Fairness in Question: Do Music Recommendation Algorithms Value Diversity?

This piece is a follow-up to the panel discussion with streaming executives on Fairness in Discovery Algorithms, which I’ve organized for Réseau MAP’s JIRAFE Paris event in September 2021. Even though the perspective presented in this article is largely shared across the streaming market, all opinions are still my own, and they don’t represent the official views of any of the companies mentioned in this text.

As a former product director at a streaming platform, I often receive questions like “do streaming services choose to promote popular artists over indies and niche music?”. Intuitively, people assume that on these big platforms “the rich get richer” — wondering if algorithms prefer artists that are already popular, which, in turn, makes them even more popular.

Those concerns are even more relevant now that Spotify released its Discovery Mode. This new feature enables artists to boost tracks across Spotify’s algorithm-driven properties in exchange for a commission on the revenue, making their recommendation system even less transparent than it already was.

Concerns about algorithmic bias and discrimination aren’t limited to the music industry.Not so long ago, algorithms’ fairness received a lot of attention in the field of artificial intelligence, as numerous…