Platform pop: disentangling Spotify’s intermediary role in the music industry

ABSTRACT

It has been widely recognized that platforms utilize their editorial capacity to transform the industries they intermediate. In this paper, we examine the intermediary role of the leading audio streaming platform – Spotify – on the recorded music industry. Spotify is often called the ‘new radio’ for the influence it has on breaking songs and artists, and for the role it plays in music discovery and consumption. Our purpose is to determine whether Spotify is leveling the playing field or entrenching hierarchies between major labels and independent labels. We attempt to answer this question through a longitudinal analysis of content owners (major labels or ‘indies’) and formats (albums, tracks, or playlists) promoted by Spotify through its global Twitter account: @Spotify. As a carefully curated venue for corporate speech @Spotify provides a window into continuities and changes in Spotify’s corporate strategy. By using @Spotify as a proxy through which to track patterns of promotion between the years 2012 and 2018, this paper offers a novel empirical examination of how Spotify is shaping the consumption of music, and in turn the structure of the recording industry. In doing so, we provide evidence for speculating about the future of the recorded music industry in a platform era.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• platform
• music industry
• political economy
• Spotify
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the decade and a half since the emergence of Napster and P2P file sharing, the global recording industry declined by 40%, from $23.8 billion in 1999 to $14.3 billion in 2014 (IFPI, 2019).

2 Streaming has been credited with reversing the declining fortunes of record labels. By 2018, global recorded music revenues reached $19.1 billion, becoming the largest revenue source for the global recording industry (IFPI, 2019).

3 A conversation one of the authors had with a Spotify Head of Content in 2019 confirmed that Spotify employs a social media team for each of its Twitter accounts. This team first decides on what to tweet and then passes these decisions on to superiors who make the final decision and offer suggestions.

4 Our gratitude to one of this paper’s reviewers for pointing this out.

5 These datasets were acquired from Chartmetric – a US-based music analytics company which collects a real-time record of playlists through Spotify’s API (see https://www.chartmetric.com/). Chartmetric provided the researchers with a random selection of playlists that appeared on Spotify in 2018. The datasets included information such as the name of each playlist, total followers, and copyright owners (ie. record label) of each track on each playlist.

6 This rationale is based on a determination of the relative risk involved: ‘distribution is interchangeable and involves only a modicum of risk, whereas investing in the creation of a copyright in the first place is the biggest risk that any artist or music entrepreneur can take’ (WIN, 2018, p. 7).

7 Unfortunately, technical limitations impeded us from scraping data before 2012.

8 Available at https://github.com/taspinar/twitterscraper

9 Tweets that did not mention any Spotify link were left out of the analysis.

10 For example https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX0LpVh8OqcuH?si=PzZmbg4NRGqkt9PHxAPdmw contains a playlist with identification number 37i9dQZF1DX0LpVh8OqcuH.

11 Each format had a different data structure. To be able to parse it into one data frame we used different functions for each format.

12 Further evidence for this strategy emerged when Billboard reported in the summer of 2018 that the streaming platform was offering significant advances to a number of independent artists if they would license their music directly to Spotify (Karp, 2018). By paying the artist directly Spotify would be able to improve its margins, while the artist would receive much more per stream than they would if signed to a major label.

13 As one reviewer suggested, it would be very insightful to study Spotify’s Twitter behavior during previous periods of negotiations with record labels, and other major events, to assess potential impact on Spotify’s promotional decisions. While this is beyond the scope of the present paper, we hope to pursue this idea in the future.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research and Innovation Support, Data Science Projects 2017, University of Groningen.

Notes on contributors

Robert Prey

Robert Prey is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He researches the relationship between technology, capitalism and culture. His current focus is on algorithmic recommendation systems and the interdependent processes of ‘datafication’ and ‘platformization’; in particular as they relate to music streaming platforms and the music, musicians and industry developing around them.

Marc Esteve Del Valle

Marc Esteve Del Valle is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. His research and teaching interests explore the intersection between new media and social networks. The main focus of his research is on networked politics. His secondary area of research is on e-learning, especially the study of political learning processes taking place on social networking sites. More recently, he has turned to focus on understanding the relations between digital media and the public sphere.

Leslie Zwerwer

Leslie Zwerwer is a data science consultant at the Center for Information Technology, University of Groningen. She holds degrees in both Mathematics and Psychology.