Summary:
With the rise of generative music, some listeners will increasingly value “authentic” music experiences with human artists who perform live shows within their communities. Spotify must position itself as the streaming platform that helps listeners discover these local and touring artists and should start recommending relevant live music events at local venues. Spotify researchers have recently begun exploring the topic of locally-focused music recommendation but it is unclear if these efforts will make it to production.
The Problem: Generative Music Will Crowd Out Authentic Music by Human Artists
Having recently attended the 2024 International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference in San Francisco, I was surprised by two things: the relatively small presence of researchers from the major music streaming/recommendation services (e.g., Spotify, SiriusXM/Pandora, YouTube Music, Amazon Music) and the almost singular focus on generative music in terms of tutorials, papers, sponsorships, academic research, and keynote talks.
Pushing aside the legal and ethical concerns, the demos from companies like Suno, Refusion, Music.ai were stunning in terms of the quality of the musical audio that their generative systems were able to produce with minimal input from the non-expert human users. This will undoubtedly create a flood of music content that opportunistic people (or companies) will upload to Spotify in hopes of becoming famous and/or rich off of this easy-to-create music.
Luckily, music is only partially an acoustic phenomenon. “Authentic music” is also grounded in a socio-cultural context. True artists engage in dialog with their listeners and society at large. Artists develop authentic music by engaging with their community in terms of cultural heritage, musical traditions, current social/political/technological/economic issues, and personal experiences.
While there are many paths to becoming a successful artist in the age of global technologies, one traditional path involves playing live shows and developing an audience over a number of years. This lets artists refine their sound through experimentation and audience feedback. For the listener, this relationship can create a sense of belonging through the community of fans, and going to live shows can bring immense personal enjoyment.
This “live music” path for authentic human musicians is threatened by generative music because mass-produced generative music can “crowd out” human-created music. It will be incumbent for “music-first” streaming services like Spotify to purposely expose human-created music through recommendation. If Spotify does not differentiate itself by supporting authentic human musicians, it risks becoming just another inauthentic generative music service.
Initial Research: Surfacing Local Artists Improves Recommendation
Spotify researchers Sam Way, Dominika Mazur, Rebecca Kupferman, Megan Walsh, Angelina Tizé, and Ben Lacker recently published a paper entitled “Exploring Local Music’s Place in Global Streaming” [Websci ‘24]. (I recently told Sam and Ben that this was the best academic paper that I have read in the past 15+ years!!!)
In their paper, the authors found that:
- local recommendations offer significant improvement over non-local baselines
- younger listeners tended to have a somewhat higher propensity for local music
- listeners had significant, sustained interactions with recommended local artists weeks after they were no longer being surfaced on the Spotify home screen
At the end of the paper, the authors stated that “local recommendations and offline context generally can and should be an important part of online content platforms’ strategies moving forward.” They concluded that “we welcome continued study in the pursuit of responsibility localized recommendations and hope that they may serve to strengthen local communities.” Using music recommendation to strengthen local music communities is the core of my own research agenda.
The Pitch: Spotify Should Invest in (Human) Musicians
Spotify should support, protect, and promote active local and touring musicians. One way to do this is to help listeners discover both artists who live and/or perform in the listeners’ community. This will help listeners develop a longer-term and meaningful relationship with these active human artists. Listeners will continue to use Spotify to listen to local favorites as well as discover artists who they can go see perform live in their community.
Since 2010, I have worked on several projects focusing on local music recommendation. Two of them, MegsRadio.fm (personalized radio) and Localify.org (recommender system), have been launched as complete apps and were sponsored by multiple National Science Foundation grants. Through these efforts, I have gained valuable experience (technical knowledge, user studies, academic papers, and research talks) which would be useful for industry-based collaboration with Spotify.
While we found initial success in terms of positive user tests, neither app was able to achieve widespread adoption since we operate them as academic projects with limited resources in terms of marketing budget, human resources, and infrastructure limitations. It turns out that simply “building it” has not been enough for us to have a successful app. I strongly believe in the mission of supporting local music communities but I now understand that the best way to do this is to encourage Spotify, as a music-first streaming platform, to further explore the benefits of local music artist and event recommendation.