What Sharky Laguana gets wrong

Sharky Laguana is my real name. Thanks.

1. Thanks for the spell check. 3,000 word piece and you found an extra “f”. Impressive.

2. “Suppose that everyone, on average, has the same musical tastes, and listens to artists at the same rate. I know that’s not true — but if it were, then clearly there would be no difference between the Big Pool and Subscriber Share methods as you call them”

Correct.

“Your argument requires the premise that distribution of artists listened to is very different at different scales of streaming levels. Do you know this? If so, how?”

There has been a reasonable amount of academic research into this topic (explained in the FAQ with links). See papers and research by Rasmus Rex Pedersen, Arnt Maaso (who used actual service data), Chris Mulligan, Anita Elberse and David Touve at Rockonomic.com (who recently proposed co-writing a paper with me before pulling out due to time constraints) to name a few.
Elberse in particular has looked at how different streaming levels impact diversity in individuals. I don’t know of anyone who has done the same research for groups (such as offices and hair salons), so if you are saying you want to jump in and do that research, that’s awesome. When can I read it?

Elberse’s research conducted in 2007 suggested that the more a user streams, the more diverse their choices are. However, some caveats: this was early days of streaming, with a hetregenuous sample that has, to my way of thinking, some issues (such as some subscribers not having unlimited access, either because of the plan, or their own internal bandwidth constraints), and didn’t really look at how user behavior changed over time. Intriguingly her research showed that users with unlimited plans had a lot more diversity than users with limits. I guess they get bored of the old hits, and it doesn’t cost them much to explore so they do.

But for me the bottom line is that music subscribers are deeply heterogenous. You have highly diverse listeners (like me for instance) with comparatively light usage (I’m probably 200-300 streams a month), and extreme super-fans who listen non-stop to single artists (40 years ago it was Elvis. Maybe now it’s Taylor Swift). You also have the opposite: shallow diversity with light usage, and heavy diversity and heavy usage (as Elberse found).

But this is getting needlessly complex. Let’s just look at it as a simple moral issue, which is largely how I present it: is it right that someone else gets to decide which artists receive your money?

My answer is no.

I think if an artist brings a fan to the table, and entertains them (feeds them with food at the buffet if you will), then they should reap the proportionate rewards.

If there’s not much diversity, as you seem to be concerned about, then there won’t be any harm in switching. However as Rasmus Rex Pedersen tweeted to me this morning, Subscriber Share is the fairer solution.

3. “Finally, I find it funny that you think that these companies aren’t aware of the problem of stream falsification, and aren’t working on addressing it.”

Please re-read what I wrote. I didn’t say they were not aware of it, nor did I say they were not working on addressing it. In fact I listed several things they were doing. I did say the problem could be worse than they admit, or *possibly* even realize. Even Spotify’s own in-house data analysis firm The Echo Nest acknowledges that fraud is “becoming a pretty huge problem”
http://www.bdcwire.com/spotify-hacking-how-is-it-changing-the-music-industry-who-is-to-blame-and-what-is-the-solution/

The problem with click fraud, in my mind at least, is that at a fundamental level there’s no perfect solution: you can’t know what a person’s *intention* was when they clicked on something, you cannot see into their heart. You can create algos to detect patterns, and you can get pretty sophisticated with UID’s and other tactical measures, but there are countermeasures for all of these methods, and equally sophisticated click fraud operators know how to probe, evade, and conceal.

It’s the proverbial arms race.

But the best indication of the current inability of the services to deal with fraud requires little or no inference at all, and we can use direct observation: they can’t even stop the basic simple shit. Like I, Sharky Laguana, in my own (real) name, on my own account, streamed my own catalog, which also has my name in plain text ALL over it, 24 hours a day for for an entire month a couple months ago and absolutely nothing happened. Except a slightly bigger check from The Orchard (who is a content aggregator that acquired my original aggregator, IODA, a company whose business plan I checked for spelling errors since my best friend was starting it. Apparently he should have hire you!)

So yeah, what else you got?

Oh and btw, I published the article last night at 8pm, and have been defending it in all corners of the internet for the past 24 hours with one 4 hour break for sleep. So, after repeating myself ad inifinitum in several venues, and also without the benefit of caffeine (on doctor’s orders), I am quite a bit more sardonic and snippy than usual. Please forgive me. Looking forward to discussions in the future.