Re:An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes
by shadowtree on Monday January 23, 2023 @03:37PM
(#34494649)
Pretty sure the DRM process in YouTube is heavily automated - why wouldn't Spotify do the same? Give the labels an API, then they can dynamically maintain all that crap themselves.
I would imagine this is where the majority of their staff are. Spotify’s catalog is huge, and record labels are constantly renegotiating extremely granular contracts with the streaming services (i.e. at the individual song level). For example, I’ve seen particular songs on albums disappear for a few weeks (the rest of the album can still be played), then mysteriously return (or not), all because of some cryptic licensing shift from the record label. There is no easy way to automate this; each time a weird licensing shift requires a particular song to be removed requires a real human interaction between the label and the streaming service. Given the size of Spotify’s catalog, there are probably thousands of such licensing changes each day.