Playlisting service scams and vanity metrics

In this series, we’re looking into various tech platforms for artists, within the context of how artist friendly they are. Today, we’re examining behavior that should cue you in that a platform is not being artist-friendly: vanity metrics, and how they apply to the various playlisting service scams on Spotify.

A vanity metric is any number that appeals to your vanity, without being truly meaningful in any real-world way. “Monthly listener count” on Spotify is one example. Others might include “followers”, “likes”, “watches”, etc.

At this point, I’m comfortable calling vanity metrics exactly what they are: emotional manipulation. Here’s why.

Vanity metrics on Spotify

A metric like Spotify’s “Monthly listener count” is incredibly vague. We don’t know if the monthly listener count number includes only completed streams that you got paid for, or if fans who listened to your song for 5 seconds, hated it, and then moved on are also included in this number. That’s because the platform, Spotify in this case, has chosen to hide that information.

You can go ahead and search the Spotify support docs. When it comes to defining artist royalty payouts, their terms are hyper-specific and detailed. Yet, when it comes to defining what exactly monthly listener count is, their terms get much more opaque.

How vanity metrics affect artists

Artists also don’t get very much as their monthly listener count increases:

Remember, direct payouts from music streaming are (on average, at time of writing) about $0.003 per stream, max. And, a quickly skipped song doesn’t count as a paid-out stream.

So, it would take a whole lot of monthly listeners to add up to any kind of sustainable revenue. The general rule of thumb is every 1 million streams of a song equals about $3,000-$5,000 before-tax dollars. Keep in mind, 90% of artists will never reach 1 million streams on any of their songs, across their entire lifetime career in music.

How vanity metrics affect our musical culture

And, even though we're talking revenue numbers in this example, it's not actually really about the money at all. Streaming services surfacing and rewarding only the world's most popular music isn't great for art in general.  If smaller independent artists can't make a living too, it leads to a gradual homogenization and creative “flattening” of our musical culture over time. That’s not good for anyone.

How many of the endless options Netflix currently presents you with are interesting things that you actually want to see? Getting tired of the endless Marvel and Star Wars spinoffs yet?

Funding and surfacing high quality artwork at all levels of the ecosystem, for both the big pop stars and the independents, is a crucial part of maintaining a diverse, interesting creative culture we can all enjoy.

Vanity metrics and enshittification

In return for providing such vague, emotionally loaded, non-scientific vanity metrics, the platform can then use all of your streaming numbers in the aggregate to justify ever-increasing public valuations for their shareholders, in order to goose their stock price. Great deal for them!

Don’t forget: Spotify has never once been a profitable company, in any meaningful sense, from the sales of their actual products (they had about a 1% margin in the last quarter of 2023). Big red flag for company of this size.

In “traditional” capitalism, when it’s working properly, a stock price should be closely tied to the cash position, profitability, and the fundamentals of the underlying business. Not smoke and mirrors, hype, and fancy accounting games.

That’s not the case with Spotify. It’s more like a pump-and-dump, just spread out over such a long period of time (20 years over the lifetime of the company) that it’s not obvious as such.

Maybe let’s call that a “pump-and-slow-dump”. Or maybe just “don't believe the tech hype”.

When you do business in this way, it makes it super hard to tell the difference between a legit scam and your garden variety, well-intentioned yet failed corporation. Regulators in the US are having a hard time controlling this right now.

All of this means that the higher your monthly listener count goes on Spotify, the more Daniel Ek’s CEO stock options increase in value. That makes a single person billions, while massive groups of smaller artists continue to make fractions of pennies in exchange for providing essential services to his platform.

I wouldn't call this a particularly equitable, artist-friendly system, and it’s a big problem. We’ll get into solving this problem later on during this series.

Evaluating vanity metrics

For now, just remember: all analytics are not created equal. Just because you see some number displayed on an app doesn’t make that number meaningful or relevant.

Vanity metrics are a tool any platform can use to obscure the true value of its service to the end user. Ignore them.

They’re also another big red flag to watch out for when evaluating the health of a platform in general. The more vanity metrics you see on a given platform, the more your hackles should go up.

As any large online platform gradually proceeds down the steps to enshittification, they'll start displaying more and more of these, in an attempt to increase emotional purchasing of their increasingly valueless product.

Watch out for “playlisting service” scams

Keep all of this in mind if you’re ever considering paying for one of the many shady “playlisting” services out there. These are the services that offer to get you placement on the various official Spotify playlists (or other playlists) in exchange for money.

If “monthly listener count” is a vanity metric that doesn’t actually mean anything, you certainly shouldn’t be paying someone money to boost it.

What are you really getting for the money that you pay a playlisting service? Well, a dopamine rush when you see your monthly listener count go up for a month or two, and that might be about it.

Don’t forget, monthly listener counts go up, but they can also go down. And, as soon as you stop paying for that playlisting service, your monthly listener count levels right off or goes down.

So, a playlisting service is asking for your hard-earned money for the “service” of providing you a short-term boost on a meaningless vanity metric that doesn’t mean anything, and the abstract future potential to earn maybe about 2 cents in return for the work they’re doing for you.

That’s not a fair exchange of value, especially considering all of the hard work, money, and time that you’ve already put into your music before it gets into the greasy hands of the playlisting service provider.

As artists, any deals we make need to reflect mutually beneficial exchanges of value for all parties involved.

If you don’t fully understand all sides of a deal, there’s no way to tell if something is mutually beneficial or not, and you’re setting yourself up to get scammed.