Spotify - anyone heard of it?

"Spotify is like a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists."

http://pitchfork.com/news/61661-joanna-newsom-spotify-is-the-banana-of-the-music-industry-it-just-gives-off-a-fume/

new username up for grabs with that link headline...someone should snap that up.

original interview:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-joanna-newsom-spotify-villainous-cabal-garbage-system-20151015-story.html

http://wiki.godvillegame.com/images/thumb/b/bf/Banana_Head.jpg/175px-Banana_Head.jpg

related issue re songwriting royalties
http://www.wsj.com/articles/songwriters-lose-out-on-royalties-1444864895

i'd have a lot more sympathy for spotify's "look we gave billions to Rights Holders, whaddyawant" stance if they were more transparent about their relationship with certain Rights Holders. you can't claim you're pro-artist & that the majors are the swindlers while in a collusive relationship with the majors.

http://assets0.thefourohfive.com/data/6920/feature/Gaz-Coombes-April-2012.jpg?1337666628

spotify just decides not to connect like 30% of the time for me now, regardless what device i'm using. endless spinning circles.

Whats w nv imagebombing every thread

Gaz Coombes

Yes i know who it is who cares

Gaaaaz Coooooooombes

Are you okay?

Gz Cmbs

gaz coombes?

Gaz. Coombes.

Gaz it.

Pretty damning to be compared to a nutritious, healthy food.

Also is she shaming crust punks here? Dumpster diving is an excellent way to reduce waste.

overripe bananas have a lot of use.

in simile, for example

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/27/ripe-banana-old-mushy-ugly-but-so-sweet-and-great-for-dessert-yes_n_5715925.html

These all look pretty good.

that link is stinkin up the thread

Noticed this change on Spotify UK, Biography on Artist profiles has been replaced with About

new meta information on Spotify artist profiles on the spotify Windows desktop app: About

the number of monthly listeners (for popular artists you can see their current global ranking, e.g Chvrches are ranked 214th)

Where people listen - top 5 cities

Discovered on: lists the top 5 current playlists where the artist was discovered on. Useful feature for discovering playlists.

About tab is great, I didn't realise, for example, how popular Dave Edmunds is in Sweden

lol, just went to check that and it's twue, it's twue. Just listened to "I Hear You Knocking" and now "Girls Talk."

Pretty much every artist I click on is most popular in London - are there just more people using Spotify there than anywhere else?

geographical population stats, bigger population, larger user base, therefore more likely to dominate top lists.

Yes, these are based on straight counts, not anything fancy.

Glenn,

Couple questions maybe you can shine some light on...

Any chance of adding AllMusic album reviews, in addition to artist profiles?
Any chance of adding user reviews and comments to tracks/artists/albums (either generated from within Spotify or from an external source like AllMusic?) This will probably be controversial but I often find it difficult to find discussion of a certain track, for example.

No, sorry, I don't have any insight on those.

(I'm not personally a big fan of attaching discussions to individual pieces of music like that. I think discussions work better at a higher level...)

http://thetrichordist.com/2015/10/20/spotify-has-apparently-failed-to-license-account-and-pay-on-more-than-150-cracker-and-camper-van-beethoven-songs/

Well it seems like they'll have to pay those twenty five bucks in royalties to them then.

lol

http://www.altpress.com/news/entry/spotify_pulls_thousands_of_victory_records_songs_in_light_of_legal_dispute

in light of an ongoing legal dispute with Victory Records, Spotify has pulled thousands of the label’s songs from their service.

According to a press release from Victory, 53,000,000 streams were identified with no publishing royalties being paid by Spotify. These were originally noted by Audiam, a digital distribution company that monitors services to make certain that publishers are receiving their due payments. In Victory’s case, their publishing company, Another Victory, has allegedly not been receiving proper monetary compensation.

... Bands who have had material removed from Spotify include A Day To Remember, Taking Back Sunday, Hawthorne Heights and many others.

According to Billboard, the unaccounted 53,000,000 streams total nearly $23,000 in unpaid revenue.

a music writer's entire yearly salary

ouch

I haven't heard anything about this case internally, but everything on Spotify comes TO us from a licensor. We're not ripping CDs or uploading our own files or anything like that. We don't have to "find" the owners of a recording. So almost certainly this is a dispute between licensors, or purported licensors.

The thing about knowing who to pay is specifically about songwriting royalties, which are 1/6 (by law) of what we pay. The other 5/6 goes to the licensor of the recordings. So the issue here is probably not that Spotify isn't paying for these songs, but that we're paying somebody who claimed to own the rights but actually doesn't...

$23,000 probably wouldn't even cover the legal fees

Victory Records is the worst label ever

Oh, I see, the whole Victory story is just about the publishing royalties. This is a part that's way more complicated with streaming than it was with physical media. Tower Records didn't have to pay songwriters and recording artists separately, they bought the CDs from the record company, and the record company was responsible for paying both the recording artists and the songwriters. I don't know the history of how the streaming royalty flows came to be different in this way.

this billboard piece more or less explains how it got to this way with separate publishing royalties. it's a somewhat garbled story but it makes it clear there's at least a little bit of blame on pretty much every side of this.

also, LOL at victory records complaining about missing royalties.

LOL indeed

Last week the discover algorithm let me down, but this week past was pretty good. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Well, with this week's playlist I discovered that there is not one but two bands called Sports that put out albums in 2015.

seems it's been mandated that I get at least one mf doom track a week (two this week) along w a healthy portion of mediocre backpacker stuff. otoh, dorothy ashby, v good, more like this ta

Getting a few "source" songs that were later used as samples in popular "rap" songs that I enjoy.

Not complaining, but after reading that article above, I'm wagging my finger at my computer going, "I see what you did there, Spot."

a few weeks ago my Discover Weekly was all rap songs except for a Gram Parsons track

now it's pretty diverse, but only 1 hip hop song, and a fucking Sublime song for some reason

I keep meaning to add the 20-25% of my Discover Weekly which is genuinely new to me (unless it's awful) to a "Discovered" playlist and then, y'know, maybe buy a physical record or two by (for example) William Basinski, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Pye Corner Audio or whoever has come up recently. But I keep forgetting. And now it's Monday and last week's playlist is gone, gone, gone.

It doesn't go out of my comfort zone very often, Discover Weekly. A month back I had four songs in a row which had been covered by This Mortal Coil or The Hope Blister and the following week... a bunch of actual This Mortal Coil tracks. Ok, ok, I used to buy a lot of 4AD back in the day (and sometimes I resort to Spotify rather than dig through unalphabetised vinyl).

Sometimes it's pretty spooky... like, a song I'd been *talking* about, but hadn't heard in years.

I've managed to largely train it away from the self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie and now really look forward to it every Monday, am firmly in the habit of saving the good stuff. Often the good stuff turns out not to merit much further investigation but It hit the jackpot recently with Ben Frost, good Spotify, have a doggie treat.