Context Is King

With more and more users, streaming services have access to huge amounts of data, increasing the predictive power of their recommendations. But while streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history, the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all. Streaming is so heavily weighted in favor of the most popular tracks because that’s how the model is designed to work: Nearly everyone using the service is meant to use it nearly the same way.

Imagine the opposite—countless different individuals asking to stream countless different albums from different eras, all at the same moment. It’s easy to picture, because this is the image of streaming services that we are sold. But the reality is something else again.

Consider the dominant streaming video service, Netflix, which now has more subscribers than all cable providers combined. While Netflix has grown more popular, it has diminished its content to the point where it recently hosted only 25 movies made before 1950, as Zach Schonfeld pointed out in Newsweek. “It’s the sort of classics selection you’d expect to find in a decrepit video store in 1993,” Schonfeld wrote, “not on a leading entertainment platform that serves some 100 million global subscribers.”

The streaming music catalog is currently in a much better state. But it could only be a matter of time until these companies lose interest in the 90 percent of music that doesn’t return even 1 percent of their gross. It seems likely that they will eventually jettison these less-played tracks for different content—just look at Netflix.

Or look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz. For that matter, performers are kind of important to rock, too! Not to mention songwriters, producers, engineers, publishers, record labels—almost all the labor that goes into making recordings is erased from the databases used by the major streaming services.

Why hide all that information, all that context to each recording? Digital services are so good at handling massive amounts of data—just think how much Spotify knows about each of us. And yet they can’t bring themselves to specify which of the radically different Miles Davis Quintets played on which album—is it the one with John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, or the one with Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams?

One reason for this glaring omission of musical data may be a reluctance to acknowledge all the copyright holders actually connected to the recordings they stream. In fact, this is the basis of the lawsuits Spotify has faced (and is facing) from music publishers, including a $1.6 billion filing from Wixen Music this December.

Incredibly, one of Spotify’s existing defenses against such accusations of unpaid royalties has been a lack of information. “Spotify has acknowledged lapses in obtaining mechanical rights due to the difficulty of identifying and locating the co-authors of each of the tens of millions of copyrighted musical works throughout its streaming platform,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Eriq Gardner explained last fall. How the same company building a reputation as the best and biggest at handling music data can claim that they can’t cope with all that music data strains credibility—especially if, as Gardner also reported, their fallback legal argument may be that they don’t owe songwriters any royalties anyway.

But there seems to be another, deeper motive for streaming companies to eliminate existing context for recordings: They want to replace it with their own. The rise of playlists, recently analyzed in a superb piece written for The Baffler by Liz Pelly, makes the platform itself the primary context for any music on it.

Information is so lacking for the individual tracks on playlists, some of the most listened to are by musicians who don’t even exist. (And who therefore won’t be asking for royalties, or suing when they don’t arrive.) These so-called “fake artists”—in reality, commissioned works owned by Spotify—eliminate the problem of researching even the bare bones of identifying data, like artist and title.

When Bill Gates proclaimed in 1996 that, on the internet, “Content Is King,” he didn’t foresee that content creators would be bypassed by the information platforms to come. Indeed the same Gates article goes on to declare, in a much less quoted passage, that, “For the internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work.” At the time, Gates predicted that micropayments would eventually solve the practical problem of how to link online users and creators financially. We have that technology now—but we also have massively capitalized platforms monopolizing access to content, with no interest in encouraging those micropayments.

But Bill Gates was right all along—content is king—and what’s more, content belongs to its creators. It’s only the deliberate erasure of context that removes the control we have over our work. And context doesn’t disappear on its own. It’s always there for us to declare, maintain, and restore if removed.

So make noise about context, because when you do, you are valuing the labor that goes into making music. Tell us who played on that track, who wrote it, who produced it, who put it out. Discogs has become a great repository of information like this for existing records. And Bandcamp makes room for all this info in a streaming platform, no less. Music publications and blogs have always been an excellent source for contextual information too.

Can simply sharing information with one another combat the power of companies like Spotify and Apple? I believe it can, and does. There’s no better evidence, perhaps, than the forces that continually rally against it.