by Serguey Shinder
In April 2022 we released a single, our first in four years, through one of the online services that deliver music to the streaming platforms for a small annual fee. Our drummer did the upload late one evening. The form asked whether we already had an artist profile on each platform, and when he typed our name it offered a list of existing profiles. A profile with our name was first on the list, with a small square picture too small to make out, and he picked it.
It was not ours. It belonged to a band in Ohio who had been using the same name since about 2015 and played something much closer to metal. For the next fourteen weeks our single sat on their page, between their two albums. Friends who searched for us found a photograph of five men we had never met. Their listeners, who were sent our song as a new release from a band they followed, skipped it within seconds, in large numbers, and the platform drew its own conclusions about how much anybody wanted to hear it.
The money, oddly, was fine. Royalties follow whoever uploaded the track, so we were paid for every play. What we lost was everything else a release is for. Nobody could follow us, because following that page meant following them. The song reached none of the playlists the platforms build from listening habits, because the habits they saw belonged to metal fans in the American Midwest.
Getting it moved took nine weeks of emails between our distributor, theirs and the platform's support team for artists. The Ohio band were perfectly decent about the whole thing, and slightly puzzled.
What I had not understood was that on those platforms a band is not its name. The name is only what is displayed. Underneath it sits an identifier, a long string at the end of the profile link, and every release attaches to that string. Two bands can share a name for decades without any trouble. What they cannot share is the string, and the only thing deciding which one a release lands on is somebody choosing from a list on a form at eleven at night.
We now keep one page in the band's shared folder with the profile link and identifier for every platform we are on, copied from the platforms themselves. Every upload uses the link and never a search by name. And before a release is allowed to go live, two of us open its page on each platform and check that the photograph is of us, and that the songs either side of it are ours.
A name is what people call you. On a streaming platform, the string underneath it decides whose page you are on.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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