OK, a little click-bait is a must, even during the Christmas season ????
Actually, at this point I wanted to give you more in-depth legal knowledge about the question of the extent to which fundraising actually represents competitive activities within the meaning of the UWG. But then on Saturday I got a very interesting article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ from December 4th. “leave me alone“; (€)) in between, who promptly changed my view of what you, the esteemed reader, might find more interesting. If you would like to know more about the aforementioned topic of the legal classification of fundraising, please tell me and us in the comments below!
But now to Spotify. Of course, first of all I would like to mention again that the SZ is the source or background of the article, so I hope to avoid allegations of plagiarism AND advertise the newspaper. Of course, the FAZ, Die Zeit and other players in the market often report on interesting topics related to data protection.
Spotify is listening
The fact that Spotify constantly looks into the ears of us listeners and tries to precisely determine our musical taste and also recommends songs or playlists that supposedly correspond to them is certainly largely known or should be known to everyone who uses the service. No different from Amazon & Co and all those services that continuously analyze the usage behavior of your customers. But did you also know that algorithms can now classify a piece of music (a title!) Using various data parameters as “happy”, “sad” etc.? (OK, as a lawyer, such information still fascinates and frightens me, despite a self-assessment as a “digital-half-native” – computer scientists may probably smile mildly and forgive me for this ignorance). These data parameters include “danceability”, “energy”, “liveliness”, “acousticness”, “instrumentalness”, “speechiness”, “tempo”, “valence” and others. Each of these parameters is assigned a certain value by the algorithm. B. can vary between -4.634 and 0.000056. The most important value for the classification of a song in (advertising-relevant) categories in the above list is – according to the above article – “valence” (with a factor between 0 and 1), which determines whether the song is rather happy or sad. But if you ignore the lyrics of the song, it often goes in the pants – because the algorithm is nothing more than that, namely just an algorithm.
Money, money, money
And what does Spotify do with this information? Yes, no surprise – of course, play out real-time advertising that is as precise as possible, both with regard to the suspected mood of the listener and, if possible, taking into account an activity – assumed but confirmed as likely by algorithms – be it the so-called work- out, cooking, learning, etc. Marketing boss Seth Farbman told Wall that this area, the generation of significant sales through precise advertising, was an important factor in comparison with sales through subscription fees even before the IPO Street Journal clearly communicated (here the Interview). The recently published figures for the 3rd quarter of 2021 show that this endeavor is now bearing fruit: Although revenue from subscription fees still accounts for the majority of the (3/4 year) total revenue of 7 billion euros, it does the increase in advertising sales this year was 75% !! compared to the same period last year – a result that can be ascribed to the increasingly precise tracking of the 220 million users of the free version. Please do not get it wrong: This is not intended to be Spotify bashing, but only to show that the company is just as privacy-unfriendly in this regard as Facebook & Co. and can still make (a lot) of money with it.
–
