The Spotification of public service media

Abstract

This article investigates contemporary cultural policy reforms enabled by paid digital media distribution services, taking the case of the integration of Spotify into the Swedish public media system. Specifically, it reflects on the conflicts arising over the prioritization of digital distribution over cultural preservation, during the gradual substitution of the Spotify digital services for the services provided by the traditional material media archive, the Grammofonarkivet. It considers the factors influencing changes in the Swedish cultural policy environment and the nature of the complaints and human rights claims made by employees of the Grammofonarkivet to UNESCO regarding its structural transformation. It also postulates a “Spotification” model of public service media emerging in Sweden but potentially affecting other countries with public media systems served by traditional media archives.

Keywords:

• Culture
• music
• public media
• policy
• radio
• technology
• UNESCO

Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their anonymous reviewers for their guidance in revising this paper and Professors Christian Christensen and Harris M. Berger for guidance in researching it.

Notes

1 The Pirate Bay was launched in 2003 as a marginally legal search engine in Sweden useful for locating copies of pirated media, principally music and movies. It attracted a large user base which also helped develop its software and later advocated for copyright reforms decriminalizing online digital file sharing. Despite a long history of legal challenges and defeats, it remains an operable indexing and search service. However, in large part it has been superannuated by Spotify, Pandora, and similar services.

2 As of this writing, Spotification extends only for programs at the Swedish Radio show websites made available for listening after the initial broadcast.

3 There are other examples of PSM convergence with private and hybrid media systems in other countries, with many different forms of public-private partnerships (Hutchinson 2017).

4 At the same time, audiences in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have “eagerly embraced new technology” and digitization for “cultural policy goals” of public media (Enli, Syvertsen, and Mjøs 2018, 110) for decades.

5 The financing of public media has until the time of this writing been administered by yet another company, Radiotjänst AB, also owned by Förvaltningsstiftelsen, in accordance with Sweden’s Radio and Television Act SFS 1989.

6 Since January 1, 2019 this arrangement has changed. From 2019 the fee for PSM is paid through the annual federal tax bill (https://www.radiotjanst.se/en/ (accessed on March 19, 2019).

7 Until recently, the Swedish Parliament had the final say in setting the fees and approving the media charter for the entire system every six years (Arriaza Ibarra and Nord 2014, 78).

8 The organization in Sweden monitoring and collecting royalties on behalf of rights holders is called Svenska Artisters och Musikers Intresseorganisation (SAMI). Anyone or any organization that plays music publicly has to pay royalties for performance rights, including TV and radio companies. SAMI is a member of the Association of European Performers Organizations (AEPO-ARTIS), the Societies’ Council for the Collective Management of Performers’ Rights (SCAPR), and International Performers Database (IPD).

9 It also “paved the way for institutional ideologies which … [are] less committed to welfare state values” (Enli, Syvertsen, and Mjøs 2018, 108).

10 For instance, Prime Minister Löfven (2017, n.p.) said: “Innovation is one of the things I personally find most fascinating and inspiring. As the proud founding country of Skype and Spotify, with Stockholm being second only to Silicon Valley in terms of the number of startups per capita in the world, we will continue to foster a development where new ways of thinking and smart solutions are encouraged, from preschools to universities.”

11 Pre- initial public offering of stocks (IPO) companies worth at least a billion dollars.

12 The principal source of information for this section on the gramophone archive is Lundberg et al. (2014).