Anatomy of an unsolicited Spotify notification

If you’re like me and use Spotify, you may have recently gotten a push notification that looks like this:

For those who are unaware, KAYTRANADA is a producer working at the nexus of electronic, hip-hop and funk styles whom I’ve been following for a long time.

General fandom aside, I have so many thoughts on how this particular notification is constructed — not all positive.

I recommend reading Jonah Bromwich’s article for the New York Times about this topic, which does a really good job at unpacking various fans’ reactions to the notifications, while connecting them to wider trends about how marketers use data to make public appeals to their customers. (Full disclaimer: Bromwich also interviewed and quoted me in the piece.)

I wanted to take a slightly different, more anatomical approach to breaking down what the notification reveals about its own intentions, as well as about Spotify’s wider goals on the company level and its relationships with artists, labels and the music industry at large.

There are two groups of elements in particular that stand out to me, and that I think directly contradict each other in some ways:

A: “KAYTRANADA” / “top 1% fans”

Aside from the possible grammatical error here (shouldn’t it be “top 1% of fans”?), what stands out to me here is the lack of clarity about what even constitutes a “fan” in the first place.

In the past, the likes of Spotify and Netflix have wielded anonymized user data to give more color to their public marketing and advertising materials (e.g. “Dear person who played [Justin Bieber’s] ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”). These ads usually have no call to action, nor any attempt to persuade non-existing users to start subscribing to a given service. Instead, their purpose is merely to illustrate, through the framing of seemingly harmless and relatable talking points, that Spotify and Netflix are analyzing their users’ behavior at the most unexpected times.

In contrast, with Spotify’s “top fan” notification, user data is delivered not anonymously on a billboard, but in a targeted manner to each individual user.

Yet, how exactly, say, I became one of KAYTRANADA’s top 1% of fans is unclear. Was it calculated based just on surface-level streaming metrics (e.g. how many times I streamed KAYTRANADA in general), or on more specific behavior (e.g. how many times I streamed KAYTRANADA via my own playlists or on his artist page, versus on Spotify-owned or third-party editorial playlists)? Was it based on my ranking among other of KAYTRANADA’s monthly listeners, or among his active followers? How many other fans are in his top 1%? All of these questions remain unanswered.  (The isolated, individualized nature of the notification delivery also underscores how Spotify isn’t as social of a platform as it used to be, in contrast to the often social nature of fandom.)

The designation “top 1%” also implies that Spotify is ranking fans on some kind of leaderboard behind the scenes, in a way that said fans can’t browse themselves. In general, streaming and digital-download leaderboards are one of many forms of gamification in music, in that they encourage competition and typically reward the top-scoring “players” with badges, coins, VIP experiences or other perks for fulfilling specific objectives.

But in the context of Spotify, is fandom really something you “play,” or something that can be “achieved”?

For instance, I’m not sure I’m trying to “achieve” anything in particular by listening to KAYTRANADA’s work over and over; I just think his music is awesome, so I listen to it a lot for my personal enjoyment. I have mixed feelings about being notified about an “achievement” I had no intention of “aiming” for the first place. And I’m pretty sure KAYTRANADA himself has nothing to do with the notification being delivered to me, let alone with the resulting radio experience.

This points to the issue of approaching fandom as a top-down commercial marketing categorization, instead of as an organic, bottom-up form of personal identification. And because I don’t really use Spotify’s radio feature anyway, the prize for said “achievement” didn’t feel particularly relevant or rewarding. Which leads me to the next element:

B: “endless stream of their music” / “PLAY RADIO”

I think the most crucial part to understand about this notification is that its core purpose is to wield individuals users’ loyalty to artists as a marketing tool to increase the former’s loyalty to Spotify. The ideal outcome for Spotify is higher user retention on their own platform, not necessarily closer artist/fan relationships in a direct way.

As Bromwich points out in his New York Times piece, loyal music fandom is “a particularly personal and personality-revealing aspect of people’s lives.” Given that emotional context, it would be great if a Spotify user’s reward for being a “top X% fan” of an artist felt more personal, more exclusive and/or more tied to said user’s individuality.

In fact, Spotify has already been giving out personal, exclusive rewards to loyal fans for years through its Fans First initiatives — primarily in connection to live events, such as exclusive presale codes for artists’ tours and one-off, private concerts and VIP experiences.

But literally anyone on Spotify can stream KAYTRANADA’s artist radio if they wanted to — the opposite of exclusive and personalized.

Even something like Facebook’s “Top Fan” badges would be cool to include on a user’s Spotify profile as a reward for their 1% status — e.g. I would get a “Top Kaytranada Fan” badge on my own page, as well as separate badges for other artists where I fit the same criteria. But then again, that might circle back to the my original question of how Spotify would qualify those “top fans” in the first place.

Also, the notification’s designation of an artist’s radio station as an “endless stream of their music” is partially inaccurate. Spotify’s radio feature serves up a diversity of tracks from different artists, instead of just offering an “endless stream” of a singular artist’s catalog (e.g. see below for what I see with KAYTRANADA Radio); I would argue that it’s a discovery product much more than it’s a fandom product. And if the “Autoplay” setting on a user’s Spotify account is turned off, the radio feature isn’t even endless anyway.

In general, I also think there’s an inherent tension between lean-back discovery products like radio and the kind of dedicated, repeat listening that puts you in the “top 1%” of a given fan ecosystem. From the artist’s perspective, isn’t a lean-back listening product like radio kind of an ineffective reward for the lean-in listener? It feels like taking two steps back.

Notification as advertisement: The future of marketing on Spotify

According to the New York Times, Spotify is reportedly only testing out these “top fan” notifications, and may not expand on them further in the future.

That said, I think the notifications are much more than just tests; they’re also likely advertisements as part of Spotify’s wider Marquee advertising initiative — which, as Elias Leight recently reported for Rolling Stone, allows labels with enough budget to purchase pop-up ads prompting users to stream specific songs at a certain time (e.g. a new album on release day). During Spotify’s latest earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek called sponsored recommendations on the platform “a dream come true” for music marketers.

I agree that these kinds of notifications could be a lot more effective than typical social-media advertising, as long as the cost stays low and the functionality becomes more open to labels of all sizes (to my knowledge, the vast majority of artists featured in the top-fan notifications were signed to major labels).

But the way in which the latest test was implemented points to a question that has plagued Spotify, and all of its competitors in the music streaming landscape, ever since their beginnings: Should the artist or the service be at the center of the streaming experience?