Spotify – the most important music streaming service in the world, which is about to go public on the New York stock exchange – has had a problem for years: being able to properly catalog and organize all the music it allows access to. It can't do it right because it's too much, but it needs to do it for two reasons: to improve the experience of its users and to avoid that the wrong cataloging of a song leads to lawsuits by those who have the rights. On March 12, Spotify then opened Line-In, a service that allows all users to add missing data on songs, records and artists.
Spotify explained that Line-In is “a tool created to allow loyal fans and music lovers to suggest changes to Spotify music information”; the service also serves “to understand how Spotify listeners interpret music, to offer a better experience to listeners and artists”.
The possible suggestions concern a variety of information: any pseudonyms of an artist, his country of origin, the role of a musician in a band, the musical genres of the songs, the mood they generate and any tags to explain them better. It is also possible to specify the words by which certain songs are known, to help those who should look for them with the wrong title: “Volare” instead of “In the blue painted blue”, for example. This information in jargon is called metadata and is what, for example, helps to decide which songs to put in the automatic playlists generated by Spotify. You cannot change “sensitive” information such as the artist name and the titles of discs and songs.
To access Line-In just be subscribed to Spotify (even the free version) and, using the desktop version, click on the three dots next to each song. From there you have to then click on “Propose change”. This opens the Line-In web page, which allows you to change the data on the song you were listening to or all the others on which you have something to say.
Line-In is Spotify's first “crowdsourcing” initiative: it means it's the first time it has asked so many millions of people to make a free contribution to improve their system. It is the principle by which Wikipedia exists, in short. As Amy X. Wang wrote on Quartz, it is convenient because Spotify gets an edge without spending anything and at the same time manages to make users feel part of a community and that those more experienced of a genre (perhaps regional and niche) feel useful and willing to contribute.
Before being open to all users, the service was tested on a limited number last fall. Now that the service is open to everyone, Wang writes, it remains to understand how the proposed changes suggested by users will be handled. Spotify said all of the proposals will be scrutinized by some of its employees, but did not go into further details.
