Author: Bas Grasmayer

Decentraland

The Decentralized Autonomous “1,000 True Fan” Organisation

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on The Decentralized Autonomous “1,000 True Fan” Organisation

Decentralized ownership registries helped enable digital art’s NFT boom of the past year. Next, blockchain, the distributed ledger technology, will underpin fanbases and the way artists build careers, teams, and engage with industry infrastructure.

Can you put a fanbase on the blockchain? Here’s what it could look like.

Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs)

If you spend some time in Web3 circles, you will encounter the term DAO. It refers to organisations that utilize blockchains’ distributed nature and (often) smart contract functionality in order to govern themselves.

These organisations are grassroots, meaning that there’s no central leadership and the members of the organisation decide what things they want to incentivize, and what rules they want to create. They allow people to pool funds, govern those funds and use them to coordinate or incentivize communal efforts and contributions. 

At this point there are way too many DAOs to give a comprehensive overview and they come in many forms. For example, Stake Capital’s StakeDAO allows its members to earn stakeholder revenue share for their participation, for instance by supporting the Discovery and Creator nodes Stake Capital runs for the Audius network, a decentralized music streaming platform. Another well-known DAO, with the stated aim to push culture forward, is Friends With Benefits ($FWB) which requires new members to invest into the DAO by buying membership tokens, so that the community is invested in itself (you can read more about how they govern these funds here and what types of things you might expect in the community here). MetaCartel is a community of people that funds “post-hackathon” projects through grants. Decentraland, pictured above, is a game akin to Roblox and Second Life, but is governed by a DAO.

The Mint Fund, which was founded to fund underrepresented creators’ NFT minting costs, aims to become an “artist-owned curation DAO”. Mat Dryhurst (@) suggested a decentralised structure for SoundCloud in 2017, when people feared the company was running out of time (and cash) as it let go a large chunk of its staff. Back then the concept was novel, but it’s quickly becoming mainstream.

There are even tools like Aragon, Colony, and DAOhaus that make it relatively easy to set up a DAO in which the community participates in the ownership and governance of what’s created through the sum of their work, contribution, and participation.

Image via aforementioned Aragon.

The Decentralized Autonomous Artist

Not everyone’s music will drive millions of streams, not everyone is able to tour constantly, not everyone will go viral… but the one strategy that I feel almost any artist can apply is that of building a community of fans that can sustain you (sometimes referred to as “1,000 true fans”). There’s benefits to thinking small.

How can a fan community contribute to an artist’s success? Well, it depends on the artist, but they can financially sustain the artist through various types of patronage, they can amplify what an artist is doing by increasing their reach and leveraging network effects, but there are also other types of contributions that may be framed as collaborations, fan art, or other. In fact, when the community includes the artist and ‘artist team’ (ie. the business roles surrounding an artist), you can disintegrate some of those roles and place the associated activities inside the community through incentive structures.

What if the BTS Army was a DAO allowing people to either purchase or earn $BTS tokens in order to unlock various types of experiences and opportunities that are completely fan-organised? BTS wouldn’t even have to play a role in the DAO, though if what the DAO is doing is sufficiently valuable (which it would be), it may decide to let people trade $BTS tokens for tickets to concerts, livestreams, merch, or NFT collectibles. BTS can then choose to sell those tokens for fiat money (e.g. dollars or won) and cash out or retain $BTS and take a more active role in the DAO (token holders are often rewarded with increased influence in the governance of the DAO, corresponding to the amount of tokens they hold).

Since it can all be logged to a blockchain, much of this experience becomes portable beyond any specific platform, allowing the fanbase to organise itself wherever it prefers. This way experiences can travel beyond the walled gardens of Facebook, Apple, or virtual platforms and into the so-called metaverse in which the DAO and its members own their data and collect the value from it. Work is also being done on making various blockchains more interoperable, so things will be less locked into blockchain ecosystems than they are now.

