Author | Wang Zhasha Editor | Fan Zhihui
On November 2, Spotify announced that it will launch a new feature "Discovery Mode". With this feature, musicians and record companies can mark their priority works, these marks will be included in Spotify's algorithm system, these works will be more likely to be recommended to specific users.
It is worth noting that the "discovery mode" is a paid promotion function for musicians and record companies. In other words, this function essentially allows copyright holders to spend money to buy and promote their works.
Currently, "Discovery Mode" is still in the experimental stage, and Spotify has not clearly stated when this feature will become a permanent tool for artists and record companies. Lamb, the head of product marketing at Spotify, said the company will first conduct small-scale pilots and make prudent decisions by analyzing data.
Regarding this new feature, many individuals and organizations related to the music industry have expressed opposition to the feature, believing that this approach will undermine the fairness of the algorithm and make the low-level musicians who lack budget less likely to become popular.
As an international music streaming giant, Spotify has been making frequent moves in the advertising business in the past two years. What are the reasons for launching the new feature of "spending money to push songs" this time? Is this feature good or bad for copyright holders?
A more democratic and fair "spending money to push songs" method
According to Spotify's blog, to ensure that artists can use the "discovery mode" at any stage of their careers, this feature does not require any upfront budget. Instead, when artists/record companies choose to use "discovery mode" to recommend songs first, they will by default agree that the songs will be authorized at a lower recording copyright rate in these personalized playbacks. Lamb, head of product marketing at
Spotify, said that such a charging method can eliminate the threshold for the use of this feature and make it more "easy to use, democratic and fair." Therefore, even if musicians have no money, they can still use the "discovery mode" function, because the platform earns the revenue generated after your song is played.
is an experimental feature, "Discovery Mode" will only be used in Spotify's Autoplay (automatically play songs) and Radio (radio) sections. After the
Autoplay option is turned on, whether you have just finished playing the album or the playlist, it will automatically play the songs recommended to you by the algorithm, so that there is always music in your ears.
is similar to Autoplay, Radio can also help you discover new songs in a "foolish way". In Spotify, you can create stations for singles, albums, singers, or playlists, and the system will automatically generate a bunch of similar style songs based on the source created.
Spotify said that the reason why these two sections were first used as "discovery mode" test grounds is because listeners who like to use Autoplay and Radio are very keen to explore new music.
Here we need to introduce Spotify’s other personalized recommendation sections. In addition to Autoplay and Radio, Spotify also has playlists with different themes. The tracks in these playlists will change from time to time, and users can follow their own Likes to find music in different playlists.
Among them, the more famous playlist is Discover Weekly. As the name implies, this playlist is updated once a week, and 30 songs that have not been heard before will be pushed according to the user's listening habits. In addition, there is a very distinctive playlist called Fresh Finds. This playlist captures the preferences of 50,000 music KOLs on the Internet, sorts them by Spotify employees, and finally pushes them to users. Compared with Discover Weekly, the songs on Fresh Finds have been filtered by a group of music experts and are more suitable for users who have a certain pursuit of listening to songs in terms of quality.
It is reported that after accumulating certain experience in the experimental phase, Spotify may apply the "discovery mode" to more sections.
Spotify's wishful thinkingPan: The main contradiction of helping musicians earn money and increasing platform revenue
Spotify is the contradiction between the increasing need of users to listen to good songs and the company’s difficulty in making profits.
According to MBW’s report in May this year, Spotify’s cumulative annual net loss in the past ten years totaled 2.62 billion euros.
’s Q3 financial report announced not long ago showed a loss of 40 million euros ($46 million) in the third quarter, while Spotify’s net loss totaled 456 million euros ($508 million) in the first three quarters of 2020. The previous loss was 530 million euros ($590 million).
As a streaming media giant, Spotify's revenue channel is very single, more than 90% of its revenue comes from the membership fees of subscribers, and the rest is the platform's advertising revenue. In the third quarter of this year, the growth rate of Spotify's paid subscription revenue has further slowed down, combined with multiple quarters, the year-on-year growth rate of paid subscription revenue has been in a downward trend.
advertising revenue is also not optimistic. Although Spotify’s advertising revenue has increased significantly after the impact of the epidemic, the growth rate is still 11% lower than the same period last year.
While making money is difficult, the company's content costs remain high, and the biggest issue is royalties. In the third quarter of this year, Spotify's cost of revenue was 1.486 billion euros, mainly copyright fees, which remained at about 80% of revenue throughout the year. In 2018, analyst Ben Thompson pointed out that Spotify’s advantage is limited by the royalties it pays to record companies, because record companies only allow a broad audience to listen to their music albums after receiving royalties.
In order to control costs, Spotify vigorously expands non-music content represented by podcasts on the one hand, and on the other hand, it strives for lower licensing fees with copyright owners. In August 2017, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment Group signed a 24-month licensing agreement with the Swedish streaming giant. Spotify has not only successfully obtained the copyright of a massive music library, but also won some discounts because of the recognition of its business model by the three major records. According to MBW reports, people familiar with the matter said that the three major records agreed to lower the share ratio from 55% to 52%. Affected by this favorable plan, Spotify's gross profit margin increased from 14% in the same period in 2016 to 21% in 2017.
