> Does the contract say anywhere that Spotify would never provide their own generated music to users of their platform?
> If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
Then why does Spotify refuse to talk about it? It's clearly outside of the spirit of the deal they are striking with artists generally.
Ultimately, they will get away with it because of just the same quasi-justification you're offering: Oh we're not screwing any of them individually, we are screwing them all at once.
Congratulations I guess, your argument is on the winning
side!
But certainly Congress, the UK parliament, EU parliament, Swedish parliament etc. should be looking at this through the lens of regulation and competition law. And for once I hope the record labels -- big and small, because so many of them are small -- sue.
I see you toned down the "defrauded" rhetoric to a much more ambiguous "yeah, it was against the spirit of the deal".
I am always in favor of proper regulation. If the EU sees this as abusive and detrimental to competition, they should definitely put restrictions on platforms offering their own content. I wonder if this would extend to, say, supermarkets offering products under their own brands. It is important that regulations don't harm the consumers.
As for record labels suing... Well, they will have this problem which is proving that any fraud took place. Unless the numbers were rigged (and no users actually streamed the slop, and it was actually fraud), I fail to see how they would win anything. What would be the allegation? That users are listening to bad music?
> I see you toned down the "defrauded" rhetoric to a much more ambiguous "yeah, it was against the spirit of the deal".
I didn't, particularly. It's just another angle on it.
I do think "defrauded" has both legal and moral dimensions, don't you? This is obviously abject shitty treatment or they wouldn't have been secretive about it.
I'm not convinced this isn't both dimensions, though -- not clear who is being defrauded but both the labels and the musicians unions should do their best to establish whether it could be them.
Spotify have crossed a pretty obvious line here. Weird that you appear to think it's, like, no harm no foul if the customers don't notice. Fast food service logic.
There is already quite extensive legal precedent and practice about supermarket own-brand stuff; fifty years of it, with supermarkets retaining teams of lawyers, operating proper clean-room reverse-engineering processes, etc. It's well-trodden legal territory. Supermarkets work right up to the line. But it's no secret that they do, and brands sometimes push back against own-brand deceptions. Mostly supermarkets threaten each other over their own, own-brand stuff. Caterpillar cakes, vodkas etc.
If Spotify were honest that they were adding "own brand" music into the mix, then this would be a different discussion.
(Amazon are required in the UK and EU to identify which are their own brands, and they mostly comply)
> I would bet that it would make zero difference in the amount of plays those tracks got.
Well given that they are inserted into generated playlists and offered up as "similar" playlist suggestions instead of tracks by authentic artists, probably not.
For this to really be resolved they would have to stop putting these tracks in those lists or suggestions panels.
The fact that they evidently list the same track under completely different titles suggests that they are not going to act ethically here.
> If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
Then why does Spotify refuse to talk about it? It's clearly outside of the spirit of the deal they are striking with artists generally.
Ultimately, they will get away with it because of just the same quasi-justification you're offering: Oh we're not screwing any of them individually, we are screwing them all at once.
Congratulations I guess, your argument is on the winning side!
But certainly Congress, the UK parliament, EU parliament, Swedish parliament etc. should be looking at this through the lens of regulation and competition law. And for once I hope the record labels -- big and small, because so many of them are small -- sue.