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.

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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,...