In addition to controlling costs in terms of copyright, Spotify also proposed a "double-sided market" plan in 2017, which allows record companies and artists to promote music on its platform. In 2019, Spotify launched a paid promotion service "Marquee" with the slogan "Brand New Music For You". Rolling Stone said that every time a user clicks on a pop-up advertisement, the label pays 55 cents. Spotify recommends that record companies or musicians pay at least $5,000, which is expected to bring more than 9,000 potential listeners to musicians within seven days.
The "discovery mode" launched this time is also an extension of the "double-sided market" plan. Compared with the previous "Brand New Music For You", the "Discovery Mode" does not require prepayment. On the one hand, it is indeed more friendly to musicians; on the other hand, it also means that this feature has a wider range of charges—— Not only earning the promotion budget of the rich, but also the money of the poor musicians.
Although Spotify has always claimed that it is for more musicians' songs to be heard, it is no wonder that some people questioned that this paid promotion is very similar to "Payola" which was banned by US legislation in the 1960s.
Spotify, which helps users discover musicians, can help musicians find success?
Among the many music streaming services, Spotify's personalized recommendation mechanism has always been highly praised. In October of this year, Spotify was awarded a US patent for its research based on user personality. According to data provided by Spotify itself, on average, the platform will help 320 million monthly active users find 16 billion musicians who have never heard of the platform before.
z0The software engineer of zSpotify once wrote an article briefly introducing the three operating models of the company's personalized recommendation mechanism.is first of all collaborative filtering, the main working mechanism is to analyze your user behavior and other people's user behavior. For example, if two people have their favorite songs: one likes P, Q, R, and S, and the other likes Q, R, S, and T, the collaborative filtering system will think: "Of the four songs you two like There are three songs that are the same, so you are likely to be users with similar tastes. Therefore, there is a high probability that you will like the music content that the other party likes but has not listened to." After that, the system will recommend song P to the first user and song T to the second user. The second model of
is called natural language processing. Simply put, it is to crawl all kinds of music information on the Internet, and aggregate various keywords related to each artist and song. Each keyword has its own weight. The higher the weight, the more the keyword can describe it. Artists or this song. Finally, natural language processing will process these keywords and weights into vector patterns, and then judge the similarity between music. The last model of
is called the original audio model. This model can improve the accuracy of the entire recommendation model. More importantly, for a new song, the system cannot capture enough information for collaborative filtering or natural language processing, and the melody trend of the song can be analyzed easily. Analyze the style of this song and which works may be similar.
In summary, the recommendation mechanism is Spotify's strong point. In the face of this niche area, Spotify said that they are still improving the algorithm.
For the "discovery mode" in the closed beta, Spotify painted a good blueprint for musicians and record companies. Spotify said that the goal of this feature is to allow artists and record companies to obtain a positive rate of return on investment. If there is no benefit, artists and record companies can close at any time.
It is worth noting that this seemingly promoted service does not guarantee the promotion effect. Musicians and record companies do not have much room for new functions. If a song marked by a musician does not perform well after being recommended, it will be quickly withdrawn. Of course, Spotify’s head of product marketing, Charleton Lamb, said that Spotify plans to "calibrate this promotion service to ensure that the widest range of artists and record companies can succeed."
In the end, although the "discovery mode" does not charge in advance, it still encountered some doubts.
In fact, Spotify has been carrying the infamy of worsening the living environment of the bottom musicians. Just last month, the Music Association of Music Association issued a public letter to Spotify, requesting higher royalty rates from streaming media broadcasts, and accusing Spotify of deliberately guiding record companies and brokerage companies to increase their exposure to songs. Platform pays.
After the launch of "Discovery Mode", American director David Lowery said on his personal social platform that Spotify's new feature is "Payola". In the music industry, this term refers to the bribery of record companies in order to play records on commercial radio stations. After accepting the bribes, the radio station will not specifically disclose the money transactions behind these songs. In the 1960s, "Payola" was banned by American legislation.
At present, because the "discovery mode" adopts a paid participation method with almost zero threshold, and the amount of payment and more recommendation rules have not been announced, it is too early to say that it may cause unfairness. However, if the percentage of the platform is too high and the bottom musicians are reluctant to pay, then the large record companies with strong financial resources are more likely to monopolize the promotion channels within the platform through the function of "discovery mode".
After all, the success of most people is true prosperity. Let every musician get the same opportunity to recommend instead of becoming a tool to exacerbate inequality in the music industry. This is something that all music platforms need to think about.
Introductory topic
Topic content: Do you think that paid song push functions like "discovery mode" will help musicians to make publicity, or will it become a tool to exacerbate inequality in the music industry?
Welcome to leave a message in the comment area to share your views and opinions. We will comment from all the comments in the article push published this weekIn, 2 readers are selected according to the best, and each of them will give a copy of the good stuff selected by First Sound. The list of winners will be announced in the "Herald Weekly" column every Sunday, please stay tuned.
Typesetting | An Lin
This article is the original manuscript of Music First Sound. For reprinting and business cooperation, please contact us.
