Uh oh, Spotify has done it again. Did your classical music album just go from a low amount of streams to 130,000,000 overnight? It's not all good news, I'm afraid...

Uh oh, Spotify has done it again. Did your classical music album just go from a low amount of streams to 130,000,000 overnight? It's not all good news, I'm afraid...

Classical music metadata has always been a bit of a problem when dealing with streaming platforms and DSPs. Apple Music is very strict, Spotify is more lax, and DSPs in general are not built for the highly structured way in which the classical repertoire is archived. Also, as classical music is a very small percentage of the total streaming market, they also don't really care that much. As for other platforms, so far these recent dramatic metadata and analytics errors appear to be specific to Spotify. I have not seen similar widespread issues being reported on Apple Music, Amazon Music, or other major DSPs at this time. However, all platforms continue to face ongoing challenges with classical metadata, and it’s worth keeping an eye out for related problems across DSPs.

Apple did a nice thing of setting up Apple Music classical after their acquisition of Primephonic, which is a step in the right direction to credit where credit is due, but Spotify has not made any moves towards doing that at all.

What's happened, and I've noticed on a few accounts, is that a lot of the movements and compositions are being mixed up or combined across completely different releases, labels, artists, orchestras, everything. Some even have a release date of 01/01/1900. Another one is that if you look at some of the forum threads on Spotify, specific recordings on people's curated playlists are being swapped out with other recordings as well.

If you go into the backend of Spotify for artists, where you can see all of your data, there are also a lot of restrictions in place and a lot of error messages floating around, so that you can't get any accurate insight. To top it all off, the total stream figures for albums in one place are accurate and about a hundred times more than others.

This is quite a big issue, and it's quite a big deal, way beyond the normal problems. It doesn't look like anyone knows why this is happening, but I suspect it has something to do with the composers, as this is the only part that is consistent. Spotify has this method in the classical music genre: when you upload it, the composer who composed the piece is put in as a primary artist. Now, this is only on that channel. Apple Music has a separate part to it as well, so it looks like somewhere on their end, the composer has now been put in the forefront of the artist rather than separating out by orchestra or the performers, essentially. I think that's going to be one, but it's all getting confused by the way.

The good side of this is that on some of the lower-performing recordings, you are seeing an algorithmic boost while this is ongoing, mainly going off the coattails of the other, more successful versions. It also highlights that Spotify is actually looking at the metadata and trying to make fixes, but unfortunately, this one has not executed very well and has caused this issue.

For this, I would suggest that you contact your music distributor and ask for updates, see what they're saying, because they will have a direct contact at Spotify. When reaching out, be as specific as possible: clearly list the tracks or albums affected, the exact issues (like stream count discrepancies, swapped recordings, missing data), dates and times when you noticed the problems, and include relevant error messages. Take clear screenshots of any dashboard anomalies, such as incorrect stream numbers, tracks swapped in playlists, release dates showing 1/1/1900, or messages like 'no access' or unavailable data. This will help your distributor escalate the matter more effectively and provide Spotify with the evidence they need to investigate. This would likely be sorted out quite shortly, and it should be a short-term problem because it's a pretty bad issue to have on the platform. You'll just have to be patient and wait and see where this goes, but you're not alone. It's not you. It seems to be a larger systemic issue.