designed around moods.
there was a whole web of power and money behind this. Internally, the program had a name: perfect fit content, or PFC. Spotify’s official definition for this material was “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins.”
Chapter 6: The Background Music Makers
Artists legitimately paid to play, no different to a wedding artiat
This wasn’t a professional scam artist, or someone with a master plan to steal prime playlist real estate from anyone. This was just someone who, like other working musicians, was cobbling together a living from a long list of revenue streams. “There are so many things in music that you treat as grunt work,” they said. “This kind of felt like the same category as wedding gigs, or corporate gigs.” In their early twenties, the jazz musician often played what they called “background gigs” at restaurants around the city, and this felt sort of similar. “It’s made very explicit on Spotify that these are background playlists, so it didn’t necessarily strike me as any different from that.”
Spotifying owns masters
I’m aware that the master recording is generating much more than I’m getting. Maybe that’s just business, but… it’s so related to being able to get that amount of plays. Whoever can actually get you generating that amount of plays, they hold the power,” the musician reflected. “And if that entity that’s generating the plays also owns your master, or owns the streaming services, or owns the means of distribution… that’s some antitrust levels of collusion.”
Chapter 8: Listen to Yourself
Taste profiles is based on what you listen to and when.
“The more mature system that you often think about when you’re using Spotify is the combination of item-based and user-based,” he explained. That combination informs user “taste profiles,” the term Spotify uses for its datafied take on a user’s listening habits, or as the company says, its “interpretation of your taste based on what you listen to and how you listen to it.”6
This ignores so much about why we listen to music, takes a three-dimensional picture and flattens it to two dimensions. former machine learning engineer
“What do you want when you listen to music?” he continued. “I don’t think there’s a single answer. Some of the records that I would consider really life-changing, really profound, are records that in terms of listening time, they wouldn’t even show up in my top 100. Partially because they’re really challenging records. They’re records that opened me up to certain things. But they require a lot of investment. I’m not going to sit down and eat dinner to it. I need to be in a space where I can really devote myself. There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day.”
Ultimately, he determined that there was really only so much that could be gleaned from a bunch of information about someone’s listening history—from reducing a person’s music taste to a pool of data. “It’s like taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it to two dimensions,” he told me. “It still has some relation to the actual object you’re trying to study, but it leaves out a fair amount. To say your tastes are really represented by a list of the things that you’ve listened to—almost anyone would say that’s not exclusively true. They’re correlated, certainly. But it’s decontextualized. Looking at a stream of all the tracks I’ve played, it tells you something.” But there is, of course, much that the data does not say.
Music as an expression of the self … templated self
In his influential 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote broadly about the hollowing of artistic integrity that comes with the capitalist limitations of mass-produced culture. He wrote about how mechanical mass production causes art to lose its “aura,” or its uniqueness. But in the modern music industry, what’s valued is not the “aura” or uniqueness of the music itself—it’s the “aura” or uniqueness of you. In Spotify’s vision of mass personalization culture, music exists to express the self
Simulacrum of ourselves
On streaming services, we hear simulacrums. We are made to believe we are listening to ourselves, but what’s streaming is a warped reflection, where our desires are just some of the data that is refracted and served back in order to keep us streaming.
Not data about music, but rather about Spotify.
In the end, it’s not data about listening to music, it’s data about listening to Spotify.
Chapter 9: Self-Driving Music
the author and academic researcher Maria Eriksson wrote in a 2016 paper on the Echo Nest, building on the work of Geoffrey C. Bowker: “We seem to be entering a point in time in which you do not exist unless you are data.” In Spotify’s understanding, the hyperpop scene did not “exist” on the platform until enough data had been accrued to make it legible.8
Problem is, there is no pure data
“Data is described as this pure source that is untainted by culture or opinion or location or anything like that,” she continued. “It’s just not true. Algorithms are made by people and people have biases. There is nothing pure about data at all. It’s just a way of describing something from a particular viewpoint.”
