As it turns out, having music launched on Spotify is not always a straightforward process. After recording a series of sounds, our search for suitable aggregators who were willing to distribute them began on Spotify’s website, which lists a series of recommended aggregators. Initially, we explored the deals offered by TuneCore, IndigoBoom, RouteNote, and CD Baby. Like most music aggregators, these companies either charge musicians an annual fee for distributing their sounds or distribute music against a certain percentage of future revenue. Even though we eventually managed to sign a deal with an aggregator for all of our releases, the process of doing so revealed the arbitrary methods by which music is approved for commercial streaming services.
“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.”
The book (on which this article is based) is available on Amazon (as noted on the article page itself). Without buying it, you can explore around in it using the "Look Inside" feature. It's a lot to get through, but I recommend mucking about in the Introduction and the Conclusion if you have any interest in what's actually going on with this study and its motivations. It appears as a pretty classic example of what might be called "investigative reporting under the auspices of academic research with one or more axes to grind".
The research was heavily funded (by the Swedish government), Spotify claims that they were deceived by the researchers and basically targeted. The researchers appear to exhibit a fear of companies (and capitalism) in general. Spotify appears to exhibit a fear of scrutiny while also appearing to exhibit certain types of behavior that might be described as deceptive or even piratical. There's an axe being ground on one side about governmental control of social media (and direct analogies are drawn in the book to Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc.), and an axe being ground on the other to avoiding any oversight of business practices, data use, and data manipulation. If you're not an academic, not accustomed to reading academic research, and not aware of the motive forces involved and the academic zeitgeist, you'll probably miss a lot that's more implicitly expressed with careful phrasing. And yeah, in the words of a guy I used to work with, "It's dry as rat shit."
It would be an interesting read if you could stick through the whole thing, bring a critical attitude to all of it, and extract what's objective and valuable in it. It's definitely concerned with some important questions about the management of social media, entertainment media, and related issues, whatever side of those you come down on. At this point in my life, I can't bring myself to devote the required attention to it -- especially since I can make a good bet about what the gist is on both sides. And man ... that's quite a grant those people got to do the study. Fascinating.
