The Victorian Music Development Office has published research from Swinburne University and The University of Melbourne examining the impact of music streaming algorithms on Australian artists. Pulling data about Spotify from analytics tool Chartmetric, the findings looked at 12,333 artists, 2.27 million tracks and 5,000 playlists to investigate the imbalance of Australian representation on the global streaming platform.
Photo © Ravi Roshan/Pexels
Spotify song recommendations are influenced by factors including paid promotions, user behaviour, the career stage and familiarity of an artist, and a label’s global reach.
The report finds there are 115 million active North American Spotify users, compared with 12.5 million Australian users. Despite Australian listeners having a preference for local content, their smaller numbers mean it has comparatively little weight in algorithms, while the US audience shares a 99 per cent similarity rate with global genre preferences.
As users interact with tracks they know and enjoy, the algorithm also favours established artists; there are 28 times more established US artists than Australian or New Zealand artists. The report suggests these biases likely contribute to a higher skip rate and, in turn, lower algorithmic reach for Australian artists.
On Spotify, algorithmically generated playlists draw from a pool of 47,319 unique tracks, while human-curated editorial playlists offer 190,034 unique tracks, meaning algorithmic listening leads to content drawn from a narrower range of artists and limits the discoverability of new music.
While Spotify’s editorial playlists in Australia featured 45 per cent Australian content, algorithmic playlists included only 25 per cent.
The report recommends measures to give Australian artists easier pathways into digital streaming, including greater transparency around Spotify’s algorithms, improved artist training and resources, and the introduction of quotas and initiatives for Australian music.
The research follows a report released by The Australia Institute in November, which found a 31 per cent drop in Australian music streamed between 2021 and 2026. In 2024, only 773 Australian artists made the top 10,000 streamed artists.
More about the research can be found here. The full report will be released at a later date.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source limelight-arts.com.au ’
