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Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

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Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very worrying. It is like regulatory capture, but not implemented at the request of the company. It was done purely by the EU. By requiring cutting edge and practically non existent technology, it somewhat requires a monopoly by the one company that can do it (YouTube, or do it the best because there is no perfect filter). And the EU will then turn around and fine them for being too big. I believe in well regul…

The problem is less one of regulation vs. not regulating and more the fact that most of the politicians are dinosaurs with little or no understanding of modern technology. They probably don't realise how unreasonable the demands are.

Laws where the government requires some business intermediary to “police” for compliance are the most worrisome to me. The bar for these sorts of regulations should be very high. Unless life or limb is at risk regulatory compliance should be left to the regulators.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#92
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an advantage for Spotify to allow 2 more years of copyright-infringing uploads that they have to clean up later? Is there another plausible reason for Spotify shutting down direct uploads that's unrelated to copyrights?

> Is there another plausible reason for Spotify shutting down direct uploads that's unrelated to copyrights? It's a service very few people use that costs them money to maintain and support. You already need to go through cdbaby and similar services for all other distributions and being just on spotify instead of all of them is not very appealing.

"Very few people" used it because it was a beta service that was only ever available to a small number of artists.

Opening it up to everyone would have transformed the industry. Spotify could absolutely own the small artist space in the same way that Amazon owns the self-publishing space for unsigned authors, but it chooses not to for political reasons.

This has nothing to do with copyright issues. Spotify already has a copyright claim process and the major labels have their own copyright monitoring systems.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosted, federated alternative: funkwhale.audio

Does this pay artists? I can't find any mention of it on their website.

They claim to specialize in copyleft content, so almost certainly not. The cynic in me thinks that in practice it'll be a fancy frontend for everybody's BitTorrent downloads folder... with an archive.org downloader script for some plausible deniability.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#94
post #14

The submitted article doesn't mention it but my guess at connecting the dots is that it's related to EU Article 13's stringent requirement of "upload filters"[0]. Yes, Spotify's direct uploading "gave opportunity for small artists to share their talent" -- but that same mechanism also made it too easy to upload copyright infringing content. Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtu…

With services like DistroKid (from F'd Company creator "Pud") I'm wondering how big of a deal this actually is?

The optics definitely are lousy.

https://distrokid.com

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#95
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might actually turn out for the better. Google is a big target; they can't fly under the radar. As for demolishing small businesses, small businesses aren't an universal, unquestionable good. In this particular case, we need less adtech business in general. It's like dumping toxic waste into rivers - not only lots of small polluters aren't better than few big ones, the desirable thing is just having less polluters…

I literally cannot imagine supporting monopolies/oligopolies over healthy competition. There really is more than just an ocean between America and Europe, the culture is so dramatically different. How can one honestly believe that a Google data monopoly is better for privacy and innovation? It seems to fly in the face of every lesson learned by every monopoly in history.

Although I generally agree with your sentiment, please don't forget that, unlike the US, the EU also has antitrust and anticartel laws with teeth and has applied them in the past against large quasi-monopolists like Microsoft and Google.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#97
post #20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good job, EU! Squelch your citizenry in the interest of the copyright industry. Content filtering is draconian and fundamentally opposed to a free and open society.

It keeps happening with their draconian regulations. After the privacy/data protection bill, I hear that the european market for online advertising imploded trying to meet regulations and Google Ads gobbled up some 30-40% more market share in Europe. It came down to the fact that Google was able to meet the regulations fastest, and achieve informed user consent across a wide userbase dramatically faster than small lo…

> I hear that the european market for online advertising imploded

Good.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#98
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps pressure from record labels? I hope artists can flock to somewhere like Bandcamp, or alternatives.

I worked at Spotify and I am very close with several folks there who worked on this initiative. This is almost certainly the fault of the labels.

Could you elaborate a bit? Do you think it's because of copyright issues, or because labels don't want Spotify to become a popular distributor that publishes exclusively to itself?

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#99
post #39
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an advantage for Spotify to allow 2 more years of copyright-infringing uploads that they have to clean up later? Is there another plausible reason for Spotify shutting down direct uploads that's unrelated to copyrights?

Remember what happened with GPDR. There was also a two year period to adapt. Everyone scrambled to do it in last week, or last few days. there could be plenty of reasons: it didn't bring them expected revenue, that team was allocated something with higher business priority while the feature itself required updates etc.

Part of the reason for the GDPR scramble is that it deferred specifics to each country's data regulator, and some of that guidance was still being issued shortly before the deadline.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#100
post #94
post #14

The submitted article doesn't mention it but my guess at connecting the dots is that it's related to EU Article 13's stringent requirement of "upload filters"[0]. Yes, Spotify's direct uploading "gave opportunity for small artists to share their talent" -- but that same mechanism also made it too easy to upload copyright infringing content. Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtu…

With services like DistroKid (from F'd Company creator "Pud") I'm wondering how big of a deal this actually is? The optics definitely are lousy. https://distrokid.com

100% agree. Distrokid makes it cheap and easy to get unto pretty much all the streaming services. (disclaimer: I am a customer in the musician with no label category)
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