Spotify - anyone heard of it?

i'm not making any claims about who did what for whom and why. i noticed something unusual, and found a pretty key piece of information left out. and all i had to do to do that was google the band's name - something you'd think they'd want if they're promoting a band rather than a service.

i should say the "former" status of industry dude is self-professed. no word how he's surviving off $900 made over the last year

so a band makes it onto a playlist. maybe it was chosen via likes/followers/whatever, which is what every music-editorial outlet and radio station does. (there was a long piece about radio 1 wrt this: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/25/radio-1-playlist-secrets-uncovered-battle-of-brands). or maybe there was a promotional/sponsored deal that got them onto this playlist, which is what every music-editorial outlet and radio station does. (see payola, see On the Verge, see a bunch of things I shouldn't have to write out as news.)

or maybe, just maybe, the spotify employee who did that particular playlist really liked that band, or some other band without super-impressive follower numbers (which are gamed and bought so hard that you really can't use them alone as an indicator of anything, but that's another story) and snuck them onto a playlist because they aren't tightly monitored and they can get away with it. when I used to write for a pop site I'd do roundups and throw in, from time to time, videos by small bands I really liked who made music simpatico to what we've been covering. when I currently select tracks for a pop site I do the same. (the nice thing about this, and the thing that people who obsess about followers and shares don't seem to have internalized, is that such acts are far more likely to retweet, post to facebook, whatever, because they are not constantly inundated with requests to do so and they are probably genuinely surprised and happy for the coverage. and you get decent numbers out of that, as in, I've seen the numbers with my own eyes. not colossal, but enough to make it worth doing.)

anyway, I'm not saying it's the most likely possibility, but it's a possibility. the rest is just how the industry works

also, I know very little about how spotify does their official playlists, whether they are done internally (and whether it's editorial or business or interns or whatever) or farmed out to contractors or what, and whether there's tight oversight of analytics or whether you can, as upthread, just throw darts in the dark, but the barrier to entry to placing some band onto a Beards and Flannel playlist is probably far lower than premiering that band on a music website.

It's true, it could just be that a guy at spotify just happened to like a song by a band made of self-professed "industry vets" who then responded to the unexpected attention by promoting spotify rather than their band.

you really think this piece does more for spotify than it does for the band?

I'm pretty curious about spotify playlists myself, I have a friend who works for them in a menial capacity & keep meaning to ask her about this. maybe glenn can shed some light on the subject

Did you read the piece, Katherine? Does it strike you as aimed towards getting them past fifty followers on their bimonthly updated twitter?

For a group excited about engaging the new marketplace they seem to not actually do it, except to thank the angel that plucked them from obscurity and got them 900 bucks

^ works for dogetunes

Excuse me I have been very up front about my relationship with ghosttunes and is appreciate a little faith that my criticisms here are unaffected by Garth being my BFF

I'm with Katherine here. I think this is a band that was living in fair obscurity--I was going to say "toiling" but I don't think they were even doing that--and they got picked up by some chance onto Spotify's playlist. Maybe the maker of that playlist was by a fan, or maybe it was a "music industry vet" friend of theirs. I doubt the band was somehow expected or required to write PR for Spotify in return. If I were in a band that is apparently not trying hard at all to promote themselves (based on dc's social media stats above), I'd be pretty stoked on Spotify's attention too. They wouldn't need to make some nefarious under-the-table deal with me for me to speak positively about my experience.

The thing I noticed most in that article? This obscure band talks about how many plays their one song has gotten--which makes you wonder, "wait, who is this band?"--and what do you know, there's a Spotify embed of their song in the article. So every reader of Wired now has the opportunity to click that stream and help this band make another $900. Of course the hook of the article has to be Spotify and not the band, otherwise no one would read this and no one would click on their track.

just a sweet innocent band of industry vets who barely acknowledge the internet until spotify gives them 900 bucks at which point they write a long article with pie charts about how the future looks bright

It's true, it could just be that a guy at spotify just happened to like a song by a band made of self-professed "industry vets" who then responded to the unexpected attention by promoting spotify rather than their band.

