Tag: Artists

If you got one of these emails from Spotify, you might be interested

Spotify failed to consult any of the people who drive fans to the data abattoir: the musicians, artists, podcasters and authors.

Spotify has quietly tightened the screws on AI this summer—while simultaneously clarifying how it uses your data to power its own machine‑learning features. For artists, rightsholders, developers, and policy folks, the combination matters: Spotify is making it harder for outsiders to train models on Spotify data, even as it codifies its own first‑party uses like AI DJ and personalized playlists.

Spotify is drawing a bright line: no training models on Spotify; yes to Spotify training its own. If you’re an artist or developer, that means stronger contractual leverage against third‑party scrapers—but also a need to sharpen your own data‑governance and licensing posture. Expect other platforms in music and podcasting to follow suit—and for regulators to ask tougher questions about how platform ML features are audited, licensed, and accounted for.

Below is a plain‑English (hopefully) breakdown of what changed, what’s new or newly explicit, and the practical implications for different stakeholders.

Explicit ban on using Spotify to train AI models (third parties). 

Spotify’s User Guidelines now flatly prohibit “crawling” or “scraping” the service and, crucially, “using any part of the Services or Content to train a machine learning or AI model.” That’s a categorical no for bots and bulk data slurps. The Developer Policy mirrors this: apps using the Web API may not “use the Spotify Platform or any Spotify Content to train a machine learning or AI model.” In short: if your product ingests Spotify data, you’re in violation of the rules and risk enforcement and access revocation.

Spotify’s own AI/ML uses are clearer—and broad. 

The Privacy Policy (effective August 27, 2025) spells out that Spotify uses personal data to “develop and train” algorithmic and machine‑learning models to improve recommendations, build AI features (like AI DJ and AI playlists), and enforce rules. That legal basis is framed largely as Spotify’s “legitimate interests.” Translation: your usage, voice, and other data can feed Spotify’s own models.

The user content license is very broad. 

If you post “User Content” (messages, playlist titles, descriptions, images, comments, etc.), you grant Spotify a worldwide, sublicensable, transferable, royalty‑free, irrevocable license to reproduce, modify, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display that content in any medium. That’s standard platform drafting these days, but the scope—including derivative works—has AI‑era consequences for anything you upload to or create within Spotify’s ecosystem (e.g., playlist titles, cover images, comments).

Anti‑manipulation and anti‑automation rules are baked in. 

The User Guidelines and Developer Policy double down on bans against bots, artificial streaming, and traffic manipulation. If you’re building tools that touch the Spotify graph, treat “no automated collection, no metric‑gaming, no derived profiling” as table stakes—or risk enforcement, up to termination of access.

Data‑sharing signals to rightsholders continue. 

Spotify says it can provide pseudonymized listening data to rightsholders under existing deals. That’s not new, but in the ML context it underscores why parallel data flows to third parties are tightly controlled: Spotify wants to be the gateway for data, not the faucet you can plumb yourself.

What this means by role:

• Artists & labels: The AI‑training ban gives you a clear contractual hook against services that scrape Spotify to build recommenders, clones, or vocal/style models. Document violations (timestamps, IPs, payloads) and send notices citing the User Guidelines and Developer Policy. Meanwhile, assume your own usage and voice interactions can be used to improve Spotify’s models—something to consider for privacy reviews and internal policies.

• Publishers and collecting societies: The combination of “no third‑party training” + “first‑party ML training” is a policy trend to watch across platforms. It raises familiar questions about derivative data, model outputs, and whether platform machine learning features create new accounting categories—or require new audit rights—in future licenses.

• Policymakers: Read this as another brick in the “closed data/open model risk” wall. Platforms restrict external extraction while expanding internal model claims. That asymmetry will shape future debates over data‑access mandates, competition remedies, and model‑audit rights—especially where platform ML features may substitute for third‑party discovery tools.

Practical to‑dos

1) For rights owners: Add explicit “no platform‑sourced training” language in your vendor, distributor, or analytics contracts. Track and log known scrapers and third‑party tools that might be training off Spotify. Consider notice letters that cite the specific clauses.

2) For privacy and legal teams: Update DPIAs and data maps. Spotify’s Privacy Policy identifies “User Data,” “Usage Data,” “Voice Data,” “Message Data,” and more as inputs for ML features under legitimate interest. If you rely on Spotify data for compliance reports, make sure you’re only using permitted, properly aggregated outputs—not raw exports.

