Spotify has had a legal way for people to release music podcasts since October with its ‘shows with music’ format, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of the woods yet with unlicensed music podcasts on its service.
Variety published an investigation in late December of the still-thriving community of people uploading bootleg tracks to Spotify as podcasts, found “using simple keywords and terms like ‘chopped and screwed,’ ‘slowed and reverbed,’ ‘remix,’ and ‘mashup’ in Spotify’s search bar”. Spotify quickly promised that it is “continuing to invest heavily in refining those processes and improving methods of detection and removal, and reducing the impact of this unacceptable activity on legitimate creators, rights holders and our users”.
According to Engadget, several of the examples identified by Variety have already been taken down by the service.
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