Instead of communicating with an audience as followers on a social media platform owned by others, you can involve them directly in the organisation of your fan experience in a transparent, open, grassroots way through DAOs. The bonus: community ownership. We’ve seen countless artists open up Discords and other types of communities next to their social media presence – what we’ll see next is the Web3 version of this: decentralized autonomous fan organisations.

x

Help me take my writing to the Web3 & support me in Mirror‘s $WRITE race on Wednesdays. Vote here.

Does Apple’s lossless streaming move impair fairer subscription prices?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Apple just announced they’ll be launching spatial and lossless audio, at no extra cost, to all Apple Music subscribers starting in June. Seemingly in response, Amazon announced that they’ll be folding their lossless quality tier into the standard Amazon Music subscription tier. Lossless quality music is $9.99 now.

Amazon & Apple are not music companies

Neither Amazon nor Apple need to make money with their music businesses. They utilize these aspects for greater ecosystem tie-in and can afford to use music as a loss leader. Not even considering Apple’s iPhone, App Store or MacBook business… Apple’s revenue for their Airpods equals the revenue of Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined (2019).

AirPods make more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined

Another analyst puts the 2019 revenue for Airpods at $7.5 billion, rather than $12 billion. Still enormous. Airpods are becoming a platform. With its iTunes Store it sought to get more people on the iPod, which created a consumer lock-in that extended to the iPhone and the App Store. Steve Jobs‘ deal terms for iTunes also had a profound effect on the economics of music – laying the foundation for many of today’s discussions.

Unit Sales Out of the Gate (Above Avalon)

Lossless as a loss leader

Unless Apple and Amazon signed some very unique deals with labels, lossless streaming comes at a higher price than standard quality. That means that for now, Apple and Amazon are deciding to eat the cost in order to tie more people into their ecosystems. Amazon was previously criticized for this in 2011, subsidizing Lady Gaga‘s album sales of Born This Way by discounting it to $0.99:

“The digital retailer used the album as a loss leader to promote their Cloud Drive storage service and paid Gaga’s label full wholesale price for each album sold.”

Apple has been taking aim at Spotify since the launch of Apple Music. That started with rhetoric around how human curation is better than algorithms. More recently it took the form of a letter to artists about Apple Music’s royalty rates. Spotify’s antitrust complaints in the EU about Apple’s App Store practices means Apple faces fines as high as $27 billion. Spotify announced they have a lossless tier coming up later this year. Most people assumed this would come at an extra cost. Apple’s decision to use their $200B war chest to eat the cost of lossless quality audio is very much a move against Spotify.

Growing the pie – undermined?

Spotify had the courage to move first and start increasing prices of its existing tiers. Streaming subscription prices have long been stuck at the same price, losing 26% of value due to inflation. The market has become mature enough to raise prices and that’s something that needs to be normalized in a way similar to Netflix’ price hikes.

Cover image for Here’s How Spotify Can Fix Its Songwriter Woes (Hint: It’s All About Pricing)

Apple & Amazon’s strategy puts that at risk. Two questions to ponder: is music currently sustainable with so many companies relying on revenues from streaming services that are making a loss and are subsidized by tech giants or investors? Can this digital music landscape be sustainable without asking consumers for a fairer price?

Music Ally‘s Stuart Dredge has an optimistic take:

“Perhaps hi-res music’s true value in streaming will be to enable the big DSPs to charge all their subscribers another dollar or two a month, rather than just to persuade a small fraction of them to pay five dollars more a month. If that strategy pays off, today’s news will have been a positive moment indeed.”

I’m less optimistic and think that if this was the strategy, they would have paired the news with a price hike. This is about ecosystem tie-in and hitting Spotify where it hurts in a way that’s likely to impair efforts to normalize fairer subscription pricing.

Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping musicians than streaming services like Spotify and SoundCloud

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Twitter just launched a new tip jar feature with greater potential for musicians than those launched on popular streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud last year.

A new tip jar

Twitter started rolling out its new tip jar functionality last week. The functionality, which for now is only available to a limited group of creators, allows people to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo to their profiles via a new button on their profiles. It’s a bit like a ‘link in bio’, but specifically for payments.