3) For users: I will be posting a guideline to how to clawback your data. I may not hit everything so always open to suggestions about whatever else that others spot.

Spotify’s terms give it very broad rights to collect, combine, and use your data (listening history, device/ads data, voice features, third-party signals) for personalization, ads, and product R&D. They also take a broad license to user content you upload (e.g., playlist art). 

Key cites

• User Guidelines: prohibition on scraping and on “using any part of the Services or Content to train a machine learning or AI model.”

• Developer Policy (effective May 15, 2025): “Do not use the Spotify Platform or any Spotify Content to train a machine learning or AI model…” Also bans analyzing Spotify content to create new/derived listenership metrics or user profiles for ad targeting.

• Privacy Policy (effective Aug. 27, 2025): Spotify uses personal data to “develop and train” ML models for recommendations, AI DJ/AI playlists, and rule‑enforcement, primarily under “legitimate interests.”

• Terms & Conditions of Use: very broad license to Spotify for any “User Content” you post, including the right to “create derivative works” and to use content by any means and media worldwide, irrevocably.

[A version of this post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy]

by thetrichordist

5 Seriously Dumb Myths About Copyright the Media Should Stop Repeating | John Degen @ Medium

Please read John Degen’s 5 Seriously Dumb Myths About Copyright the Media Should Stop Repeating at the link below.

There you have it. I hope this quick list has helped my friends and colleagues in the media who may be hurrying to file a story on World Book and Copyright Day. Here’s a final, simple, rule of thumb for writing about copyright.

If you want to understand how a working artist feels about copyright, talk to an actual working artist.

The last time I checked, ivory-tower legal-theory departments and digital-utopian advocacy groups were not the best places to look for actual working artists.

READ THE FULL POST AT MEDIUM:
https://medium.com/@jkdegen/5-seriously-dumb-myths-about-copyright-the-media-should-stop-repeating-a92e934f12a4

by Trichordist Editor

Copyright Critics Don’t Quite Get Artists | The Illusion Of More

A must read from David Newhoff for all creators with many points, well made.

Further, if it is true that a copyright-free future could shrink the pool of producers to those already financially secure (as predicted above), this suggests that all of the non-remunerative benefits of copyright might be of even greater value to those authors still willing and able to produce. And in the absence of those rights, we could easily see a reduction not only in the number of producers, but also in the number of works produced by that elite few. In a practical example, imagine the trustafarian artist working in the most altruistic manner, producing wonderful works solely to be experienced; he doesn’t care about money, but he does have to accept that McDonald’s can use his work to sell hamburgers, which betrays everything he is expressing. It is not farfetched to imagine the artist in this example will withhold works from public view, even if he continues to produce for his own pleasure.

READ THE WHOLE POST AT:
http://illusionofmore.com/copyright-critics-dont-get-artists/

by Trichordist Editor

Artists Will Receive Nothing from the $3 Billion Beats Acquisition, Sources Say…| DMN

The three major labels secured an equity share in Beats Music as part of their licensing agreements with the service. But according to multiple sources close to those negotiations and Beats’ subsequent sale, artists on those labels will receiving nothing at all from the roughly $3 billion acquisition by Apple.

The reason is that acquisition earnings aren’t tied to actual sales or streams, and therefore are not accounted at all to label artists. “They will get nothing,” one industry attorney flatly told Digital Music News, while insisting on anonymity.

READ THE FULL POST AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/06/09/artists-will-receive-nothing-3-billion-beats-acquisition-sources-say

by Trichordist Editor

The “Bad Romance” of Musicians and Silicon Valley : Happy Valentines Day

You’ve heard this story before, or actually – you’ve seen the movie. This is like a John Hughes film the 80s. You know the ones about High School Romance. The plot lines from these movies remind us a lot of the bad romance between Silicon Valley and Musicians over the last decade or so.

