Spotify has created a new website called ‘Made to Be Found‘ as the latest salvo in its efforts to show musicians how it can help their careers. It follows the launch of its ‘Loud & Clear’ site in March 2021, which offered data and case studies on the money being earned by artists from their Spotify streams.
This time round, the focus is more on the audiences they are building, and specifically on how their music is discovered by those listeners. The ‘Made to Be Found’ launch is backed by a new section in the Spotify for Artists analytics dashboard, where artists and their teams will be able to see how three discovery methods break down across their catalogue.
The three sources are defined as ‘Made by Editors’ (streams from Spotify’s range of curated playlists); ‘Made for You’ (streams from the personalised playlists, autoplay and radio features on the service); and ‘Made by You’ streams from listeners actively searching for an artist or track, or playing music from “fan-made or artist playlists”.
This will be helpful data for artists and their teams, as they work to understand what’s driving their streams, and how the marketing campaigns and other activities they’re running are helping them to grow.
On the new site, Spotify says that “the majority of streams” on its service come from active sessions: the third category, where listeners are actively seeking out music and artists rather than being passively served music by editors or algorithms.
Expect this to spark some discussion outside the realms of music marketing. In the UK, there’s an ongoing debate about whether ‘equitable remuneration‘ (ER) should be introduced in the music streaming market. Pro-ER campaigners are unlikely to push for this model to apply across all music streams, but more likely to call for it to be used for the most ‘radio-like’ streams.
The sight of Spotify breaking out editorial, personalised and active streams at an individual artist level may thus encourage those campaigners to press the company (and its rivals) to break them out at a service-wide level too, as fuel for that debate.
We expect this question to come up both during the music streaming market study officially launched this morning by UK competition regulator the CMA, and in the ‘working groups’ created by the British government to consider whether ER should be introduced for streaming, among other issues.
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