2. "Name collision" unfortunately that's not Spotify's fault but the artist who set the wrong Artists ID. So instead of creating a new one for themself, they just use an already existing one with the same name. What I did in the last i just email the record label ( if they have one ) and ask them. In my case i listen to metal, but every know and then a mediocre rap song shows up in my RR. Usually because the artist is clueless and they just "put they new song" on Spotify.
Entity resolution is a thing though, and the Discover Weekly algorithm actually tries to combine artists (possibly due to collaborations), which is what goes wrong.
For example, I follow Cornelius, the Japanese guitarist. I liked several of his song. So the data indicates I’m a fan. I’ve been recommended a new song by a different Cornelius. This other guy is an African gospel singer. I don’t follow him. Never even played a song.
That shouldn’t happen. The system knows they’re different Corneliuses, because the catalogs aren’t mixed, but yet string match took over.
I wonder if, instead of a string match, enough people have searched “Cornelius” and (accidentally, out of curiosity, etc.) played the gospel singer’s songs that it’s algorithmically linked the gospel singer to the other artists these people listen to, which are then linked back to the Japanese guitarist.
No, you have to sign up with a company Spotify has a deal with. Spotify seems to no longer have a deal with the sort of "artist services" companies that don't check if the uploaded music is a Beyonce album.
Spotify, or rather the old Echo Nest folks I suspect, actually do a lot to combat spam compared to the other streaming services.
I tried out the French service Deezer for a while, they had a huge compilation spam problem. I found one spammer in particular, who around four times per months would upload 300+ albums, all with the same title and cover art, only the artist name would be different. Thus you would get the album "Angry Man" by Frank Sinatra, "Angry Man" by Charles Aznavour, "Angry Man" by Johnny Rivers, etc. for another 300 artists. Thing is, they would contain music from the actual artist. The spammer probably speculated that if you wanted to add, say, Doc Watson's "Sitting on top of the world" to a playlist, searching would lead you to one of his "compilations" instead of the original. Or maybe it's part of a scam with hacked accounts "listening" to these teams. Either way, it must have been profitable, because with some searching I found out he'd been at it for almost a decade. He uses one of the "artists services" companies that lets him pick a new label name every time, but his laziness in generating images reveals it's the same guy (and I'm pretty sure I know his name, too).
He's not on Spotify, they kicked him off ages ago. But he's on literally every other streaming service that I know.
Spotify at least seems to have a few humans employed to take tips about mislabeled releases and fix them. (For instance, they removed the albums of the Salvadorean rapper Spiro from the page of the British folk band Spiro when I mailed them about it.) Most streaming services have nothing of the sort. Music metadata sucks, but Spotify is actually slightly less godawful than the norm.
