An Open Letter to Spotify

Dear Spotify,

I am an artist, and I’m here today speaking on behalf of many other, like-minded artists who have built their hopes and their careers upon the success and growth of your platform. So what I’d like to start out by saying is, we love you, and, we’re not mad — just disappointed.

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You probably hear many collective demands from artists in passing. You probably have the general sense that we always want something and are never satisfied with what we get. But that’s only partially true. We all want something — badly want something — from you.

Most independent artists want to be featured on an editorial playlist, and most want to be paid more than a fraction of a cent every time their song is streamed. But that first thing isn’t in our control, and that second thing isn’t in your control.

So forget those things. Let’s focus on the third thing most artists collectively want from Spotify (and this is something that should absolutely be in someone’s control. Either your control or, perhaps more reasonably, in our control):

The thing I’m referring to goes almost without saying. We want a solution to the bot attacks.

Speaking personally, I monitor my playlist adds, audience data, and account analytics to an almost obsessive degree, multiple times a day. Every release, we all brace for the impact of a bot attack.

And I’m not alone in that fear or in that experience. Bot attacks are becoming more frequent, and people are becoming more concerned.

Bot attacks have always been a concern for artists with a high degree of ambition and integrity, because bot behavior corrupts listener data, making marketing efforts costly and largely ineffective. And, because they hurt our ability to organically grow on your platform through algorithmic channels you have put in place to help users discover new music that is similar to what they already like.

We as artists rely on that algorithm to show our music to an increasingly widening audience, who, if all goes according to design, should have a pretty high chance of liking the music you introduce them to.

But that algorithm can’t function properly if the data is skewed by a bunch of bots streaming our songs. That’s because, when we get bot attacked, our song is shown to other, similar user accounts, which, of course, will be mostly other bot accounts.

So, now not only is our ability to do paid marketing screwed up, our ability to grow organically and benefit from your platform is profoundly hindered.

That’s because discovery algorithms like yours are easily corrupted by a bunch of “user” data coming from bots that suddenly begin incessantly streaming our songs.

Bot attacks are more than just harmful to us, though. For me at least, they’re also just embarrassing. It’s a really bad look for any artist who deeply cares about the integrity of their work or even just the optics of their brand.

But all of this came to a head when Spotify announced that their solution to the problem with bot playlists was to penalize the artist who ended up on those playlists. Maybe you don’t realize that many people are being put on these playlists against our will and without our knowledge.

This comes largely from a company called Music Array, which channels their playlist data through Helsinki, giving them their hallmark call sign on Spotify For Artists, which is a huge stream count suddenly coming from Helsinki.

Music Array and companies following their model evade immediate detection by using an unsophisticated mix of bots and incentivized users (humans who are paid to stream songs on a Music Array playlist, i.e., humans who behave like bots and thus have absolutely no meaningful distinction from them). But we all know that this problem won’t be solved by removing even the largest offender of this problem.

Someone has to be in control of these “user” playlists — either Spotify needs to take charge and remove them, or they need to let the artist have the ability to do that for themselves. That is why we are asking for an Opt-Out feature for user playlists that exceed 1000 followers.

We all know that a user playlist of that size is unlikely to be someone’s personal playlist. It may not be botted, but we are smart enough to know when it is and when it isn’t.

I use a website called Artist.tools to check any playlists I’m added to and to monitor the overall health of my artist data on Spotify. All you have to do is copy the url to any playlist you’re concerned about into the search bar on the main homepage, and it will tell you immediately if a playlist is botted, or suspected to be botted.

It’s free to use, and for larger playlists, the bot assessment is human verified. The man who created it is an ingenious developer named Aaron, and I recommend linking up with him to further your bot-prevention efforts.

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But until those things can be implemented, allow artists to take control of this situation — give us the ability to opt out of large, suspicious user playlists.

I understand that you care about user satisfaction because users are your customers — but artists are your product. Without us, the users have nothing to show up for. So, we have to matter to you, too.

Don’t get me wrong… I love you, Spotify.

You’re the digital stage which beautifully showcases my most cherished work to most of the inhabited world.

There are lots of DSPs out there, but there are a lot of really important reasons why we love your platform most of all.

So, this is not an attack on you. It’s a plea for help because there have been constant attacks on us.

This bot problem, and more specifically, the way you’ve chosen to handle it, is causing a lot of artists to question whether or not we even matter to you. But I choose to believe that we do matter to you. So, now it’s time to show us that.

We understand features take time to implement. Even though this “Opt-Out” feature can’t be rolled out tomorrow, it would mean a lot to us if you could let us know that it’s in the works.

We understand your resources are limited, and that new features take time to develop. But just let us know you have our backs on this one.

Spotify has always been a great disruptor in the music world — and we like that about you. But now we think it’s time that you disrupt the bot farms, rather than penalizing artists for bot attacks that are totally out of our control to stop or prevent.

Thank you for your time and for giving us all a place to share our music with the world. Truly, it is not lost on us how huge that is. But it can’t stop there. We are asking you to please give us an Opt-Out button for large, suspicious user playlists. Help us help ourselves.

Love,

Erinem

(Written On Behalf of Many Concerned Artists)