What is fair? Exploring the artists' perspective on the fairness of music streaming platforms

TL;DR

The paper investigates fairness in music streaming platforms from the artists’ perspective, addressing a gap in prior work focused on end-user fairness. It employs nine semi-structured interviews and qualitative content analysis to extract dimensions of fairness perceived by artists, revealing consensus on promoting local content, achieving gender balance, and ensuring long-tail representation, while showing mixed views on repertoire size weighting and local quotas. Key contributions include a detailed articulation of non-algorithmic fairness aspects (presentation, context, and artist control) and design implications such as contextual metadata, transparency mechanisms, and user-controlled discovery. The findings offer actionable guidance for building fairer music platforms that balance platform economics with artists’ needs and cultural representation, highlighting practical paths for incorporating artist-centric fairness into recommender systems and interface design.

Abstract

Music streaming platforms are currently among the main sources of music consumption, and the embedded recommender systems significantly influence what the users consume. There is an increasing interest to ensure that those platforms and systems are fair. Yet, we first need to understand what fairness means in such a context. Although artists are the main content providers for music platforms, there is a research gap concerning the artists' perspective. To fill this gap, we conducted interviews with music artists to understand how they are affected by current platforms and what improvements they deem necessary. Using a Qualitative Content Analysis, we identify the aspects that the artists consider relevant for fair platforms. In this paper, we discuss the following aspects derived from the interviews: fragmented presentation, reaching an audience, transparency, influencing users' listening behavior, popularity bias, artists' repertoire size, quotas for local music, gender balance, and new music. For some topics, our findings do not indicate a clear direction about the best way how music platforms should act and function; for other topics, though, there is a clear consensus among our interviewees: for these, the artists have a clear idea of the actions that should be taken so that music platforms will be fair also for the artists.