Mark Kratter vs. Spotify | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Yeah, we have time for one more quick thing. Also, digital music news reporting this Spotify shows up a lot in the news, especially lately. Spotify asked judge to shift undisclosed filtering practices lawsuit to federal court. Spotify has officially moved to shift to federal court the undisclosed filtering practices lawsuit filed against it by artists and attorney Mark Crater. I know a little bit about this, but it says here Spotify set that shift in motion with a notice of removal yesterday after Crater fired off an amended complaint and aggressively sought an injunction in late June.

0:40 But to recap, the plaintiff maintains that Spotify in March retooled its streaming and recommendation system without informing the public or artists themselves. The alleged pivot fueled a sudden, simultaneous and systemic collapse in streams across Crowter's multiple artist profiles, according to the complaint. Okay, that's very interesting, So in other words, he's basically he's suing saying, Look, Spotify has changed the way that they do this, the way they do their filtering system, and because of that change, my streams.

1:18 My streaming numbers are way down. I'm not getting the traffic I was I have. I have a gut reaction to that. But we'll finish this article quickly and then we'll I'll tell you what I think. So it refers to five artist pages for the amended action and Spotify's just submitted retort. However, upon closer inspection, the plaintiff appears to operate additional profiles as well, like a distinct Mark Crater band singles page on top of the main Mark Crater band profile, for instance. That can be a problem having too many profiles and with actual consumption data factoring prominently into the action.

2:00 Crater is accusing Spotify of making the relevant changes to boost major label catalogs at the expense of indies. Now, Spotify is weighed in on the suit and filed to shift the showdown from the Stanford Superior Court to the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. There's more here about that, specifically about what Crater is trying to do in terms of moving the case to the US District Court. I just would say, though I'm not sure, I'm not someone who wants to defend Spotify but I don't know.

2:37 Can you if you're an artist and you have your music on a platform and that platform changes something about how the algorithm works, how their search functions work, how they're filtering works in this case, can you then sue them for that because they've damaged you in some way. I am pretty skeptical. I don't want I don't want to say this is frivolous, but I don't know. I kind of do want to say this is frivolous. I mean, first of all, these platforms, and I don't have much experience directly with Spotify because I haven't been releasing my own music, But I mean I have some experience with YouTube.

3:21 They're always changing their rules and how things work and what shows up and what doesn't in searches and et cetera, and how the algorithms work. They're always they're always changing things. So as Facebook, you know, so as a lot of these platforms. But and and in the case of YouTube, a lot of creators, a lot of podcasters have been damaged in many different ways, in many different instances over the years by YouTube specifically. And I've had my problems and complaints about YouTube, But I don't know I mean to actually sue one of these platforms for changing how they do things.

4:00 I mean, it's not as though I would assume it's not as those Spotify somebody sat in a room at Spotify and said, let's really screw over Mark Crater. We're going to change something about how our platform works so that we can decimate this guy's streaming numbers. Right. I don't think there was any malicious intent here on the part of Spotify, so I'm not sure about going and suing them. It seems strange to me. I don't know if it's frivolous, And again, I don't want to be defending Spotify. You know, obviously, at the end of the day, I will always advocate on behalf of artists because of my background.

4:48 But I just I don't know if this is a fight that I would have chosen with Spotify. I mean, they're a private company. They can I don't think they're publicly traded, are they. They can really kind of make whatever rules they want to about how their platform operates, right. I Mean, we had a discussion on a not on this show, but on a podcast that I do separate from all of this, where we were talking about you know, does a platform the rights of a platform to control how it operates and how and whether someone can even be operating on their platform.

5:28 You know, these are private companies that you know, we might not like it. It might feel like censorship when they do things to either remove us from their platforms or to potentially hide our content or lower our streaming numbers, et cetera. But ultimately, they are private companies and they have a right to do what they want to. So I just don't think this is I don't think this guy Mark Cratter is going to win. I guess that's my long winded way of saying that