Why tip jars ‘failed’ on streaming services

Streaming platforms are not creator services. They focus on monetizing the catalogue-listener relation through ads and subscriptions rather than the artist-fan relation. That means the user experience on streaming services is geared towards what people expect in exchange for their payment: quick access to the music they know, new music, and being able to find ‘music for every moment’.

I’m not entirely sure how these services defined success for the donation feature, but especially Spotify needed a PR win over the past year, so I’m interpreting their silence over the feature as an indication that nothing significant is happening through there. As a matter of fact, it seems that in its newly designed desktop profiles, the feature has been quietly removed. For reference, compare Marshmello‘s profile on mobile and the new desktop UI.

Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping

Social media is where people connect to artists. You may listen to dozens of artists per month, even hundreds, but the commitment of a social media follow is something reserved for those you actually care about. Social media is primarily about what’s new and while you can scroll back into someone’s history, it’s a secondary use case when compared to seeing months or years-old ‘content’ appear on playlists.

Through social media, it’s easier than on streaming services to stay connected with people and introduce them to new ways to support you. By creating a Tip Jar that also includes things like Bandcamp and Patreon, Twitter is reducing the distance between a person being interested in something and actually purchasing it. Any friction in that journey causes drop-offs along the way, so any reduction of friction or journey length translates to real money for creators (see also: merch integrations in (live)streaming platforms).

Expect others to follow suit

The type of direct monetization offered through Twitter’s Tip Jar is part of a wider trend that can also be seen in livestreaming services, the surging popularity of Patreon and OnlyFans, Clubhouse‘s tipping feature, and even the donation buttons in music streaming services.

Twitter will not be the last service this year to roll out more monetization options.

Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 2 Comments on Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

The foundations of the music business lie in an age of channels. Many current success models still focus on channels, despite living in an age of networks. Due to this mode of operation, a renewed demand for channels has created a landscape of influential gatekeepers over the past decade. But you can still opt to play the network game instead.

The channel landscape

Two clear examples of the new emergence of a channel landscape are Spotify and SoundCloud. Both of them started as platforms that were centered around the user and their networks. Spotify let its users build playlists and those were the playlists it served through its search and other features (actually, for a long time playlist discovery was handled by third-parties like Playlists.net, at the time called ShareMyPlaylists, now part of Warner Music). Over time, playlist brands emerged and Spotify started investing heavily into its own editorial brands – even prioritizing them over ‘user generated’ playlists.

SoundCloud started as a collaboration platform that quickly turned into a music-based social network – in some ways not very different from Twitter, which at one point considered buying SoundCloud and ended up investing $70 million. The main page was its stream, where you can see what people who you follow are uploading. Nowadays, the main page has featured playlists, personalized recommendations, charts, and themed playlists for studying, partying, sleeping, relaxing, etc.

Editorial playlists are channels. Both platforms went from social-first to channel-first and so did the much of the rest of the landscape.

Linearity

Channels are linear. You broadcast down them. You distribute through them one-directionally. In the CD days, if things start travelling in 2 directions in a distribution channel it meant there’s a big problem.

This linearity is what shaped modern music culture as it has emerged in the age of the recording and post-WW2 consumerism. It went hand in hand with the economies of scale that many also unknowingly sign up for when doing music, despite alternative ways being possible.

Non-linearity

We now live in the age of networks. This has been the most profound shift since the internet. Not streaming and not piracy, which are both just symptoms of what happens when something can be turned into data that can then travel without friction through networks.

It has created virality, internet memes, and an overabundance of ‘content’ since creating something and making it available for all to see is easier than ever. That’s true for your track, but also the 59,999 other tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. This problem has meant that platforms like the aforementioned have invested heavily in recommendation algorithms in order to ensure relevance to their users. That creates channels and in the case of certain big social media platforms, it means that people have to pay to actually reach audiences that already follow them.