lol this is exactly what I'm talking about, this pretty pure-conjecture-but-I-know-the-real-story stance - most of the time when you flex this kinda insider-info about the industry, it doesn't really match my own limited-but-inside view of the industry

like, no shots, for real, but to me you come off like the guy explaining how all the drugs work who then reveals he hasn't actually taken any drugs

you picked a weird bit to quote as me "flexing insider info" - my tongue-in-cheek description of the alternative hypothesis

lol misread you then, my bad

you could just say "you think your so great" if you're not willing to actually read what you quote

but your thing reads as "there's no way an employee at spotify liked something, gave it the recommendation and it did well" -- whereas I have direct experience (years ago, but it's the same principle) of "an employee at Yahoo! liked your stuff, decided to make it pick of the day, and you made 500 bucks that week and your website got more hits than you could have possibly anticipated" -- people do actually, you know, like stuff and decide to use their positions to give it some shine

I mean I seriously do feel like you have a bunch of zero-source "everybody knows this is how it works" stuff about the industry, and it literally never matches my (again, limited, small-game, but still) experience of said industry. ever.

ok now you've read half what i wrote. i never said random luck never hits obscure bands. i'm just questioning why a band who does so little to engage the internet would then go hog wild to promote the company that did them a solid. yahoo got you some cash - did you start a tumblr to write a long article about how yahoo is the future and that people hating on yahoo are fools and then get it reposted to wire?

fyi all insider info i'm flexing here can be found by reading the article and googling "moke hill"

wired, rather

also said article never mentions being singled out by spotify - would your "hooray for yahoo" article have not mentioned they made it "pick of the day"?

just a sweet innocent band of industry vets who barely acknowledge the internet until spotify gives them 900 bucks at which point they write a long article with pie charts about how the future looks bright

― da croupier, Wednesday, November 26, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, that's what I said. If I was used to making $0 and then I made $900 I would think the future looks bright. And if I could get my song embedded in a Wired article then I would still think my future looks bright.

personally i don't think industry vets who get rapturous about making 900 bucks over a year should get to call themselves industry vets

shit i don't think you even have to be an industry vet to question whether that 900 bucks is oil bubbling up from jed's land, just an adult

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the band started doing PR in earnest. (the wired article says "no PR," but "several years on the business side of the industry" is plausibly enough to know the right people and get emails opened.) "in earnest" apparently included placement on a Spotify playlist, for whatever reason. maybe it was an email some playlist guy opened, maybe it was a sponsored deal, maybe it was a longtime fan who just happened to land at spotify. the point is, this is very unremarkably how things work, and the Wired piece not mentioning the exact playlist is not proof of some massive conspiracy.

you gotta wonder why i've bothered repeatedly noting I'm not saying there's necessarily a massive conspiracy

but you also gotta wonder led by someone who writes shit like

Rather than fighting, I believe the industry should embrace the change that’s coming (or more accurately, the change that has already arrived). Technological advances have made mobile access to millions of songs a reality – this is a great thing for music fans. Subscribers paying for the mobile version of Spotify in the US are spending ~$120 per year on the service – well above (almost 5x by some reports) what the average music listener spends on music per year. More people spending more money on recorded music (since Spotify’s total revenue increases with each new user) leads to bigger payouts for artists, writers, labels and publishing companies alike.

and

As for Moke Hill, we’ve spent next to nothing to get our songs on Spotify and it has exposed us to tens of thousands of people around the world who never would have heard our music otherwise. Spotify is not only paying us, but building our fan base while paying us, which will eventually make it easier to sell tickets to shows.

wouldn't manage to capitalize off their fluke hit beyond having a whopping 246 followers on spotify. ffs brokencyde has over 22,000.

you also might wonder why this person has seemingly never posted an article before on the internet.

hell even a paragraph of text

woops, meant to say "gotta wonder why a band led by someone..."

forgive me if it seems like these guys are exceptionally verbose and grateful for 900 bucks

"I purchased Dr. Dre's Tha Chronic like 7 times, turns out my dad was throwing it out every time he saw it laying around."

