Turning your Spotify playlist into a record collection, and why that could be really disruptive

Quick summary

I’ve long wanted to make it easy to buy the music of artists I like, not least because they get better £pay on physical, but when (not if) online services de-list things and hard drives break, they don’t vanish forever.

So, here’s a first experiment: pulling out one of my annual playlists into a ‘catalogue/shop window’ that links to various retailers, CD and Vinyl, and Bandcamp if that exists for the artist.

This is only 2025 for now, while I work out some of the bugs. https://dgen.net/w/playlists/2025.html

Update: now live at https://secondpress.club/p/5lx398

Some reflections (over the past three decades)

This is an example of shifting power dynamics in consumption, engagement and how we can help deliver open markets that work for everyone. I’ve also noticed that the music sector is often an early adopter/trailblazer for broader societal shifts.

Music streaming has solved discovery: a near-infinite library at your fingertips, finding new artists, forgotten classics and new connections has never been easier.

However, there’s an issue buried in that convenience: you don’t really ‘have’ any of it. If a label dispute pulls an album, or you cancel your subscription, your carefully curated listening history evaporates. This can also apply to your ‘downloads’ (even with good hard drives and cloud services, we still lose our digital stuff).

I’ve long thought about what it actually means to have a music collection. Back in the day (1998!) I put Virgin Megastores online: all 60,000 products (which is how may CDs were in a typical store), and designed a service with a colleague, Rick Glanville, where we could sell a subscription to digital downloads and give away a tiny MP3 player as part of the package. We even got Cambridge Electronics to make a little postage-stamp sized player. [yes, these pre-dated the iPod, iPod Shuffle and Spotify by many, many years].

While on that journey it struck me that we were in the process of reducing ‘music’ to a search box, killing most of the actual experience outside of listening, destroying record stores, and as humans we were likely to eventually push back on something so techno-reductionist.

Many of the things we enjoy about music listening are physical: this has played out in the long-term success of stores like Rough Trade, and the resurgence of vinyl (even cassettes are back!). At the time, as a bit of rebellion, I also released my own music as a 19kg solid granite MP3 player and radio transmitter.

In one of my many roles as CEO of Consolidated Independent, we helped get over 20% of the world’s music online: millions of tracks from thousands of labels distributed to hundreds of retailers and services. Some of the labels were terrified of the web destroying their business due to piracy, but the whole system had to embrace it, including sorting out commercial realities. Sadly some of those realities massively skewed market value to ‘the big guys’, including ludicrous statements from some (let’s say ‘commercial’) CEOs that if artists wanted more money they should increase their output (as if art and soup cans are the same thing ).

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact we have vast access to new music, and listen to a very diverse range of music. And, it creates different challenges for us as consumers and music fans. Now we can have more agency in balancing out the way the music market works – the cathedrals are not going anywhere, but the bazaar has some new spaces.

What we can now do

One of the things I missed when listening was album art, and a few years back I made a 12″ sized screen to pull down and display whatever I’m playing on Spotify (AI helped me code this, and I would never have got around to it without that help).

Building things just for me is fun, and…

Interestingly, with just a few AI prompts and some lightweight code, I created a tool that takes my Spotify playlist, cross-references every album against Discogs, and produced a personalised catalogue.

Based on the individual tracks I’d added to my annual playlist (which I have going back 8 years now), it looks up the album that it was on. It then works out which are available on CD and Vinyl (or digital–only), where to find them, and who sells them. And, not ‘just Amazon’, but others: Rough Trade, HMV and directly linking back to the artist’s Bandcamp. This is just the start of and idea, and took less than half a day to create it as a prototype.

This makes me wonder about a quiet promise of AI that doesn’t get talked about so much: enabling each of us to build the world we’d like. This will disrupt the big platforms (Spotify, Amazon, Apple) who have invested billions in making their aggregated experience frictionless and hard to leave. They’re using AI to make them more personalised and ‘sticky’. We can do the same for ourselves.

The same AI tools they’re racing to build are equally available to you and me. We can now spin up personalised services—in an afternoon—that would have taken a dedicated development team a decade ago.

So, this is a prototype of a custom, personalised catalogue and record-buying assistant that can be built around your taste, routing money to your preferred retailers that you can share with your friends. It is a small but real act of reclaiming your relationship with artists, and their music, from the big platforms.

We can help bridge the gaps and connect the smaller services together (back to the original vision of the web).

And, looking forward, we can start blending, sharing, cross-connecting using federated services like Mastodon and then connecting people, places, gigs, merch, in a way that could actually help everyone.

Isn’t that exciting!?

Well, it’s taken a little while to pull together, but Binary Dust is now live. Hope you enjoy.

At last, I think the nature of [AV] transmission is beginning to reveal itself.

Do we need a new term? Probably – many other terms (p2p, broadcast, webcast, bitcast, torrent, web2.0, hive, etc) all describe an evolutionary step, so it does make sense to have a phrase to describe this one (note that edgecasting has already been monopolised by the CDN community and doesn’t actually describe “edge” in the context we need it to).

Cloudcasting is a term to describe usage of cloud (or meta-cloud) infrastructure to super-distribute content to, and from, edge devices.

Design requirements

:: Addressability
Permanent, guessable, as per the Coatsian rules of linkage.

:: Viewer Identity Management
Viewer-controlled at the edge, as per the O’Brien rule of Digital Identity Management.