The landscape also means you can branch off. You don’t need to do interviews in magazines in order to talk to your fans. You can set up your own groups on messaging apps, you can do newsletters, set up forums or Discord communities, etc. It can feel like a handful of companies are setting the rules, but you don’t have to play ball.

Non-linearity in fan communities

Whether you’re an artist, label or startup, how you structure your relation with your fan or user base determines the type of game you will be playing. For contrast, the below graphic looks at traditional linearity in artist-to-fan and fan-to-fan communication and compares it with a ‘network model’. The network model means that as an artist, instead of broadcasting down, you’re placing yourself inside your community of fans.

A community means multidirectional conversations. These conversations exist inside fan clubs, but that information would then have to be moved back up. If, instead of that, you’re participating in the fan community, you have access to more (qualitative) data and insights… with the added bonus that it gives you and others a sense of belonging.

Getting people to pay for something that’s abundantly available is a hard business. The better you understand the fans of your music, the more manageable that challenge becomes… and it will also help you develop completely novel ideas.

5 ideas for fan conversations

Basic rule of thumb: the more you interact with the people who like your music, the better you’ll understand them, which significantly impacts your odds of running a successful business. It also brings up one of the most underestimated challenges in music:

How do you get someone who likes your music to hear you again? They may have heard you on the radio or a playlist somewhere… now how do you make sure they keep listening to you over time?

Below are a few ideas that can help with fan retention and help build your understanding of your listeners in order to unlock new ideas to fold into things like Patreon memberships, crowdfunding perks, limited merch, or whatever you conceive.

  • The chatroom: “just set up a Discord” is thrown around a lot, but the relatively simple concept of creating an environment where fans can interact comes with real challenges. There’s a cold start problem meaning people join empty channels, only to disappear because the community feels dead (which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy). There can be abuse, where people spam channels or are not respectful of others. How you plan around these issues and the way you decide to architect your community determines what types of conversations and interactions you enable.
  • The weekly hangout: if you have a limited number of engaged fans, perhaps reach out to them individually and set up a weekly hangout where you all chat about life & music. Over time, bonds will form and people will feel more invested in the success of the reason why they’re connected: your music.
  • The monthly 1-on-1: set up a monthly, individual call with various fans, one on one. Check in on each other. You’ll not just get a snapshot of who people are, but you’ll get status updates, hear how they’re progressing on certain projects… and they’ll hear the same from you. This is one of the Patreon perks I offer to 1:1 supporters and although I expected it to be mostly consultancy calls, I’ve actually gotten a lot of value out of it by learning about new domains.
  • The ‘user interview’: user interviews are something I learned doing in various product roles at digital music services. Whenever you’re exploring a certain challenge, for example a new merch line, you reach out to a bunch of your fans directly and hold an interview with them (that you prepare well beforehand). In this situation, things you might want to find out are how they see themselves, how they express themselves through objects or clothing, how much they spend, how they decide to purchase items, etc. These are 1-on-1 calls and you can find plenty of great resources about this by learning more about a domain called ‘user research’.
  • The co-creation: you can also kick off a project where you co-create something with fans. For example, you could aim to create an audiovisual map and have fans populate parts of this map, based on their location. Working together on something helps you to understand people in new ways, it will let you see how people express themselves, and in what ways they like to be creative themselves.

Besides building a sense of community and connection, it’s important to always consider what you want to learn from these interactions. I could think of dozens of additional ideas for interaction, but what’s most important is that you understand the challenges before you and start thinking what type of insights will help you address those challenges. In some cases, the challenge might actually be to speak to fans so you can get more clarity on what goals to set.

The choice is yours

Not everything has to be in the hands of a few platforms. You can choose to interact directly with fans and you can do it today by DMing some people who recently liked your posts. Break out of the channel paradigm and see what you can build through network. It’s not one or the other: you can play both games. Just don’t be fooled by the dominance of channels. In the words of Black Sheep: the choice is yours.

