Spotify suspensions, Kotlin and more – freelancers meet up 5th February 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 5th of February, eleven freelancers met in the Lord Nelson pub to talk all things tech and self employment.
Welcome to Joan, who came along for the first time.
This is some of what we talked about:
- Insolvency, an unwelcome mess
- The Brighton AI talk by Anil Seth was very good
- Spotify suspending accounts due to dodgy streamers
- Use Deezer not Spotify
- The news out of America
- Dealing with Brighton council
- WordPress Advanced Custom Fields blocks
- The annoyance of finding a bug in your own recent code
- Learning Kotlin?
- Hypermobility
- i360 sold!
- Council finances
- Structuring other people’s code more formally to help find bugs
Spotify suspensions
If you’re trying to get your music off the ground, it makes sense to have at least some of it on all the streaming services. They pay very, very little, but you need exposure with the goal of getting people to buy your music somewhere more profitable to you.
One of our members has hit a problem with this. His son’s band had their album on Spotify, then it was targeted by people streaming their own music for money. This is a worry for anyone trying to get their music career off the ground, whether on the side of other work or as their full time gig.
This is a problem on any platform that pays out based on attention. X has a problem with some users trying to fake attention on their posts with bots, as X will pay out if you get lots of views on their service. Spotify has a problem with people uploading music, often AI or procedurally generated, then using a network of bots to stream these tracks in order to get a payout on the music. The more plays, the more they get. Even if it’s very little money per stream, if you can get enough streams then it adds up.
Now, if the people doing this only play their own music then they’re easy to spot. Spotify (or whatever service) can find and disable the accounts. So the people running the bot accounts are smarter than that. They target both their own music and those of others. A spread of popular musicians like Charlie XCX, The Weeknd and Billie Eilish? That makes sense as it makes the bots look more like ordinary listeners. But as a bot operator, you can’t have your network listen to just popular artists and switch to obscure ones that are there just to make money, that makes it too easy to spot the dodgy “artists.” So, the bots listen to other obscure artists too.
So what’s the problem? Some bands uploading their first music gets some extra streams, maybe enough to get some money out of it. The problem is the platform lumps all of these starting out artists together. They don’t try to assess whether the obscure music is made by code, uploaded samples stitched together, or the results of hundreds of hours of effort and pooled money for studio time. Spotify makes a lot of money from serving up other people’s music, but they don’t really care what it is. Rather than spend time investigating what music is from legitimate artists and what is from people who are trying to rip them off they just ban all of the obscure accounts. If you’re a legitimate artist trying to get off the ground? Tough. You’re banned too.
Being a modern, billion dollar organisation Spotify doesn’t offer any way to talk to a person to appeal. All contact goes to an automated bot and it’s impossible to get anywhere, ironically they use bots to not help people, just like scammers are using bots to rip them off.
For my friend that means their son’s album is gone from Spotify. Does it block any future work from the same band? Currently unknown. Does this mean the band will need to change name to come back? Currently unknown. If they do manage to get back on, will this happen again as they’ll be used by bot networks trying to cover their new activity? Who knows.
How is a musician supposed to get started now? Fundamentally, Spotify doesn’t care. They’ve captured a large share of the music streaming market and are doing very well from it – their CEO made more than Taylor Swift last year – and unfortunately it seems they’re short term thinkers and don’t care about up and comers. They won’t until it affects their bottom line.
As the person involved in the sharp end of this said: “Use Deezer, not Spotify.”