Solid argument for streaming in the comments.

you don't think having your band at the center of a wired article is "capitalizing"? (and when I said it did more for them than spotify, what I meant was the odds of someone saying "wow, spotify isn't so bad after all, my mind has been swayed by this one band" or "wow, I have never heard of this large, ubiquitous company even though I read WIRED," I'm going to check it out" are exponentially smaller than the odds of someone saying "wow, I like this band, I'm going to check them out."

katherine if a band who posts single sentences on social media once every two months suddenly were driven to write multiple paragraphs of pro-spotify statistics and anti-taylor swift/aloe blacc talking points because they got 900 bucks and a follower count that's a fifth of what some rock critics have, and the reason was that they wanted to get that WIRED crowd onto the Moke Hill train...these guys have to be pretty dumb fucks.

what's funny the usual dumb fuck musician in the same situation could have easily posted on facebook "spotify randomly put us in a playlist, and suddenly one of our songs had 300,000k streams instead of 5,000. pretty sweet right? actually, we've just gotten 900 bucks. sure, that was nice but it barely put us on the map otherwise. it doesn't seem we got much in the way of publicity." at which point people would note they probably suck and could stand to get off their ass and not expect spotify to do everything for them.

just read his editorial, wow it's a lot of bullshit

I think you really have a weird sense of how much it means the first time you get anywhere near Actual Money for your music -- like, 900 bucks...is fucking 900 bucks, it's incredibly super-nice to get a check for that amount - the first time I made a grand in a night was '98, I still remember it really clearly because it was like holy shit. a thousand dollars. takes me three and a half weeks to earn that normally. I am still talking about it. but this dude used to be a publicist evidently? and people are seriously asking musicians right and left "wanna write a Spotify article?" pro or con because they're getting linked, so I'd guess this guy thought "I can write one and generate further publicity for myself"

Omg why are people acting like this guys some sweet noob getting lucky kisses from wired and spotify when he's a self described industry veteran with management label experience, who literally started a tumblr for his band just to post this article

Why the hell is my noting this is weird and suspsish causing people to half-read my posts and respond like I'm bob lefsetz screaming about the saucer people

lol no idea. My reaction was exactly same as yours (minus the investigation part because you've already done it).

Bless you sir was reaching frustration level mugatu

the author and co-founder of Moke Hill's motivation is pretty clear

"Imagine if Spotify were embraced by notable musicians and revenue grew to 10 times what it is today (and the streams per song along with it); the singles mentioned above could be generating $9 to $17 million dollars each—for one song."

it's easy if you try...

Different playlists on Spotify get done different ways. Some involve significant personal input, some are much more numbers-driven. I don't know the exact story behind Beards & Flannel, but it's an individual's list that has been featured in the Spotify editorial section, not an official Spotify company-produced list. It's got 28k followers, and the follower-count is usually a smallish fraction of the listeners, so that song might have reached ~100k people by appearing on that list. It's sort of like getting played on a college radio show, except that list doesn't change very often, and Moke Hill's song has been on there since January, so I guess it's like being put into long-term rotation on a very small station.

da croupier the thing that nags at me in your post is that you're implying that this guy is in bed with Spotify at this is some kind of cynical PR shill for Spotify, like he's so naive that he made $900 that he'll do anything for them.

I think this "industry vet"--by the way the phrase "industry vet" is nowhere in the article--used his contacts to get on a playlist on Spotify and also to land an article in Wired, and he's savvy enough to know that Wired will not publish an article about Mole Hill but will publish an article on Spotify. You seem baffled that this (sneer) "industry vet" is so bad at social media, get when it comes to the two huge PR scores he's achieved, it must have nothing to do with his connections and everything to do with Spotify exploiting a naive schmuck,

ffs you've spent the day researching everything there is to know about Mole Hill, so I think this guy is not a rube.

alright, last time i'm going to explain why someone's confused about what i'm saying. from here on out if i ignore you, that means you don't understand what i've said and i don't need to repeat myself again.

that this guy is in bed with Spotify at this is some kind of cynical PR shill for Spotify, like he's so naive that he made $900 that he'll do anything for them.

this is a really wrongheaded conflation of one possibility - that this article is not just some tenderhearted indie musician speaking up for the company that's gonna get him and everyone else through the rain - and another, which i've only shared tongue-in-cheek because it's so ridiculous - that he was legitimately moved to write a long-ass article full of industry-wide optimism and pie-charts (despite minimal web presence beforehand) because he got random love from spotify adding up to 900 bucks and less than 300 followers (admittedly more than he has on any other platform). if you think i'm saying he became a pr shill for spotify BECAUSE he got 900 bucks, you need to read slower.

