Spotify - anyone heard of it?

The blog that Glenn linked makes it pretty plain they pushed out their re-design way too early.

i am attacking spotify as a company

that's fine! I thought maybe you were referring to my posts, but I guess you weren't. sorry I misunderstood!

Kinda weird that that (absolutely amazing) Basement Tapes Complete only registers a few thousand plays for most of the songs?

Tracer, I'm pretty sure that last time I looked for them, the Bootleg Series albums weren't on Spotify so that might explain it, if they've just been added recently. And I'm less sure of this, but I think there was a sampler on there before, which might explain why a few tracks do have millions of plays.

The blog that Glenn linked makes it pretty plain they pushed out their re-design way too early

I don't see that in the article at all, fwiw.

It was written before they pushed it out. Glenn was helping to illustrate the scale of what was up. We can draw our own conclusions.

Just a comment - I use Spotify for Roku on my tv, which is hooked up to an amplifier and speakers.

As this is the best set-up for my needs, it would be cool if I could add to playlists from it, or even make playlists.

It's not a crisis or anything - just something that would be cool further down the road.

the roku app is frustratingly limited. I'm in the same situation where it's the one connected to my stereo, but I tend to bluetooth from my phone instead because it gives me more control. The thing I really wish they'd bring back on the roku app is menu options on tracks. Would be great to be able to go to an artist's page from their track. The old roku app had this.

Can you use Spotify Connect to control the Roku's playback from your phone? I've always found that an easier way to work with Spotify on TVs than fiddling with the built-in interface.

yes you can

Yeah, I use Spotify on Roku all the time, and just control it from my phone or laptop.

You can barely make playlists with Spotify itself right now, good luck doing it via another intermediary

i have a bunch of issues with spotify but no issues whatsoever with making playlists now or ever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seems to be making a playing queue ok now but still not allowing scrolling if I'm bringing something new up from bottom. So have to do it in short steps.

& has brought up a couple of options of accessing recent searches etc though have to go to home page.
Do wish they would return search box to active page instead of menu.

my workaround for adding tracks to playlists rn is to play the track i want to add, scroll to the spot in the playlist where i want to add it, and drag the playing track in

I know the fix for that dragging-up problem, specifically, is in the next version...

OK, I'm not sure if I've just discovered or rediscovered this service (its name is so similar to Organize Your Music, which doesn't work in the same way, but http://sortyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com is brilliant.

Specific use case: sort a playlist by release date, then save it as a fresh playlist with one click. Yes, Spotify's release date for back catalogue are hit and miss and often feature the rerelease date instead, but it seems like that's less the case than it used to be and in any case it's a whole lot better than nothing when you've got a mega playlist like this one and just fancy listening to the early stuff.

Here's a question for somebody like, say, glenn- Where did the Chuck D Clash podcast go to? Stay Free: The Story of the Clash, I believe it was called.

yes, it's a little weird that's gone missing

What's also good now is the way when I do try to look at my local files it just crashes the whole program. What a heap of shit.

Try to delete a playlist, get this fuckery:
https://i.ibb.co/5hvJfHG/Untitled.png

Try to look at a playlist, get this bullshit:
https://i.ibb.co/6DJtnWb/Untitled2.png

To be fair to them that looks like a freak bug that probably affects 0.0001% of people based on some obscure combination of hardware and software and that they've never soon before. I'd try a fresh install as a first resort.

Do wish they would return search box to active page instead of menu.

Is this some sort of attempt to force additional "engagement" or whatever with Spotify (i.e bury the one function everyone uses every time they open Spotify one level down).

I’ve been getting a fun new bug where dragging a song to a playlist warns me it’s a duplicate, despite not having been added before—I have to click don’t add and add it again for it to work. If I click to add anyway, the song it adds is the previous one I added, not the one I just dragged to the playlist.

1. Check my credit card statement and realise that I am paying for Spotify Premium, somehow
2. Log in to Spotify, it says I need to update my location and kicks me out, try again, the same happens.
3. Finally twig that I have to go to the desktop version, so recover my password (another story) and do that.
4. Change my location on the desktop version and log in to Spotify again.
5. But I don't have Premium on here? What?
6. Try out every other email address I have (another 15 minutes here while it redirects me to a "something has gone wrong" US page (I am in the UK)
7. It turns out that three different email addresses have Spotify accounts. None of them have Premium.
8. Write an angry note on the Spotify support forum explaining what has gone wrong. Spend 5 minutes adding mandatory tags and going through three capcha processes, whereupon it asks me to log into my account, which then leads to another 404 page.
9. Finally try logging in via Facebook, yes this works! I can tell I have Premium here, only because it isn't nagging me to sign up for it. But can I cancel it? No. Also it has yet another email address listed, one I lost access to about five years ago.
10. Finally signing in on desktop via facebook works! And going through a load of menus I can finally find a "manage subscriptions" option.
11. And just to end this story there are a whole FIVE PAGES of nag screens before I can finally cancel the subscription.

This right here is why I fucking hate Spotify. Well, one of the reasons.

I rather doubt Spotify is any worse than any other subscription service when it comes to managing your unconnected accounts if you sign up for 4 of them using email accounts you no longer have access to and forget which is which.

Something has gone wrong

the root of the problem is

- automatically signing in with whichever Google account is active and not making it clear that you have done this

- having a support forum which is unusable and let's you write a comment which you cannot then post

- not letting users manage or view subscription settings in app, or let you know you have to be on the desktop version to do so

yes, there are lots of apps that do the same to some extent, is this the worst one? not sure, maybe, however "other people are bad so we are also bad" is no kind of argument to make.

for someone with my level of executive dysfunction this means that for reasons beyond my control I have lost £50 I cannot afford for a service I did not use. I can't sue anyone so let me vent on here please.

oh and all the 404s, no other service does that quite so much.

