Revenue, access, and engagement via the in-house curated Spotify playlist in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the perception of recording industry change in Australia through a focus on the curated playlist as a sociotechnical intermediary. During the rapid expansion of commercial music streaming services between 2016 and 2018, musician and recording industry enthusiasm for revenue growth was tempered by trepidation surrounding change. This article presents findings from interview research conducted with Australian artists and music industry professionals to provide insight on the promotion of popular music within the often opaque blend of human and algorithmic structures inside the digital music streaming commodity. It explores the apprehension and enthusiasm over the affordances of the new recommendation and discovery ecosystems, centered around the in-house curated Spotify playlist. Debates surrounding the topics of revenue, access, and engagement are explored. Analysis will demonstrate the increasingly influential role music streaming services and recommendation tools are perceived to play in the sectors of retail, promotion, and distribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• digital media
• information society
• media industries
• new media
• popular music
• sound studies
• work and labor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Cited research interviews

Brian pseudonym (2017). Director, large music publishing company

Cuming, Lou (2017). Artist manager, Mister Management

Dan pseudonym (2017). Songwriter and performer

Deady, Beth (2017). Digital Asset Manager, MGM Distribution

Frew, Ronnie (2017). Songwriter and performer, Pink Harvest

Hamilton, Sarah (2017). Operations manager, Ditto Music

Monica pseudonym (2017). Artist manager

Maund, Chris (2017). Chief Operating Officer, Mushroom Group

Phil pseudonym (2017). Managing director, large music publishing company

Wilson, Amy (2017). Songwriter and performer, Mere Women

Notes

1. The music industries encompass the broad monetization of music, including the recording industry, live performance, and other revenue streams. This preference for the plural reflects older definitional work (Sterne, 2014; Williamson & Cloonan, 2007) and in particular Nordgård (2018) who also views the streaming services as external actors to the music industries.

2. Self-reported artist genres (acts typically cited 2–3 genres): Indie (5), Pop (3), Rock (2), Electronic (2), Funk (1), Hip Hop (1), Alternative (1), Roots (1), Soul (1).

3. Platform is a term commonly applied to these companies, and Spotify itself is noted to describe itself as a music streaming subscription service or an audio platform depending on context. but the usage of the term platform in academia carries theoretical implications that cannot be addressed here, and will be avoided. (Eriksson, Fleischer, Johansson, Snickars, & Vonderau, 2019) work through this definitional issue in Spotify’s case, and propose to use platform as shorthand for action nets, in order to “grasp this quality of companies as temporary entanglements of unlike yet related actors” (p.15).

4. Vonderau (2017) reports the usage of DSP referring to Demand-Side Platforms, but that usage is focused on a particular segment of the advertising supply chain within Spotify’s platform ecosystem.

5. (Prey, 2016) provides a breakdown of how Spotify’s algorithmic recommendation engine the Echo Nest generates personalized recommendations, which is a different algorithmic process than the management of the curated playlists. (Eriksson et al., 2019) lays out the broad functionality of the entire Spotify system, but neither of these sources shed more light into how in-house playlists are specifically managed beyond how Spotify reports that they are: managed by human curators, and informed by metrics.

6. Discovery is also an important term to problematize, the subject of a special issue in this journal in 2016. See (Nowak, 2016) on the differentiated approaches to discovery as a phenomenological act. Discovery here is understood as the mechanism where listeners are exposed to new recordings through recommendation, and (Kjus, 2016) notes: “The degree to which these services manage to convince artists, labels and consumers of the virtues of discovery may well be decisive for the future of the streaming model.” (p. 129).

7. The announcement of the new pitching process was followed in September, 2018, by the announcement that artists could upload music directly into the Spotify system without using an aggregator (Spotify, 2018a).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects funding scheme (project LP150100156).

Notes on contributors

Benjamin A. Morgan

Benjamin A. Morgan is currently researching the use and meaning of digital platforms and usage data in the Australian music industries. He is a veteran of the U.S. music business who worked for several years in Liberia and is interested in approaches to developing cultural markets. His PhD is part of the research project Music Usage Metrics and the Future of the Australian Music Industry. He hopes to help artists, investors, and governments collaborate to improve the cultural industries.