How would this benefit Spotify? The few people it would attract wouldn’t be worth the cost. According to other posters, it’s barely used.

Maybe it doesn't, but I was planning to use it soon!

I'll have to pay a small sum to do the same now, but that's not a big deal.

Unrelated question. As an indy artist, why use Spotify? More than likely people wouldn’t discover your music and you lose the direct relationship with your listeners. Isn’t it better for small artists to get “1000 True Fans” who would be willing to pay $x than to get a few more fans that would pay you indirectly $x/10000?

I don't actually care about the money. I have a full time job as a software engineer, this is more for me to have something to be proud of (performance at work, to me at least, isn't as important as leaving a tangible mark on someone, or brightening up people's evenings).

Spotify is the biggest music streaming platform, and having something I created, or played a part in creating, be on the platform, would be a personal accomplishment. It's just an item on my bucketlist, really. In a similar vein, I want to see somoene sing along to a song I write at a gig :)

Eventually the algorithm might even drop the songs in people's discovery queues, etc. But for fanbase interactions, I think local gigs + a Facebook page is the most important, to be honest. Then you tour and people should be able to discover you on their streaming platform of choice.

I haven't heard of 1000 True Fans, will look into what that is actually.

How can they possibly know whether the artist licensed their samples? Or whether the artist is paying the original artist royalties for the use of their music?

I was more thinking a sort of hash value for the song, to prevent reuploads. Sample detection would be hard, considering sample pack reuse would have to be dealt with!

Youtube is built around letting random individuals upload their videos, it makes a lot of sense for them to implement clever automated filters, contentID etc... And even then it doesn't seem to work that well since I very often see videos popping up of Youtubers complaining about abusive demonetization and false-positive flagging.

On the other hand I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of the music streamed by Spotify comes from "the industry" instead of artists uploading their own songs themselves. Implementing complicated filters (and playing the arms race game against people trying to work around them) is probably not worth it for them.

> Spotify please hire me so I can work on this, tack.

I know some people who are working on something like that with the added benefit* of being on Ethereum if that interests you... :)

I'd definitely be keen to hear more about this at least!

I've been thinking about hash values for song sections, and then proving ownership by claiming a sequence of hashes. Could help ensure you aren't subconsciously ripping other music off, and make finding 'related' songs easy (covers, remixes, etc).

But changing some aspect would change the hash value

That, there, is the hard part of the problem. You can go with acoustic hashes (like Chromaprint[1]) but even that's not 100% reliable in the face of small changes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AcoustID#Chromaprint

What is the project name?