Why YouTube is the streaming service to watch

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Spotify often gets contrasted with Bandcamp in order to explain the challenges of the music streaming landscape: low per-stream royalties versus much larger commissions on sales. The intensity of that discussion has moved all eyes from the actual one-to-watch, which is not Spotify, but YouTube – a service with a billion monthly active music listeners and 30 million subscribers.

Always has been

YouTube has of course long been on everyone’s radar due to the so-called ‘value gap’: the disparity between what YouTube was willing to pay for music & its perceived real market value. As the biggest music platform, YouTube was infamous for its low per-stream rates which, on average, are significantly lower than Spotify’s for music identified through its ContentID system (source). I chose to phrase things in past tense due to attention shifting to Spotify, but that does not mean rightsholders have found these issues to have been resolved.

Another concern is the power of YouTube and its mother companies Google and Alphabet, which is a common reason for complaints from music industry lobbyists about having imbalanced negotiations. Before I go into why I think YouTube is making all the right moves: the concentration of power towards tech monopolies is of big concern for me too (it’s why I deleted or deactivated my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Keep this in mind when developing a strategy: always diversify, never put your eggs in one basket, and make sure you create ways to go direct-to-fan (e.g. collect phone numbers, email addresses, build communities).

YouTube’s evolution as a creator service

Google’s video service has long had something of great strategic value: not music. I mean that literally: it’s had content and creators that were not doing music. This has meant less complexities around licensing (but also poorer representation for creatives) and has allowed YouTube to experiment with new models.

The same is happening now with podcasts at Spotify and user-centric streaming payments at SoundCloud. Having ‘user-generated content’ from unsigned artists allowed SoundCloud to start trialing its ‘fan-powered royalty‘ model without every rightsholder having to opt-in through contract negotiations. Meanwhile Spotify is exploring new monetization models around podcasts, like paid podcast subscriptions. As a relatively new medium, podcasts don’t yet have the legal and political complexities associated with intellectual property in music.

YouTube & the next layer

Streaming is a base layer for music monetization. It’s shallow in that it leverages nothing but the relation between listener and catalogue. Monetization is driven by factors like accessibility (e.g. all devices, price), portability (e.g. offline) and convenience (e.g. catalogue size, search, recommendations). It’s absolutely basic: it’s not about the relation between fan and artist, it’s not about the quality of the art or music, it’s just about having the largest and most convenient store where you can access everything by paying from a magic wallet with your costs predictably capped at $10 per month. It’s a subscription business, not a music business – as Tim Westergren (founder of Pandora and now livestreaming service Sessions) also pointed out in my recent interview with him during Karajan Music Tech.

This base layer has advantages: it generates a huge amount of money for rightsholders and creates a foundational data layer which can be used to connect listeners to new artists and music or could be leveraged to learn more about existing fans and get new music to them. But streaming was never supposed to be the future of the music economy. It needs additional layers on top.

One of these layers is the Interaction Layer. This layer has been thriving during the pandemic thanks to a particular medium: livestreams. Livestreams encourage interactivity: fans can be exposed to each other in chats and the chat functionality can make fans feel like they’re seen by the artist(s) they care about so much. That means there’s value being created beyond simple music access. Value means opportunity to monetize and YouTube has seized that opportunity.

Image taken from my Water & Music piece about fan-centric streaming services (paywall).

Through its Super Sticker and Super Chat features, YouTube allows creators to monetize their livestreams. Super Stickers are big, fun and quirky custom emoji that appear in the chat in exchange for a small fee. Super Chat allows viewers to highlight and pin a message for a certain duration of time, depending on how much they pay. In the first months of the pandemic lockdowns, from March to June 2020, over 2 million new users spent money on these features.

The second feature that provides an additional layer is channel memberships. This allows creators to created limited edition content, similar to what they might offer on Patreon or a SFW OnlyFans. At smaller numbers, it even allows them to create semi-bespoke content.

