Who Owns the Data? Spotify vs UnwrappedData.org

The Hypothetical Reality

You spend three years grinding in an online game. Thousands of hours building your character, mastering strategies, collecting rare items. You become one of the top players. You know the meta better than almost anyone. Even the developers who created the game.

A gaming analytics company reaches out: "We'll pay you $2,000 for access to your gameplay data. Esports teams and game developers want to understand high-level strategy patterns for new games and better understand how people play these strategy games, and your data, along with aggregate data from other top tier players are valuable for training AI coaches, and may also benefit you too in understanding your play style."

Hell yeah. It's YOUR gameplay, YOUR strategies, YOUR time invested.

Then the game developer sends you a legal threat: "You violated our Terms of Service. Section 8.2 states that gameplay data cannot be sold to third parties, even if you generated it. We're already using that data to balance the game, train our AI systems, and sell insights to advertisers. You're allowed to screenshot your stats for personal use, but monetizing your own gameplay? That's theft. Of data you created. On our platform."

You're like, "Wait... I can't sell my OWN gameplay that I spent 3,000 hours creating? But YOU can use it however you want? What the heck? You’re not even giving me great insights into the game like these companies can.”

"Correct. You clicked 'Agree' when you installed the game."

This isn't a hypothetical. This happened with Spotify, and 10,000 users just got a finger wagging from Spotify for selling their own music listening history for $5 each.

Spotify Wrapped

Lets dive in.

A project called unwrappeddata.org was attempting to allow users to sell their data to third party AI tools that could provide them with better insight into their listening history than Spotify has been providing. It also provided a better understanding of similar users tastes rather than surfacing songs based on engagement, which provides better listening experience to all users.

They used a decentralized autonomous organization to vote on whether to make a sale of 10,000 users’ listening history to an AI tool that allows them to gather deeper insights into their own listening data on a regular basis rather than on the one time per year Spotify provides.

The vote succeeded with over 99.5% of users voting to sell the data to Solo AI for $55,000 with each user getting $5 for the sale of their data.

Now, whether or not it was worth it financially in this instance has yet to be determined, but it does provide an interesting framework for users to reap the financial benefits of their own data. Imagine, the hundreds, if not thousands of data brokers quietly selling your data, the amount of money that is flying around unseen is insane.

This is where I’m disappointed in Spotify.

They decided instead of investing in improving their own Spotify Wrapped tooling and API, that it would be better for them to shut down this tool by telling the unwrappeddata.org team that this was against Spotify’s developer policy “which prohibit the collection, aggregation, and sale of Spotify user data to third parties.”

Now, there are other tools that can provide individualized reports on your personal listening history, but there’s no real great service that can aggregate the data from multiple users and provide different insight that may be based on other metrics than what Spotify has deemed as listening metrics and weights based on engagement, and thats where this tool was attempting to make improvements.

The Problem

Now, I see where Spotify is coming from, yeah, its Spotify’s systems, and yes, they likely have some vetting to third party data brokers they do to prevent misuse of the data.

But come on Spotify, is this the right way to do it?

The users have asked nicely to improve Spotify Wrapped, and you refuse to do it. So in the democratically run world we live in, a group of users decided to sell THEIR listening data (and get money from it) to an AI service to improve on YOUR failings.

And you said no.

Why? Because you have claimed your listeners data as your data and it couldn’t have netted you that money.

The Solution

Now, most of the solutions would require a different set of laws than what we have now, where if its on the server owned by the provider more often than not its controlled by that service providers terms of service, especially if they manipulated it to add value.

But I do see a future where all user-generated data would be stored in decentralized form either in a personally stored server or decentralized services where no one company can shut them out or take ownership of the users data and the users can choose to share with companies they agree with or can provide the best financial return on their own user generated content.

We are working that way, as the more technical users (like myself) are stripping all user generated data that we can away from data service providers due to their poor terms of service, poor pricing and service capabilities, the technical people around will create services that are more friendly to users data rather than create integrations with services that are onerous to personal data ownership.

It’s coming. We’ll will wait.