Spotify has never been shy about the fact that the massive amount of user data it collects is a major part of its secret sauce, from its user-specific Discover Weekly playlist to the annual event that is Spotify Wrapped. But the company, which does everything it can to lock people into long listening sessions and sells ads based on user data, would really prefer it if you didn’t bottle up that sauce and resell it for your own profit. According to a report from Ars Technica, a set of users did just that to make a little profit, much to the company’s chagrin.
More than 18,000 Spotify users joined a group called Unwrapped, which set out with the goal of allowing said users to monetize their data by selling it to a third party. They found a buyer on Vana, a startup platform that allows people to sell data to firms building AI models. The idea is that users can get some cash directly by selling sources of data that are largely untapped, including things like private messages from Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram—and, in this case, listening history data from Spotify.
Through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), the users voted on whether or not to make a sale, with 99.5% of the more than 10,000 voters approving, according to Ars Technica. They ultimately sold off artist preference data pulled from their respective Spotify profiles to a company called Solo AI, which markets itself as an AI-driven music platform. The users reportedly got $55,000 for the pool of data, which was split amongst them and distributed via cryptocurrency tokens. The final profit for each person: about $5.
If you’re factoring in whatever trouble it takes to collect the data and cash out the crypto, your mileage may vary on whether it was all worth it, but it’s interesting as a proof of concept. Now, whether that concept is good or not is a whole other question. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that selling your own data doesn’t actually do anything to correct the imbalance between the power held by companies that collect and cash in on user data and the users who are being constantly surveilled and monetized, and argues, “Those small checks in exchange for intimate details about you are not a fairer trade than we have now.”
Spotify also thinks selling your user data is bad, but for totally different reasons. According to Ars, the company told the developers in charge of the Unwrapped project that they were violating Spotfiy’s developer policy, which prohibits the use of Spotify content for machine learning or AI models. “Spotify honors our users’ privacy rights, including the right of portability,” Spotify’s spokesperson told the publication. “All of our users can receive a copy of their personal data to use as they see fit. That said, UnwrappedData.org is in violation of our Developer Terms, which prohibit the collection, aggregation, and sale of Spotify user data to third parties.”
Maybe Spotify is just annoyed that users are monetizing their own data when the company has struggled to figure out how to do the same. Per Business Insider, just 11% of the company’s revenue currently comes from its data-driven advertising business, well short of its 20% goal, as it has apparently been unable to crack ways to turn its massive trove of user data into ad placements that ad buyers actually want.