From endless opportunities to increasing disparities: 50 shades of music streaming

Valentina is working hard to make a living out of her passion: writing and performing music. Known on the web under the name of VALENN, since 2022 this 20-year-old indie singer, composer and piano player has released 5 single tracks, through different independent labels. "I've been using Spotify, AppleMusic and all major streaming platforms since the beginning, but only one of my songs has achieved some visibility, as it was selected for a playlist with some 190,000 followers."

In just a few days, Valentina had registered some 2000 new listeners. "They're not big figures, but they gave me the chance of being discovered by a new audience at least," she says. Yet, the positive effect only lasted two weeks. Once her song came off the playlist, numbers plummeted and "all went back as before". "Streaming platforms offer the possibility, unimaginable until a few years ago, to have your songs heard and discovered, but getting into a playlist is very difficult and no matter how hard I have tried since, by following the same steps and with equally good songs, I still cannot explain how it happened to me." What Valentina's experience outlines is, among other things, the growing influence of dominant streaming platforms not only on artists' visibility, but also, as a consequence, on music fruition as a whole.

"This influence operates at several levels, but mainly through recommendation systems, which suggest particular artists or songs, and through the creation of personalised playlists where some tracks are chosen by the user and others by an algorithm, based on what you usually listen to. And these kinds of selections, such as Spotify's 'Discover Weekly', end up significantly influencing your listening and discovery," says Antoine Henry. Assistant professor at the University of Lille, in Northern France, Henry is also among the co-creators of FairMuse, a European project aimed at fostering a "fair, more competitive and sustainable" music sector, by providing "a timely response to the increased dominance of the biggest music platforms and their algorithms." Professor in Law and Innovation at Lisbon's Católica Global School of Law, Giuseppe Mazziotti is its coordinator and principal investigator. "The risk is that tech companies will cannibalise the music industry, and turn music creators from independent and conscious actors into puppets: employees of companies that merely feed machines in need of data and content," he says, warning that the consequences can go far beyond the industry and impact the global music offer: "Through social media, especially, and streaming services to some extent, the internet, instead of breaking down barriers, is becoming a never-ending series of 'bubbles.' Often trapped in these bubbles, created by algorithms driven solely by user engagement, consumers are becoming less aware of the broader creative world and are experiencing increasing cultural impoverishment."

What is happening before our eyes, or rather in our ears, is a kind of cascading homogenisation, confirms Henry: "Depending on what people listen to most, platforms will push artists to create content that fits these preferences. In order to get your song shared more widely, you may then try to conform to the algorithm's expectations, ultimately shaping your music to meet its criteria." To counter the risk of a decrease in musical exploration, experimentation and diversity, FairMuse has developed an online portal aimed at better framing this influence on listeners' habits and music consumption. "We invite the users to ask the platforms and share with us their 'streaming data'," he explains. "These metadata will reveal, for example, when they listened to a particular song, whether they listened to it all the way through, whether it was in a playlist or not, and thus help make the link between users' behaviour and 'response' of the platforms, especially in terms of recommendations. All this should then enable us to identify patterns and understand the influence exerted by these players and whether the algorithm overweighs, for example, the popularity of the artist, the musical genre or other factors." The end goal is to understand if streaming platforms' recommendations are fair according to a set of parameters: "We consider factors such as the origin and genre of the songs to prevent certain languages or musical genres from being over-represented. However, we also aim to incorporate the artist's remuneration."

Having already given up hope of making money from her music, Valentina says she releases it purely out of passion: "The big platforms are crucial for getting yourself known, but as an independent artist, you already know you will never earn back what you spent to produce them." The share of the profits they redistribute to the music sector is indeed one of the key factors in evaluating platforms' fairness, confirms Mazziotti: "We know, for instance, that Spotify pays around 70% of its revenue to the music sector. It would be naive to view this ratio as purely positive, but considering the investments involved and compared to user-generated content platforms and older streaming services, it's already a significant share. However, we now need to understand exactly where this 70% goes and whether music creators, publishers and record labels receive a fair portion of it." While awaiting the outcome of the project's inquiry, several studies already suggest that this revenue distribution is pyramidal and reflects the principles of the so-called 'Pareto Law': "With respect to streaming platforms, we see that the famous 80-20 ratio is often confirmed, with 20% of artists achieving 80% of the visibility and revenue, while the remaining artists share a mere 20%," explains Henry. He adds that, given the prevalence of such platforms, this trend is likely to become self-reinforcing, further amplifying the existing bias: "Artists already in the spotlight will continue to be promoted, as the algorithm bases its recommendations on their popularity, while those with less visibility will remain in the shadows."

What can be done then to curb this trend? "First and foremost, we need to reverse the narrative that tech companies have been pushing for the past 20 years to undermine the creative sector," suggests Mazziotti. "Stop believing that paying for high-quality content is unappealing and not innovative, and start raising awareness while seriously considering the rights of creators." A move toward a "fairer recommendation system" is what Henry hopes for and is actively working on: "Our aim is to foster more conscious music consumption, helping users understand where the music they listen to comes from, and encouraging them to question whether it's truly what they want to support. This may, hopefully, lead them to explore other genres, discover new artists, and broaden their horizons," he says. All of this, in an era where new technologies often exacerbate inequalities and polarize digital markets to the point that "creators are left vulnerable and isolated," reflects Mazziotti. This is why, when it comes to looking ahead, he concludes by emphasising "fairness" once again and placing it at the centre of conversation "Fairness means reducing inequalities to make creative industries more inclusive, more transparent, and more multicultural, all principles that don't arise out of nowhere but are rooted in our shared history and embedded in the DNA of the European Union."

Contacts:

Coordinator: UCP, Giuseppe Mazziotti, gmazziotti@ucp.pt

Communication officer: ICONS, Cesar G. Crisosto, cesar.crisosto@icons.it

Journalist: Diego Giuliani, diego.giuliani@icons.it

Website: https://fairmuse.eu/—LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fair-muse-project/

Provided by iCube Programme