What you probably didn't know is that it also lets those artists and their record labels track you back. According to a new report from Billboard , in some cases when users save songs to their device on Spotify, they unwittingly give record labels permission to access a considerable amount of personal information. This access comes when a user pre-saves an album on Spotify. The feature, available for upcoming songs and albums, lets users add music to their library as soon as it becomes available.
However, once a user pre-saves a song or album on their device, a record label can request and gain access to basically any part of a person's account. Labels can access a person's birthday, email address, and other personal information linked to their Spotify account, view their listening history, gain the ability to change the artists they follow, upload images to their account, take full control over private playlists and even remotely control their music streaming. How exactly do labels end up with this type of access?
In order to pre-save songs to a user's library, the label needs to have the ability to add and remove songs to a person's library. It has to ask permission to be able to do that, and most users grant it seeing as they are trying to get access to music as soon as possible.
However, in asking for permission to access a user's library, some labels have started to ask for excessive amounts of access to user information — and the level of access isn't always obvious to the user.
Many of the requests are hidden in submenus and would require the user to click through and review each and every request. Most users are likely unaware of those additional permissions and should have no reason to suspect they are agreeing to give away unfettered access to their account information. There are two ways to measure market share:. By distribution this includes indie labels distributed via major labels being included in the share of the bigger labels.
By ownership this measures based on the original label, so does not count any indie labels as part of major labels. So, if Spotify does direct deals with the larger indies currently distributed by majors or major-owned distributors or persuades them to join Merlin , it unpacks up to more than a fifth of major label market share.
Fake artist gate saw a lot of people getting very hot under the collar, but nothing that was done was against any rules. Instead library music companies like Epidemic Sounds were — and still are — serving tracks into mood based playlists. The inference is that Spotify is paying less for Epidemic Sounds tracks than to labels. Not exactly industry changing, but a pointer to the future, and a point of share is a point of share.
Of course, this is a hypothetical scenario, and one on steroids: the odds of Spotify signing up all the top 20 artists in the next 12 months is slim, to put it lightly, but it is useful for illustrating the opportunity.
However, UMG would be thinking if it jumps first and removes its content, each of the other two majors would benefit from it not being there and would probably be secretly hoping for that outcome. Each other major would be thinking the same, and regulatory restrictions prevent the majors from discussing strategy to formulate a combined response.
Thus, maybe Spotify is already nearly big enough to do this, and could do so next year. History shows that when Spotify makes disruptive announcements, its stock price does better than when it delivers quarterly results.
Maybe, just maybe, the labels have already missed their chance to prevent Spotify from becoming their fiercest competitor. The TV networks left it too late with Netflix…history may be about to repeat itself. The discussion around this post has not yet got started, be the first to add an opinion. Share this article.
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