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A comment on The day I canceled my Spotify subscription. Parent comment

Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by usrusr on Monday February 19, 2024 @07:42AM (#39429122)
Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize.

Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

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Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by jsnell on Monday February 19, 2024 @09:09AM (#39429896)
There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount.

(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)

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Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by usrusr on Monday February 19, 2024 @11:45AM (#39431839)
Heh, I don't even doubt the legality, I was talking purely about subjective expectations, about how it feels to us.
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Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by troupo on Monday February 19, 2024 @09:40AM (#39430210)
On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song".

This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.

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Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by jsnell on Monday February 19, 2024 @09:58AM (#39430421)
I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.
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Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by troupo on Monday February 19, 2024 @02:01PM (#39433364)
Ah true.

This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data.

But true, it's not anonymized in this case.

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Re:The day I canceled my Spotify subscription by vintermann on Monday February 19, 2024 @02:52PM (#39433933)
Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)
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