Layer integration

These features allow creators to monetize and connect with fans where they already are: YouTube (as opposed to onboarding them to Patreon or OnlyFans). This is the important distinction. These monetization options are not novel in and of themselves – many of them have been around for years or even decades. The important development is that these experience and monetization layers are integrating. Moving fans around various platforms causes friction, which means you won’t be able to convert everyone down the funnel from the streaming layer. It also keeps the data in one place instead of fracturing it.

Graphic from Streaming is not the future of the music economy, from the second edition of the MUSIC x newsletter, February 2016.

Over the next years we’re going to see many examples of artists successfully building models on layers that sit on top of streaming. YouTube is going to play a significant role in that. The conversation will move from leveraging streaming (still essential for discovery & connection to wider audience) to interaction & bespoke options.

Another service to watch in this space is Amazon Music, which is slowly expanding their integration of livestreams from Twitch (another Amazon company, which also allows micropayments and memberships like YouTube).

Livestreams mean original content and a different set of rights than what you negotiate for on-demand streaming. This has given YouTube and Amazon the flexibility to experiment with these new layers. Spotify’s business strategy has introduced similar functionality to podcasts, but will they be able to do the same for music given the complexities of licensing and the various rightsholders that will want a piece of the pie?

The music streaming landscape is in flux and it’s not about Apple Music vs Spotify or Spotify vs Bandcamp anymore.

–

For a wider read diving further into this trend, read my article The rise of the fan-centric music streaming service at Water & Music (paywall).

A special thanks to Vickie Nauman for some of the inspiration for this piece and to c/o pop and Germany’s association for independent music (VUT) for having us on a panel last week.

Streaming services: it’s time for Two-Factor Authentication

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Scams, fraud, bots and theft: the ugly side of streaming provides a stark contrast to that beautiful feeling of having the world’s recorded music at your fingertips.

What is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

You are already using 2FA. Certain accounts, like Google, Facebook, or Apple, require multiple forms of authentication in order to sign in from a new device. This often works by verifying it’s you from another device, or by entering a code sent to your phone number, email address, or generated in an authenticator app.

It adds a layer of security to accounts that makes it hard to get in with just the username and password.

Why don’t streaming services use 2FA?

Popular streaming services like Spotify and Netflix famously don’t use 2FA, although the latter has recently started running tests with it, presumably to tackle account sharing. The reason for not implementing 2FA? Likely because it doesn’t help growth and in fact may hamper conversion rates.

Jorge Castro on developer community dev.to sums it up well through this fictional conversation:

  • Developers: We want to implement 2FA in our platform.
  • Netflix executes: Ok, and how much will it cost us?
  • Developers: Around two months.
  • Netflix executives: Ok, and it will increase the number of viewers?
  • Developers: Well, not really. It is about security.
  • Netflix executives: So, it will not increase the number of viewers but it could be a burden for some customers and it could decrease the number of viewers.
  • Developers: Yes, but it could be optional.
  • Netflix executives: So optional, an option that it plays against the number of viewers and it will cost us time (and money). Sorry but no.
  • Developers: But the security.
  • Netflix executives: We already invested in our security. If our customers have trouble then we could reset its password. It’s their responsibility, not ours.

However building in a little more friction could be beneficial to all… and tackle certain types of fraud more efficiently than a switch to user-centric streaming payments might.

Black market for streaming service accounts

For years, there has been a thriving market for streaming service accounts, with Spotify accounts selling for under a dollar. Many though not all of these are hacked. It’s so common that people commenting on their hackers’ music tastes has become somewhat of a meme and a quick search on Twitter pulls up countless examples.

Vietnamese blogs speculate that black market accounts are what led to Spotify and Netflix halting their free trial offers in the country last year.

This is not an issue that is exclusive to Spotify and Netflix, but there’s a high availability of examples since they are two of the most popular entertainment services without 2FA.

Fake plays, scams, and fraud

Just like it’s possible to buy ‘fake followers’ on social media, it’s possible to buy fake plays for streaming services. Jacking up the numbers can help to game the recommendation algorithm and build fake legitimacy for those looking closely at big numbers (but perhaps not closely enough).

