4 ms·

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month accou

by usrusr 3y ago

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account). If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

vintermann 3y ago
Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled. It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested. Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize. Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount. (And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)
    - troupo 3y ago
      On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song". This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.
      - jsnell 3y ago
        I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.
        troupo 3y ago
        Ah true. This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data. But true, it's not anonymized in this case.
        vintermann 3y ago
        Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)

by usrusr 3y ago

vintermann 3y ago

Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled. It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested. Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.

usrusr 3y ago
Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize. Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.
- jsnell 3y ago
  There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount. (And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)
  - troupo 3y ago
    On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song". This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.
    - jsnell 3y ago
      I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.
      - troupo 3y ago
        Ah true. This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data. But true, it's not anonymized in this case.
      - vintermann 3y ago
        Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)