[MLA] Watermarking by Universal

[Grimm | Eelco]

Dear all,

I am in a very interesting conversation with Spotify and will get back to you with more details about that after both my contact Simon Hofverberg and me are back from holidays, mid August. The main message to keep at the moment is that Spotify already applies album normalization, but only if the tracks are played in the order of the original album. I have a lot of questions about that and once their process is clearer to me I will report to you. 

For now I like to share this outcrie from Simon with you:

> Universal applies a watermarking to all their tracks, which is most audible for classical music. 
> I think this practice is completely idiotic, and we've been pushing and pushing to get it removed, but they've stayed adamant so far.
> (If you can spread this information to places where it might cause an uproar, that would be awesome ... we can't really go out publicly and complain since we're in a very dependent position with UMG - they're dependent on us too, but still.)
> Here is a super-good blog post about this phenomenon: https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark
> It's written by a Spotify employee in San Francisco, although he wrote it before starting at Spotify. He also wrote update posts, and made a web-based listening test, as follow-up, while at Spotify, but this is his personal blog post, so not something we at Spotify have done.
> If you listen to his sample (he also made a null test sample) you can hear that the disturbance is in the same magnitude (or even worse) as your sample.

Please do not refer to Simon or Spotify if you 'spread this information', but certainly feel free to make some noise.

All the best,
Eelco

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