Who cares if that is what someone wants to do? Well, everyone should, because it eats away at the pool of money distributed to all artists. Hackers have been gaming this system openly since at least 2013 in order to generate revenue.

An article by William Bedell from 2015 explains how he was able to do the same. At the time, not only did Spotify not use 2FA:

“There wasn’t even a CAPTCHA or email verification when creating accounts.”

Image by William Bedell.

The lack of better security leads to these types of fraud having to be traced & fixed retroactively, which often leads to streaming services taking music with fake plays down. That sounds good, but there are two issues: 1) we don’t know what percentage of fraud goes undetected, and 2) this opens up an attack vector (want your competitor’s music taken down? Just boost it with fake streams).

Audius (primer article), a new streaming platform and protocol that awards people tokens (called $AUDIO) based on their participation, is also running into this issue. Bots are used on the platform to game the system and get music into the charts. This messes with the platform’s weekly reward system, as WeirdCityRecords on Reddit points out:

“Curators have been robbed by bot users almost every week since the rewards inception (not only in terms of $audio but engagement being buried below bots), and now with a song being clearly botted to #1, it seems like this week 1 artist or possibly more will be deprived as well.”

The track accused of being ‘botted’ to the top outperforms the #2 by over 14 times, despite the artist and account being new to the platform and seemingly not having a significant presence on other music platforms.

Two-factor authentication would make it a lot harder to create loads of accounts like in the examples above, especially if you limit to 1 account per phone number.

Report fraud

Recently, I became familiar with another scam. Unfortunately that was due to falling victim to it on Spotify, though it may also exist on other platforms.

Botnets get employed to report people’s playlists for inappropriate content. This results in the playlist title and description being taken down. Bada-bing bada-boom: it is now easier to be the #1 search result for those same terms on Spotify.

As soon as I reported the erroneous report to Spotify and had them restore the playlist title and description, the botnet took it down again. This repeated half a dozen times over 2 weeks with my playlist existing without a title or description for the majority of the time.

I’m not alone in this and have found various playlists that also seem to be suffering from this issue (click here for an example if you’re curious about Romanian Manele music and here for GTA’s excellent soundtrack). This thread in Spotify’s support forums has other users reporting the issue.

The attack seems to have ended, but I almost gave up restoring my playlist every time it got taken down (I did consider writing a script that would auto-reply to Spotify’s takedown emails, though).

Since playlists are user-generated content, Spotify needs some type of system to deal with reports and make sure content that goes against the terms & conditions is taken down. After the 5th time my playlist got taken down and I asked if they could protect my playlist from the next auto-takedown, I got this answer:

“All user-created content can be reported, and while it may be possible that a report is invalid, all such reports need to go through our official report channel so we can handle them properly.”

So that’s a no. This means that anyone building playlists on Spotify with an unverified account can fall victim to this. Sure, the reporting account may get banned, but if it’s a botnet targeting you that doesn’t matter. That’s problematic, because unlike my hobbyist playlist with 100 followers, there are curation brands and artists with playlists that depend heavily on Spotify. They’re all exposed to this type of attack that seems to rely on either hacked accounts or easily-created free accounts.

Investment without security

People around the world are putting hours of effort into their streaming accounts: building playlists, followings, brands and in some cases companies using their presence. They’re exposed to insecurity.

Even accounts on platforms with better security get hacked, e.g. to misuse the trust someone has built up and run a cryptocurrency scam on followers (as fellow music-tech writer Cherie Hu recently became a victim of on Twitter, which besides Audius and the report fraud above was my third prompt for writing this piece).

Even if a streaming service can reinstate an account after a hack: the hack can damage your brand, e.g. if the hacker changes playlist titles and imagery to something offensive or scams, or just makes it impossible for you to keep running your playlist brand due to repeated reporting. If you enjoy services’ algorithmic recommendations, a hacker’s temporary account takeover can mess that up for you also.

Two-factor authentication is a basic standard for security. Maybe it’s time for streaming services to give it some priority and prevent fraud, scams, and theft.