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[Playlists] Solution to false/abusive reporting

Whenever someone reports a playlist - the title and cover art are removed immediately. This is often abused to hurt record labels and playlist curators. After contacting support - the account of someone who abused this system gets taken down. This person then creates another email and free Spotify account and repeats the process. 

 

There is a simple solution to the problem - enable reporting feature only after 10 hours of music/podcasts were streamed using the account. It won't change the experience for a normal user but makes copyright abuse impractical. It's cheap and easy to implement and would stop 95% of false claims.

 

Thank you for your consideration. 

Updated on 2021-06-14

Hey everyone,

 

Thanks for bringing us your feedback in the Spotify Idea Exchange.

 

Your suggestion has gathered the votes necessary and your feedback is now reaching the internal teams at Spotify. They're aware of the vote count and popularity of this idea. We'll continue to monitor and check out the comments here, too.

 

As soon as we have any updates on its status, we'll let you know.

 

More info on how your feedback reaches Spotify via the Idea Exchange can be found here.

Comments
JFC_Alves

One more thing, now Spotify doesn't send emails. I have the same playlist reported, and you know what? No notification in my own email. great! Better and better each day.

coolpanama
Hi all,

Don't bother about this issue anymore, let it go and move on.

Spotify won't do anything about it, because good and popular user-generated
playlists cost them money, and then we don't matter anymore.

I always thought Spotify was a decent, modern and honest company, and the
Swedes were decent, modern and honest people, but clearly they are not.

They won't help us, forget about it, they only go for the money. Our
playlists are DEAD here, let's move on to other platforms.

Honesty, fairness, integrity and responsibility have slipped from their
memory.
DoomNation

Who needs an idea if you have a dispute system like most companies do. I thought Facebook was unreasonable when their algorithms were set to extra sensitive and were disabling ad accounts left and right, but they had a form you can fill out to have it under human review and can reinstate your disabled ad or ad account if it was flagged by the system or otherwise. RIght now I have excellent playlist that was disabled which I have built a great following over a long period of time. In the meantime you have these unscrupulous curators breaking all kind of rules and getting away with it. They're probably the ones who are reporting us because they're actions are keeping their garbage away from the Artist's Discovered On page

DoomNation

It's a thoughtful idea, but unfortunately wouldn't be a solution. Someone can create a bot network that can stream dozens of playlists for 10 hours, than each of the fake accounts will have free reign to report anybody they want.

It's really simple, have a counterclaim system in place so that it can go under human review and restore playlists that are compliant with the terms.  

After which fake claims will end up just being a temporary nuisance as may have to wait a day or two for it to be reviewed,

I remember when the DMCA was just passed in 1998 and people were up in arms as they forecasted that this type of abuse would take place. It turns out that they were right. 

DoomNation

Just got another playlist taken down after a false report!!! After it got 18 followers! This is really unfair, is there somebody who can help??

deadman79

Hello me again, Deadman79, I am commenting again for the first time since the middle of December to talk about problems that have either come back, came up, or are completely new for me.

  1. 3 of my spotify playlists got taken down for violating the terms
    1. 1 of them was deleted
    2. 1 of them was "threatening" it was a joke but okay
    3. And the 3rd one was a STUDY PLAYLIST, it's title was 𝑺𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒚 𝑽𝒊𝒃𝒆𝒔, it had a custom image, and it had no description
  2. My spotify went down 4 times in the past 2-3 weeks.
  3. And my ex who I blocked made a new anonymous account and is spam reporting ALL of my playlists. We ended on bad terms but she lied about having cancer, and a few mental illnesses.

 

Top50Clean

Reporting abuse seems to be back and not going away, so I cooked up a report to keep track of all the emails I've been getting. Enjoy!

 

https://top50clean.com/takedowns.html

Top50Clean

Still going strong today! This is how it's supposed to work, right? Just let the bots run free.

 

Top50Clean_0-1675270986308.png

https://top50clean.com/takedowns.html

DoomNation

From some research I have done, a couple of years ago they did have an appeal option after a playlist was whacked. They took it away because they were overwhelmed with the amount of appeals against fake reports which I guess they felt was taking up too much time and resources. Still they made it too easy for people to file complaints and the takedown process is automated. From what I have read in articles like the one in Billboard which I find the most scary is that they are even enabling copyright theft whereby people can claim one of your songs as their own and if you want it reinstated on the platform you have to convince the other party to rescind the claim which you know they won’t do. If you can’t afford an attorney to fight it, you are SOL. 

SensualBodyworks

On it goes, I have one playlist that seems to be a target with 16k+ likes, and 948 takedowns since Oct 22.