I think this "industry vet"--by the way the phrase "industry vet" is nowhere in the article-

you're right. in the article he says Before switching over to the artist’s side of things, I spent several years on the business end of the industry, working at an indie label and management company. That experience gave me exposure to the process of how revenue flows from consumers to artists, and how that process is changing with new technology. If you feel the phrase "industry vet" is misleading shorthand to use in response to the repeated idea that he saw 900 bucks and went "woah, we're making it!" (again, an idea i've floated only as an alternative to him being a pr shill) I'm really surprised by this

-used his contacts to get on a playlist on Spotify and also to land an article in Wired, and he's savvy enough to know that Wired will not publish an article about Mole Hill but will publish an article on Spotify.

nowhere in the article does he acknowledge being benefited from a playlist on spotify - merely that spotify "exposed" his band's work. so you're basically admitting there's at least a modicum of deception involved in him saying what worked for moke hill will work for every indie artist. you're even taking it a step further. you're saying a guy who can't be bothered to post regularly on facebook, twitter, instagram to promote his band, started a tumblr with a long article about how spotify is the future, with the long game of slipping in promotion of his band in Wired. Cuz man, what a "huge pr score". Almost as big as the one that got him 200+ followers on spotify. (ps i have an old co-worker who makes no music and has 1,524).

I am soooooo not saying it has nothing to do with connections. AT ALL. i have to assume you missed the sarcasm of the "ok perhaps he's just some guy who rose like a phoenix when spotify gave him cash" for you to think i was.

this bit from the tumblr version of the article probably also influenced my decision to honor him with the handle "industry vet"

Today, I’m experiencing the industry from the side of the artist (although admittedly, miles from Taylor Swift and Aloe Blacc on the notoriety continuum). In 2013, I formed a band called Moke Hill with my close friend Andrew Phillips and we were later joined by several other friends from within the industry.

actually, to acknowledge that there sure has been plenty of clusterfuck, lemme just lay out what i've been saying in the simplest terms. hopefully then people can disagree with THAT.

a person who "worked for several years on the business end of the industry," in their own words, now has an indie band with a web presence that would hardly suggest they're engaging the new music economy as we know it. this person then started a tumblr for his band that has no information about their music, just a long article about how the arguments against spotify are really misleading, complete with charts and graphs, noting that while 300,000 streams have only gotten him $900, it's really helped them out in terms of outreach and publicity (again, this someone who has posted a collective five tweets, six facebook posts and 12 instagram photos over the last year, so you know how much he's into outreach and publicity). he trumpets that no pr or marketing went into their success, but fails to acknowledge that a spotify-promoted playlist is undoubtedly what got this track 300,000 streams when the rest of the songs only have about 10,000 (they also have a miniscule amount of followers on spotify, suggesting there really hasn't been a groundswell of interest from this playlist placement). despite zero history of any other writing on the net, this post got linked to in the kansas city star, and then turned into an article for wired within a month.

i deem this odd. very odd.

forgot: there's also no acknowledgement of bandcamp or any other popular indie band music distribution platform. part of why i'd even go as far to say the piece is "suspicious," though i know i'm asking for someone to say i'm accusing them of some grand conspiracy if i do.

I advise you to avoid all music premieres.

not sure i understand that cryptic dismissal (though it's a refreshing change of pace - no clear evidence what i've written has been ignored or misread), but i should note that part of why i'm hesitant to lay out any actual conspiracy is that it's possible this guy IS focused more on kissing industry ass than engaging with an audience at this point. He says himself We laid the foundation for Moke Hill with an EP that came out at the end of 2013, then worked on new material to complete a full-length release as a basis to secure label, management and booking partners. And while I think it's insane to think Wired is a way to the people, saying you think spotify is the bee's knees might be a way to get label, management and booking partners.

despite zero history of any other writing on the net, this post got linked to in the kansas city star, and then turned into an article for wired within a month.

i deem this odd. very odd.

totally odd. it's almost like the guy used to be a publicist and might know people at publications or something.

Can we move on to the next artist complaining about or praising Spotify?

ime people tend to follow playlists in spotify, rather than musicians. a low follower for an unknown indie band isn't necc. an indication that people aren't listening to or liking their music (correct me if i'm wrong, glenn)

Just got the family plan for 4 people. Nice for me to save money but man Spotify is just going to burn cash to get MAUs, huh?

MAUs?