Record companies ask too many permissions for ‘pre-save’ on Spotify

Record companies often ask for far more permissions than necessary if fans want to ‘pre-save’ music on Spotify. Then the record company automatically places an album or single in the user’s library as soon as the music is on the streaming platform.

For ‘pre-save’ only the permission is required to put music in the user’s library, Billboard writes. Despite this, record labels often require ten to sixteen permissions more than that, including user email addresses, access to usage data on Spotify, and the ability to stream music to those users’ devices.

Spotify has been offering pre-save as an option for a few years now and record companies and artists use it to quickly get a lot of streams to end up in the charts. The ‘pre-save’ often works via a button on the artist’s site or on pages that artists post on social media. Spotify has no function in its back-end for artists to set up a pre-save campaign, but various services use the api.

By default, Spotify’s permissions page shows only bold, general permissions, requiring users to click to see what they’re giving permissions to. Users can revoke record label access through an account page on the Spotify site. Spotify has not yet commented on the matter.