The billionaire co-founder of Spotify made a rare visit to Australia this week as the company tries to convince the Albanese government that its plans to force streaming services to play more local music could kill the nation’s ability to produce the next Troye Sivan.
Daniel Ek, who upended the global music industry when he co-founded Spotify in 2006 alongside Martin Lorentzon, made a short trip to Australia to meet with the platform’s key partners and music industry bosses, just weeks after he officially relinquished control of the company’s day-to-day operations.
Spotify’s charm offensive included a lunch with music industry bosses on Tuesday, along with meetings with key Australian officials, as it tries to convince them that forcing audio streaming platforms to preference local songs in their algorithms could strangle music exports.
In early 2023, Arts Minister Tony Burke gave an address to the National Press Club, which he used to send a warning shot to Spotify and Apple Music over regulating their algorithms to surface more local music in Australia. He suggested the move could come as part of the government’s arts policy, Revive.
Burke’s office did not respond directly to questions related to the status of the government’s work on the policy. But the Department of the Arts said the policy committed it to ensuring “local music remains visible, discoverable and easily accessible” across platforms.
“Three years on from the launch of Revive, with over 85 per cent of actions delivered, we will soon open consultations to inform the next National Cultural Policy,” a departmental spokesman said.
“This will build on the progress made by Revive, including considering new ways to further improve visibility of Australian music on streaming platforms and increase its reach domestically and overseas.”
Spotify’s New York-based global policy boss, Dustee Jenkins, described the proposal as a “defeatist strategy” and claimed Australian artists get 85 per cent of their revenue from exporting their music.
Jenkins said any effort to regulate Spotify’s recommendation algorithms here would only open the door for other jurisdictions to do the same, which would hurt Australia’s musical exports.
“That [85 per cent] is good, healthy growth. If you go in and you manufacture something different, you’re going to upend the industry,” Jenkins said.
“There is a reason that these are not done around the world, and that reason is because artists want to export in a really healthy way. That’s how you become a global superstar. That’s how you grow your listener base. No [artist] just wants only their neighbourhood, only their city, only their country [listening to their music].
In recent years, Australia has emerged as a policy incubator where regulatory frameworks have inspired iterations around the world. Among the highest-profile of Australia’s world-first frameworks are the news media bargaining code, a policy aimed at forcing big tech firms to pay for news which has inspired similar laws in Canada, and the under-16 social media ban.
Jenkins said that under the status quo, local artists were “earning more than ever” on Spotify. The platform paid out more than $330 million to Australian artists and rights holders last year, with 370 artists now earning more than $100,000 each year from the platform, “double” what that number was in 2017.
But Australian music charts, which are primarily based on how many streams an artist gets, have become flooded with foreign music acts such as British singer-songwriter Olivia Dean, who topped triple j’s Hottest 100 last year.
Even for those Australian artists who do climb the charts, critics of Spotify and its competitors argue that local music does not receive a level playing field.
In an opinion piece last year, Australian music manager John Watson suggested that the rise of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify and other platforms has led population weighting to dominate what music surfaces where.
“Platforms mainly recommend US songs no matter how much Australian music we play. It’s not a level playing field here at home,” he wrote.
For its part, Spotify points to the steps it has taken to boost Australian music on its platform.
Spotify, which last year raked in $60.4 million in Australian revenue, continues to employ an editorial team that curates “over 120 local playlists”. These include the “Turn Up Aus” initiative launched last year, which the company pitched as an effort to highlight local talent.
The platform will also roll out a new feature in the Australian market this week aimed at giving premium subscribers more control over their recommendation algorithms. The feature, called “prompted playlist”, will let subscribers describe what they want to hear by prompting the platform “in their own words”, based on a “mood” or “vibe”.
Jenkins suggested that, in order for Australian music to succeed, the local music industry could also be doing more.
“What we need is that talent pipeline. We need good content coming in through that pipeline, so that when our editorial teams are looking at it, they can say ‘that’s so good, we can put that here’,” she said.
“And that’s very dependent on the content that we’re seeing. I know that there has been some contraction in the music industry in this market, and so that’s something we pay really close attention to as well.”
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John Buckley is a CBD columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
