Spotify doesn’t just influence the listening habits of its vast audience, but even the way some musicians create music. Shanti Mathias takes a look at the musical behemoth that strives to give everyone everywhere everything.
Spotify released its annual Wrapped promotion yesterday, as it does every December. If you spend any time on the internet, it’s hard to miss: suddenly social media feeds are filled with statistics about listening habits and cute graphics displaying top songs. Some people joke about not sharing their most-listened to songs because it’s too embarrassing, or being taken over by white noise for their child’s bedtime. Others achieve truly astounding feats by listening to more music than there is time in the year.
The intended effect is obvious and immediate: if you’re a Spotify user you immediately open the app. There you might find out that (to take a purely hypothetical example) you are in the top 0.005% of Dave Dobbyn listeners due to your attachment to the te reo version of ‘Welcome Home’. This is all presented on screens, like an Instagram story, perfect for screenshotting and sharing (if you aren’t humiliated that your music taste has been defined by the man who once wore this jersey in a music video). If you’re not a Spotify user, you might witness this demonstration of personality via audio consumption and feel left out.
Clever marketing campaigns like Wrapped have made Spotify a global music behemoth, with more than 195 million Premium subscribers and a market cap of US$14.8b. It’s particularly popular with youth audiences: in New Zealand On Air’s latest “Where are the youth audiences” survey, Spotify was used by nearly two thirds of 15-24 year olds each day. On the face of it, Spotify makes vast amounts of music available at an affordable price, or free with ads. But its sheer scale means that it has shaped the rest of the music industry too, and is changing what we listen to.
In an article earlier this year, digital rights experts Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow described why Spotify is so focused on playlists. “Streaming is sold as a way for listeners to access almost any music on command. Increasingly, however, obeying nudges from streaming platforms, subscribers listen to playlists prepared by algorithms or human curators instead of making their own selections,” they wrote.
If you’re a Spotify user, you might have noticed this: when you search for an artist, one of their top results will be a “This is” playlist of their most known music. “Daily Mix” playlists, personalised via algorithm to contain music and artists you already enjoy with a few new-to-you tracks, are aimed at keeping you listening. Then there are mood playlists, like “Peaceful Piano” and “Ambient Chill” and the “radio” function, which will play a whole lot of songs similar to the selected song or artist. Often it takes several taps and some scrolling to get to any actual albums.
There’s an allure to these playlists, made just for you, and Spotify sells that too, especially in the Wrapped programme: nobody else has listened to the exact combination of music that you have. And since Spotify knows you so well, why wouldn’t you trust their recommendations?
Spotify can make these playlists, of course, because of all the information they already have about you – the information you see in your Wrapped presentation is the tip of the iceberg. “You’re the product as well, your input is the data. What you listen to in the playlists they offer is used to make playlists for other people,” says Matt Mollgaard, an expert on the New Zealand audio industry who is the head of AUT’s screen, audio, and journalism department. But Spotify is opaque about its use of data too, he says. “It’s essentially a black box.”
Is regurgitating your top songs of the year so very different to, say, The Rock 2000? Like Spotify, radio stations have access to huge amounts of music and a commercial incentive to have people engage with that music. While radio stations are also trying to play music people will like, based on what they know about their listeners, they don’t have anywhere near the depth of data Spotify does, says Mollgaard. What radio does have are personalities who love music and can build trust with their audience to try something new, while Spotify’s data-based approach means that you’re usually served music similar to what you already like.
When it works well, and you’re able to feast at Spotify’s musical buffet, filled with dishes they want you to like, the interests of Spotify and yourself may be aligned.
Certainly many consumers have benefitted from the development of streaming – but have musicians? As revenue from physical music sales has dropped, income from streaming services has supposedly stepped in. But compared to radio play or physical music, streaming margins are tiny, with the few big music streamers able to negotiate cut price rates with music publishers, making artists even more reliant on revenue from live performances and merch sales.
High profile cases, like Taylor Swift advocating for all artists to receive revenue for music listened to during Apple Music’s free trial, point to an appetite among stars big and small to change the status quo, and there are some alternative streaming models where revenue is more directly shared. For the moment though, it’s possible to have millions of people listen to your music and still not make much money; on a Guardian podcast last year, Georgia Mooney of Australian band All Our Exes Live in Texas said that their song ‘When the Sun Comes Up’, with 5.3 million streams on Spotify over five years, made each of the four band members about $396 per year.
It’s a conundrum for regulators, Mollgaard says. “Lots of NZ music is funded by New Zealand On Air then played on Spotify. Maybe they should contribute to an artists fund or pay more tax, but anything like that would send Spotify packing from a small market like New Zealand.”
Meanwhile, the way people listen to Spotify might be changing music itself. Statistical analyses of released music, especially pop, show that songs are getting shorter, with chorus and hooks placed earlier in the song, as an artist will only receive revenue if their song is streamed for more than 30 seconds. At the same time, artists are compelled to release longer albums, with more songs, to take advantage of the streams to be made from people who press play and let the album keep going. “There are complaints that [instead of] a thought through album of artistically derived songs, now you’re trying to turn music into short formats that Spotify want,” says Mollgaard.
Artists The Spinoff talked to say the Spotify algorithm is not top of mind when writing songs. “We just want to make the music we want to make and if it works on Spotify and reaches people, then great,” said Hollie Fullbrook of the band Tiny Ruins, whose most popular songs have more than 5 million streams on Spotify. However, when deciding which singles they might focus on for an album, “we might push them more in that direction with their arrangements to be more punchy or lush … but we stick to whatever direction the song wants to go in.”
Sxmpra, a New Zealand-based rapper with 3.7 million monthly listeners, says that while he didn’t “set out to be as big as I am now”, the kind of music he makes – “fast, aggressive and dark” – might be one of the reasons he’s done well on Spotify. “Naturally that’s how my songs are, short and aggressive, but I didn’t do that because of [the Spotify algorithm].” On the whole, he feels that niche musicians like himself only stand to benefit from Spotify’s global listeners. Spotify’s algorithm doesn’t help him as much as “more palatable pop artists”, but people look him up and add him to their playlists. The data Spotify provides shows him that the majority of his listeners are overseas, and the revenue is “a good chunk” of his income.
And with Spotify making enormous investments to become a podcasting hub, too, the company is hoping to keep taking up more of your time. One of Mollgaard’s nightmares is Spotify trying even harder to compete with radio by hiring radio personalities to give algorithmic playlists the human touch. But it’s still difficult to argue with the enormous availability of music on streaming services, he says. “You have whatever you want, whenever you want it … and it’s powerful and on your phone and everywhere.”