The inevitable onslaught of music podcast spam

Today’s essay might have been literally impossible to write, were it not for a recently-formed habit of mine.

Nowadays, I usually start my weekend mornings by listening to one to two podcast episodes about whatever I feel like learning, in order to 1) wake up my mind for an otherwise lazy day, and 2) train my normally scatterbrained self to focus on just one piece of media at a time.

This past Saturday, I found myself in the mood for a music-related podcast, and decided to peruse the Music tab on Spotify’s podcast homepage for recommendations. Given that Spotify has historically been known as a pioneer and innovator in music discovery, I figured they would have similarly top-notch curation for podcasts pertaining to music.

Unsurprisingly, the top-recommended music podcasts on Spotify are owned by the streaming service itself, including Dissect (which Spotify acquired and relaunched under its own studio in May 2018), The Joe Budden Podcast (with which Spotify nabbed an exclusive windowing deal in August) and Under Cover (an original series that launched in September).

But towards the bottom half of the page, I spotted something more intriguing:

My first reaction: “Cardi B has her own podcast?!”

I had known, and written about, why more and more independent and DIY musicians were starting their own podcasts to bypass traditional media middlemen—but found that virtually no major-label artists hosted their own podcasts, in part due to low expectations around the format’s scale.

I had also known that Cardi B’s label, Atlantic Records, did run its own in-house podcast initiative—but none of the label’s official series, Inside the Album and What’d I Say, focused singularly on one celebrity or personality, instead taking a wider, more curation-driven approach to featuring and interviewing artists.

So the notion of a standout, mass-market personality like Cardi B hosting her own podcast, let alone one that appeared only in the bottom half of Spotify’s recommendations, was novel to me.

But then I clicked through and looked at the list of episodes, and immediately realized that it wasn’t actually her.

What made it obvious was that every single episode of the “Cardi B podcast” was just… a different song by Cardi B. That was it. No advertising, no intro or outro section, no commentary from Cardi or another human being—just her music.

Some episodes were simply entire run-throughs of her albums (e.g. the Invasion of Privacy episode pictured above), the same way that users regularly upload full albums to YouTube—except in the case of podcasts, there’s no native content ID that will help monetize each song properly for rights holders.

In fact, the only form of monetization for this Cardi B podcast was a monthly donation you could make directly to the user’s Anchor account, via a URL that was included in each episode’s description (which I did not get to screenshot in time).

Anchor launched its Listener Support feature back in August 2018, allowing listeners to donate $0.99, $4.99 or $9.99 to their favorite podcasts on the platform every month. In the case of the Cardi B podcast, the Listener Support UX created the illusion that you were donating money to Cardi herself to keep her new venture alive—the purest form of direct-to-fan membership, except it was more like direct-to-scam.

That same Saturday, I posted about my discovery of the Cardi B podcast on Twitter, tagging the accounts for Spotify, Anchor and Atlantic Records. Within fewer than 40 minutes, Anchor replied to my tweet notifying me that the podcast violated their terms of service and was officially removed from Anchor (and subsequently Spotify). Shortly thereafter, an executive at Atlantic Records also reached out to me confirming that the podcast was definitely not approved by the artist or label, and that the latter was working on taking down infringing podcast content on an ongoing basis. See, Twitter is good for something!

Given its fraudulent nature, how the Cardi B podcast ended up getting such front-facing, promotional real estate on Spotify without a more rigorous approval process in place remains a mystery. My hypothesis is that the podcast excelled both at platform SEO (i.e. naming itself after a mainstream celebrity) and a regular publishing cadence (i.e. publishing several episodes every week, starting from early April 2019), such that Anchor’s algorithms picked up on the podcast and immediately fed it into Spotify’s publicly-displayed recommendations.

The bigger picture: Podcasts as vehicles for content infringement

After doing some more sleuthing, I found that Cardi B was far from the only infringing music podcast on Spotify.

There exist several other podcasts, like New Hits (Spotify, Apple Podcasts) and Radio Fear (Spotify), that are structured similarly to Cardi B in that each episode is  a few minutes long, and features just one popular song played all the way through, without any additional ads or commentary.

In other words, these are just playlists in podcast form—and are directly fraudulent because, as has been widely covered in the media, Spotify doesn’t pay out royalties to podcasts based on pro rata consumption in the same way they do with music.

Even if I streamed the New Hits episode that is just a playthrough of Beyoncé’s “Formation” over 100,000 times, neither Beyoncé nor the creator of New Hits would see any royalties from Spotify based on that consumption. In the current landscape, the burden is on podcast creators themselves (and in some cases their hosting platforms) to source compensation from advertisers and listeners as well as make sure each episode’s content is properly licensed, which New Hits likely has not done for its own show.

Others, like Underground House, Funk, Techno and HOUSE MIXES, mix and/or mash up several songs within a single episode, typically lasting around 40 to 60 minutes. Such accounts are essentially using the democratized nature of podcast-hosting platforms to treat Spotify like a new SoundCloud or Mixcloud.

The silver lining of this situation is that such shows often open up the “digital crate-digging” process by raising awareness of deep catalog that isn’t yet available on dominant streaming platforms, encouraging unconventional avenues of music discovery as a result. But as with SoundCloud, most of these “mix podcasts” on Spotify are unlicensed and, by nature of being podcast episodes rather than recorded music with the proper ISRCs, un-monetizable.

Even without podcasts, Spotify continues to struggle with a dark underbelly of content infringement and fraud. For instance, Pitchfork recently reported that accounts are racking up millions of Spotify streams just by uploading pitch-shifted, unreleased tracks from rappers like Playboi Carti under a different pseudonym. The dynamics of this scene are similar to viral activity around mixtapes on unlicensed sites like Datpiff; in the words of Noah Yoo, fans are “eager to consume that content regardless of who owns it or who benefits from the plays.”

These should be immediate red flags for a publicly-traded tech company like Spotify that has such close relationships with major rights holders, but it also raises the question of who should be responsible for monitoring podcasts for potential copyright infringement.

In the Cardi B case, both the hosting platform and the end-user consumption platform were owned by Spotify, making the company singularly responsible. But if Cardi B were uploaded via another third-party distribution platform—say, Transistor.fm, the hosting site I use for my own podcast—would Transistor be more responsible for takedowns?

Yes, if podcast standards end up resembling those that currently exist in music streaming. For recorded music, while fraud detection is a collaborative effort between end-user platforms and aggregators/distributors, it’s the latter group that’s ultimately more responsible for taking down infringing content across the streaming ecosystem. Both sides are hiring more and more analysts and data scientists for their internal fraud teams, and podcast hosting companies would do well to start recruiting the same.

While there’s also an argument to be made for Spotify developing its own internal Content ID system to fingerprint and monetize podcasts that resemble DJ mixes, that would go against one of the main reasons Spotify is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in podcast companies in the first place, which is precisely not to have to pay additional licensing fees to third parties.

The music industry has historically struggled to deal with any and every kind of freeform, self-organized collaging of musical material—mashups, sampling, remixing, you name it—and the ongoing merger of podcasts and recorded music under the umbrella of “audio” is only making these legal issues even more complicated.

Moreover, music podcast spam could make platforms like Spotify look, and act, increasingly like SoundCloud, and I think we all know how that would go.