:: Distributed storage
Both at the edge and in the cloud, as per the Loosemore box of imposs and the O’Brien rule of infinite scaling.

:: Open, anonymous publishing
Via tor networks, embedded on every mobile, home router, myth … devices.

:: Access control and content-owner identity tracking
Enabling edge-to-edge rights-control and reporting for those who want/need it. Commercially-enabling is important.

A cloudcast needs to enable content owners to be identified so that they can be paid (via direct and/or syndication channels) but doesn’t need to explicitly identify users, only views, which can be managed via oauth-escrow.

A p2p+tor+S3+mythTV+hive+impossibox mash-up, but with good addressability…?

http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.php

Summary

I remember this kind of idea coming from the utopian folks on the mailing lists a few years back – the kind of “it’ll all be alright if we just co-operate” scenario. Unfortunately, and I’m cynical having spent time embedded in the commercial side, I think it’s well off the mark. But…

Is a subscription-model an industry solution? I don’t think so. It’s part of the landscape.

Is it an excellent business-model for companies? Certainly.

We need to create structure around all that exists, stop suing people and just focus on being constructive. These things are not going away, but neither will CD sales for a long time.

We need to build more bridges between the online and offline worlds.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we just give the “music” away and charge for a product associated with it (which, after all is what we do with CD licensing already). The associated product might be a CD or a memory stick, but it will have a picture on it,
and some perceivable creative and unique value beyond a “device” that carries a signal. Your CD covers are more valuable to you than you might have thought….

What I think the current EFF is missing:

1) Intellectual Property-based commerce relies on geographic boundaries

Getting a commercial collection agencies to work with “the whole web” on behalf of “the whole industry” seems really naive. Why, or how, would a Chinese record label use or trust a US collection agency to get a chunk of its $5. It’s akin to creating a global tax for music, a tax that is paid to lots of profit-driven labels.

I don’t know of good examples where some company in such a situation wouldn’t try and do everything humanly possible to “win” over the rest. Never mind trying to create some kind of international tax-tracking to pay the import and export duties…

In the same light, *any* analogy to radio or broadcasting does not apply because broadcasting is limited by the technology to physical demographics. It is not a good model for any internet commerce.

Broadcast licensing is already a complete mess -profit and business growth is *engineered* around selling rights in different territories. This is an economic cat that does not want to be put back in its bag, so there will be massive opposition to it. The rights organisations hardly ever agree and thank god they don’t otherwise Europe would have followed America’s “lead” a long time ago – PPL in the UK is *still* trying to sue Virgin Radio for webcasting its on-air output…. that’s 8 years.

2) Distribution is an industry

“No CDs to ship”. This is a perfect example – there is a huge industry out there which is based on CD distribution, not just licensing. They also sell DVDs and merchandise. They heavily promote artists. They are not going anywhere soon. HMV/etc. have ‘essential’ commercial relationships as part of the economic ecosystem on which the music industry is based.

3) Computers are good at counting

“divvy up based on popularity” – measuring the charts is hard enough. It might be technically possible to have some trusted measurement network, but, well, do you believe the top10? In the UK they will start to count Digital Downloads in the UK charts later this year – but they are still part of an ecosystem. Never mind the tax issues mentioned above.

Although it’s arguable that every time a track is played it could be measured, but over what timescale? Every form of playback device would need to be internet-enabled. So what do we do for the next few decades?

4) If we build it they will pay

“The vast majority of file sharers are willing to pay a reasonable fee for the freedom to download whatever they like” is completely unknown. I hear it all the time and we all want to believe it. If this is the way we wanted to consume music, we’d have all signed up to Time-Life.

There is a real point here – we like to own things. We’ve like to own the physical product that accompanies our music as well as the convenience of portable playback. I favour models that combine the physical product we can own and the digital product that gives us the connivance.

I know someone who has 200GB of MP3’s and has stopped buying CDs altogether. If they *really* think someone deserves it, they just **buy the CD**. It’s neat, simple and fits the existing commercial models. Personally I’d rather be evangelising the message: “If your MP3 player registers you’ve played a track more than 5 times, show some respect and buy the album from the shops”

5) The Movie and Software guys are getting there faster

(“The movie industry, in contrast, is having its most profitable years in history”). Movies and software are a great examples, but not in the right context. Movies have turned on the head of a pin and created the “slightly too much data to make it worthwhile ripping” DVD format, and you get a nice box.

ADSL just isn’t quite fast enough to treat movies like music – this is just a quirk of physics. We needed 256Kbps to get to good music sharing speed. We’d need 2Mbps for movies and that’s some way off for home use. The movie industry needs to look out for when we have 100BaseT to the home. Oh, and software is still based on a “proprietary hardware solution”.

—

V1.2 1st March, adding related links
V1.1 29th Feb, after feedback from Danny
V1.0 Gavin Starks, 28th Feb 2004

Related Links

29 Feb 04 ZDnet “the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $19.20 on iPod-like MP3 players, putting the devices in the same category as audio tapes and blank CDs. The money collected from levies on ‘recording mediums’ goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenues lost from consumers’ personal copying.”

USA bodies: RIAA (targeting individuals in a high profile campaign)

International IFPI RIAJ

UK licensing bodies: MCPS
AIM PRS
PPL
(e.g. PPL still does not license internet-only radio broadcasts)

Misc: DRM watch