You’ve heard this one before…Before the internet musicians had a largely dysfunctional but not entirely bad relationship with record labels, like the self obsessed jock. Labels would wine and dine artists, buy them gifts, lure them back to the fancy label HQ and fawn all over them. This love affair would usually continue through the making of the record and up and until the album was released. After that, the honeymoon period would be over and disagreements over money and creative issues would start to surface. Eventually, artists would become increasingly dissatisfied with their partner and the dirty laundry would become public. Labels would be accused of taking the artist for granted, not giving them enough attention and be unresponsive to their needs.

Then one day, the Silicon Valley drives up the school in a shiny new Ferrari convertible, music blasting, well dressed and charming. Silicon Valley says all the right things to artists, “labels are bad news, they don’t appreciate you.” Artists are wooed by the possibilities of their wind blowing in the air in the passenger seat of the Ferrari on their way to a better future. Silicon Valley tells the artists that not only do they not need the labels, but Silicon Valley will empower the artist to be truly independent. The artist, enamored with this world of possibility and opportunity joins hand in hand with Silicon Valley. And all seems well, for a while…

Over time the artist seems to notice that things are not really getting better. Silicon Valley becomes less available to the artist and less responsive than the label. Making maters worse, Silicon Valley insists the artists path to freedom is self reliance, and Silicon Valley refuses to support the artist unless the artist is willing to do more work from themselves.

The artist starts to reflect on the relationship with the label. The label paid for dinners, bought them gifts, and offered support. Silicon Valley made a lot of promises but never actually delivered. Silicon Valley had become more demanding, and refuses to communicate with the artist in any way other than barking orders and suggesting that the artist use their primary asset to make money on their own, unless they want to give up their new found freedom.

As the plot develops we see that Silicon Valley’s wealth has been earned by going from town to town and helping artists join the worlds oldest profession for “personal empowerment.” Of course, Silicon Valley connects the artists to customers and controls the flow of revenue to the artist. If the artist protests, Silicon Valley gets very angry and berates and bullies the artists with insults and threats of poverty.

The artist reflects on what Silicon Valley “freedom” really is and decides to speak up and speak out to help other artists break free of the exploitation they have experienced. As the Prom approaches the label and the artist make fleeting eye contact passing in the hallway. In the end the artist, having had the experience of being with both the label and Silicon Valley arrives at the prom empowered, with other artists, and hopeful for a better future.

by trichordist

DMN : 7 Reasons Why Artists Should Skip a BitTorrent ‘Media Partnership’

Worth repeating here from Digital Music News by Helienne Lindvall.

Lately, BitTorrent, Inc. has made a concerted effort to appear “legit”, courting both artists and their managers.  It’s even managed to become a “tech partner” of the UK Music Managers Forum.  But is partnering with BitTorrent – and its uTorrent client – really a good idea for artists?

READ THE FULL POST HERE AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/20130529bittorrentjustsaynoearbud

by Trichordist Editor

Enemies of Artists Organize on Internet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/27/organising-against-enemies-internet-freedom

Once again the guardian misses the not-so-subtlety of the debate. It’s not Governments and large corporations on one side of the “freedom of the internet” debate and individuals on the other. This is a completely outdated narrative.

The freedom of the internet debate has been totally co-opted. Google and other giant tech companies would have you believe they are fighting for your “freedom” when it’s actually their freedom to exploit us. Further they want to be beyond government control. Recently in The Guardian  Sergey Brin was quoted as saying: “If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great”.

Personally we’d rather have a democratically controlled elected government regulating the internet, rather than a company like google which isn’t even accountable to it’s own shareholders. (see latest stock split).

Further Google, Facebook and others web 2.0 companies are all built on an “architecture of exploitation”. Or as Stephen Colbert smartly noted in his interview with Lawrence Lessig:

Colbert: Well let’s see (laughing)…so the hybrid economy is where everybody else does the work and Flickr makes all the money?

Wake up people.

Trichordist Editorial.

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[ THE 101 ] [NEW BOSS / OLD BOSS ] [ SPOTIFY ] [GROOVESHARK ] [ LARRY LESSIG ]
[ JOHN PERRY BARLOW ] [ HUMAN RIGHTS OF ARTISTS ] [ INFRINGEMENT IS THEFT ]
[ THE SKY IS RISING : MAGIC BEAVER EDITION ] [SF GATE BLUNDERS PIRACY FACTS ]
[ WHY ARENT MORE MUSICIANS WORKING ] [ ARTISTS FOR AN ETHICAL INTERNET ]

by trichordist