  Music streaming platforms are currently among the main sources of music
consumption, and the embedded recommender systems significantly influence what
the users consume. There is an increasing interest to ensure that those
platforms and systems are fair. Yet, we first need to understand what fairness
means in such a context. Although artists are the main content providers for
music platforms, there is a research gap concerning the artists' perspective.
To fill this gap, we conducted interviews with music artists to understand how
they are affected by current platforms and what improvements they deem
necessary. Using a Qualitative Content Analysis, we identify the aspects that
the artists consider relevant for fair platforms. In this paper, we discuss the
following aspects derived from the interviews: fragmented presentation,
reaching an audience, transparency, influencing users' listening behavior,
popularity bias, artists' repertoire size, quotas for local music, gender
balance, and new music. For some topics, our findings do not indicate a clear
direction about the best way how music platforms should act and function; for
other topics, though, there is a clear consensus among our interviewees: for
these, the artists have a clear idea of the actions that should be taken so
that music platforms will be fair also for the artists.
