Spotify Pushes Musicians to Become “Content Creators”

Liz Pelly

For years, many other music tech critics and I have talked about how the streaming model pushes this idea of a one-size-fits-all solution for all of music. And how in imagining alternatives, we have to imagine beyond the one-size-fits-all model.

It’s hard to generalize about what music communities need. I think, for a similar reason, it’s hard to really generalize about how far streaming and tech companies have shaped music culture. It’s different depending on who you’re talking about. There are so many different ways in which listeners and musicians themselves relate to music and the concept of music. In lots of ways, streaming has set incentives that have nudged artists and listeners in one direction or the other — sometimes in really overt ways, sometimes in really subtle ways. Some musicians have really felt those platform pressures, though.

Something that came up in the reporting for the book, particularly in interviews with people who run independent record labels, was how artists are confronted with so much data from these streaming services, and how that data can still more insidiously have an influence on you — even for musicians who aren’t necessarily pop-aspiring or in pursuit of relentless growth.

The general public interfaces with Spotify through this main Spotify app, but there’s another app that artists interface with, called Spotify for Artists, where they’re given this data dashboard, and all these stats on their catalog. They’re told which songs are doing well, what playlists they were added to, which tracks are unexpectedly taking off, how people are finding their music, that kind of stuff. Even beyond just streaming services, we’re at this moment where all artists are expected to not just be musicians but also content creators.

So maybe, in addition to contending with their streaming metrics, they might also be dealing with other apps’ metrics: “If I posted this way, a lot of people found it, and if I [posted] this way, no one found it. When I talk about what my songs are about, no one interacts with it, but when I post my face, more people are finding out about my shows.” And now you also have Substack data, Patreon data — all these different data dashboards.