Spotify considers the interests of artists when recommending music to users

Spotify announced a new feature that allows artists and music labels to influence how their music is recommended to the users of Spotify.

In this new experiment, artists and labels can identify music that’s a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithm that determines personalized listening sessions. This allows our algorithms to account for what’s important to the artist—perhaps a song they’re particularly excited about, an album anniversary they’re celebrating, a viral cultural moment they’re experiencing, or other factors they care about. 

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-input-in-your-personalized-recommendations/

Of course, Spotify is not doing this only to be nice, but they have their own interests in this feature.

[…] labels or rights holders agree to be paid a promotional recording royalty rate for streams in personalized listening sessions where we provided this service.

Anyway, it is nice to see this feature as it demonstrates the importance of different stakeholders in recommender systems. Normally, recommender-systems, and especially research in the field of recommender systems, focus only on the user that receives recommendations. We highlighted already in 2016 that there are more stakeholders than only the user; and several others mentioned this even earlier. In recent years, this insight received more attention, resulting in dedicated workshops on “multistakeholder environments”.

Let’s see if Spotify reports the effect of that feature on their system and user satisfaction with Spotify.