Spotify has never been shy about the sheer amount of user data it collects, including the weekly Discover playlist for its annual event, which is packed with Spotify. But a company that does its best to lock people into long listening sessions and sell ads based on user data would really rather you didn’t burn that sauce and sell it for its own profit. According to a report by ARS Technica, the user set did exactly that, for a small profit, much to the company’s chagrin.
More than 18,000 Spotify users have joined a group called Wrapped , which aims to allow said users to monetize their data by selling it to a third party. They found a buyer in Layer, a startup platform that lets people sell data to companies that build AI models. The idea is that users can make a little money directly by selling largely unused data sources, including things like private messages from Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram — and in this case, listening history data from Spotify.
Using a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), users voted on whether to make the sale, with 99.5% of more than 10,000 voters approving, according to ARS Technica. They ended up selling artist preference data extracted from their respective Spotify profiles to a company called Solo ai, which markets itself as an AI-driven music platform. Users reportedly earned $55,000 for the data set, which was divided among them and distributed via cryptocurrency tokens. The final profit for each person: about $5.
If you factor in the hassle of collecting the data and breaking the crypto, your mileage may vary on whether it’s all worth it, but it’s interesting as a proof of concept. Now, whether the concept is any good or not is a whole other question. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that selling your data doesn’t actually do anything to redress the imbalance of power between the companies that collect and monetize user data and the users who are constantly being monitored and profited from, arguing that “These little checks in exchange for intimate information about you are no fairer trade than what we have now.”
Spotify also thinks selling your user data is bad, but for very different reasons. According to ARS, the company told the developers behind the Unsolicited project that they were violating Spotify’s developer policy, which prohibits using Spotify content for machine learning or AI models. “Spotify respects our users’ privacy rights, including the right to portability,” a Spotify spokesperson told the publication Local. “All of our users can get a copy of their personal data to use as they see fit. This means that newappeddata.org is violating our developer policy, which prohibits collecting, aggregating, and selling Spotify user data to third parties.”
Maybe Spotify is just annoyed that users are monetizing their data when the company has struggled to figure out how to do the same. Per Business Insider, only 11% of the company’s revenue currently comes from its data-driven advertising business, short of its 20% goal, because it apparently hasn’t been able to crack the way to turn massive user data streams into the ad placements that ad buyers actually want.