Chapter 10: Fandom as Data
vibes as a way to typecast users
The pop music philosopher and scholar Robin James, in theorizing why music culture has become entwined with the language of “vibes,” has argued that in embracing vibes, we’ve adopted the language that algorithms use to perceive and to organize us. She has explained vibes as a way to typecast users not based on identity but on their actions and data breadcrumbs, in terms of the “trajectory” that someone might be on as a user. “We’ve learned how to interact with algorithms so that they perceive us in ways that we want to be perceived,” she said in a 2023 podcast interview. “You’re pre-packaging yourself as a data subject.”2
Chapter 13: The First .0035 Is the Hardest
Payment on percentage
Spotify makes its pro rata payments on a monthly basis, paying labels and distros based on not their catalog’s number of streams, but the percentage that number comprises of the total streams that occurred on Spotify within the month.
Is $0.0035 really better than nothing?
As independent artists have come to terms with the state of streaming, some have pondered this question: Is $0.0035 really better than nothing? It’s one thing to make nothing from the free circulation of your work, but it’s another to make nothing while Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon become billionaires, and the majors earn higher and higher revenues.
86% of tracks demonetised
the new model also would demonetize any track garnering fewer than one thousand streams annually—an estimated 86% of the tracks on the platform, to which Spotify now seemed to say, Actually, we do think this is worth nothing.11
Chapter 14: An App for a Boss
Dictating not only what music is produced, but how
In a 2020 media appearance, Daniel Ek asserted that “some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”
Musicians as Spotify employees
You are a Spotify employee at that point,” Daniel Lopatin, the prolific producer and artist behind Oneohtrix Point Never, told me. “That’s fine. But that’s what it is. That’s something other than just being in a band. That’s being a multimedia marketing enterprise.” Reflecting broadly on the different ways platform economics have shaped art-making, Lopatin asked a question that has stuck with me: “If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?
Chapter 15: Indie Vibes
Spotify like playing the slots where the house always wins.
If DIY artists banking on the “opportunities” of the streaming landscape was like playing the slots, then there’s another phrase from the casinos that comes to mind: “The house always wins.”
Chapter 16: This Is… Payola?
Skip the town square, Spotify a part of the social media shipping mall
Looking through algorithmic social media feeds today, a user is met with a whiplash-inducing barrage of ads, influencer garbage, and other clickbait content. It can be stressful and overwhelming. Perusing search results, too, it can be hard to tell what’s trustworthy or reputable—to comprehend how you even came to be looking at a certain photo, video, or text. On news sites it can be hard to decipher sponsored content from an editorial. The internet has long stopped feeling like a town square—it feels like a shopping mall. And streaming services are part of that shopping mall, even if their sleek interfaces don’t currently frame it that way.
Music an industry …
“If retailers are going to take your vinyl album, it’s like, Well, what are you doing to tell people it’s on sale here? Are you doing street posters? It’s the same thing on digital services. It’s not just Ah yes, you’ve got a great record and we are going to support you. What’s the campaign? What’s the story? What can we expect? Have you got any festivals or TV appearances? All of these things feed into whether people support the music or not. I’d love to think it’s all about the music but it’s really not. Clearly having great music helps. But there’s actually a lot of great music out there.”
Conclusion
Future involves rethinking profit motives and power structures
The problems created by venture capital are never going to be solved by more venture capital. There needs to be a political counterweight, but music needs alternatives, too. Rethinking the future of music also requires rethinking profit motives and power structures, and challenging a system where a small handful of entertainment and technology firms own so much of music. It requires investigating alternative models that are more cooperative, transparent, and artist-run, that support artists operating across diverse scales and practices, and that generally put people over profit.
Losing music that will never be made
if we keep giving too much power to corporations to shape our lives, and we don’t protect working musicians’ abilities to survive. We are foreclosing that possibility for music to evoke those ephemeral unknowns. We are losing a lot of music that will never be made. We are letting new expressions, emotional articulations, and points of connection slip away.
Actually bigger that music, it is about the world that we want
Ultimately, we can’t just think about changing music, or changing music technology. That’s not enough. We need to think about the world we want to live in, and where music fits into that vision