In 2020, when live music was dead, and musicians were suffering, and @Bandcamp started Bandcamp Fridays to help, Apple, Amazon and Spotify quietly dropped their payments per stream. Spotify has reduced their rate by 43% in 2 years. #spotify #bandcamp #justiceatspotify #payartists https://t.co/HcV773XkFM

— Ashtray Navigations (@ashtraynav) June 2, 2021

Well, I think I finally understand their business model for transitioning from unprofitable to profitable.

So Spotify pays out royalties based on how much money they collect in ad revenue and subscription fees. This must mean that they (and the other services, tbf) have been collecting less money per new user?

Seems like this model encourages userbase growth and maximizes overall revenue to the labels (and the artists). Your per-stream payout is lower but there are more streams.

Also seems like the labels should have set a minimum per-stream price. Maybe they did, and we just haven't hit it yet :/

The labels are not in it for their artists

This must mean that they (and the other services, tbf) have been collecting less money per new user?

How is this even possible?

Right, both the addition of discount plans and expansion into countries with lower relative prices result in lower averages per user and per stream, but more streams and more total money.

And, of course, none of these services set their payments by stream, so "quietly dropped their payments per stream" is a giveaway that the writer either doesn't know how this works, or is counting on the reader not knowing...

Also, payments are done by product by region, not through averages, so although expanding into Bangladesh (e.g.) makes the overall effective average go down, it doesn't change the amounts or rates paid for US Premium streams.

Not sure if you know the answer to this, Glenn – but when a 30-second (or shorter) song clip is used in something like an Instagram Story, does any $$ change hands? Or is it just treated as promotional?

I doubt it, but I have no idea if there are specific business arrangements for Instagram...

Also, payments are done by product by region, not through averages, so although expanding into Bangladesh (e.g.) makes the overall effective average go down, it doesn't change the amounts or rates paid for US Premium streams.

A comfort to know that expansion into Bangladesh doesn't change the reprehensibly low rates paid for US Premium streams

You are free to call 70% of revenue "reprehensibly low" if that's how you feel, of course, but it's a larger share to royalties than LPs, CDs or iTunes downloads had...

percentage of revenue is probably not the right stat to talk about... the issue (if i'm not mistaken) is how the artists can make a living wage/fair compensation, and how the cheap/free streaming model, by involving much less revenue to start with, already means a huge cut to that? and then within that frame, it's fair to say, "if spotify's raking in all this dough, then they do have the opportunity to get the artists closer to a living wage/fair compensation." like - the pie has gotten smaller. so it's not really meaningful to say "well, they're getting 70% of this much smaller pie, that's a higher percentage!" right?

Except streaming is on course to maybe bring the music industry back to CD-era levels, so it's actually not a *much* smaller pie currently, and it might not be smaller at all soon.

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

You are free to call 70% of revenue "reprehensibly low" if that's how you feel, of course, but it's a larger share to royalties than LPs, CDs or iTunes downloads had...

― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, June 3, 2021 9:31 AM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

A question in good faith: do you know of a single artist whose career spans both the LP and CD era and the streaming era who is in better shape now than they were in 1992? Are you aware of any such artists who have publicly embraced streaming over the old model as a sustainable way for artists to continue producing work?

a larger share to royalties than LPs, CDs or iTunes downloads had...

How many $30 CDs can I get each week for $10 a month?

The best estimates I've seen for average music-spending per person at the height of the CD boom were $25-45/year. The CD retail chain kept about 55% of that, so that was $12-20 per person per year in effective royalties. A $10/month streaming subscription is about $84/year in royalties. A "free" ad-supported account is more like $15-20. So overall it's pretty comparable, and maybe the average is actually higher. So the industry premise is that we can get more money into the system by getting more people to spend $10/month even though the tiny fraction of people (like me) that used to spend $1000s/year are no longer doing that.

I do appreciate all these stats, some more I would like: how many people are on premium vs free accounts (and is that proportion changing); and are there significantly more people trying to make a living (or any money) from recorded music, now the barrier to entry is much lower?

That RIAA chart is really interesting; I didn't realize CD sales had shrunk to that extent (also helpful that it has the "Revenue adjusted for inflation" checkbox – looks like there's still a ways to go before we come close the 1999 peak by that measure).

I too would love to know how many artists are trying to make a living from it. There are >10m artists on Spotify, but that includes a lot of people (like me) who aren't trying to make money, which makes any statistics about "% of artists" basically meaningless...

For that matter, how many artists were making a living from music in 1992? And how many of those were getting royalties, vs on unrecouped major-label contracts.

The best estimates I've seen for average music-spending per person at the height of the CD boom were $25-45/year. The CD retail chain kept about 55% of that, so that was $12-20 per person per year in effective royalties. A $10/month streaming subscription is about $84/year in royalties. A "free" ad-supported account is more like $15-20. So overall it's pretty comparable, and maybe the average is actually higher. So the industry premise is that we can get more money into the system by getting more people to spend $10/month even though the tiny fraction of people (like me) that used to spend $1000s/year are no longer doing that.

This is interesting, but feels like it's not apples and apples, stats wise. If the average per person (all people, or just music buyers?) was $12-20 before, I'd love to know what that average is now – presumably quite a few people don't stream music at all, but I don't know how that compares with the numbers who never bought CDs/records in the old era.

And the other part of this equation is just how many more artists and releases there are than there used to be. I'm sure the vast majority of revenue is generated off the back of a small number of artists, but of course it's all the little artists that people care about in all this. Or maybe not the tiny ones, who people recognize would never had made much money in any era, but the ones big enough to have some media attention and be able to tour to a following.

xpost