You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

Recordings are owned by licensors, who send bulk uploads of audio, with the credits in accompanying XML files, to the streaming services. ‘Licensors’ include all the major labels, a few aggregators that take care of distribution for smaller indie labels, and a bunch of self-service distributors (with a weirdly stages-of-life set of names like OneRPM, CDBaby and DistroKid) that independent artists can use themselves for negligible fees. That’s all. Nobody uploads music directly to Spotify or Apple Music, yet. Thus there’s still a conceptual line between these ‘professional’ streaming services and ones like SoundCloud and YouTube, to which anybody can upload anything, even though a) that ‘anything’ could include professional-produced music just as readily as cute ten-second cat videos, and b) most of those self-service distributors impose few if any constraints on what you upload.