Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I just read about this. Apparently some kind of streaming iTunes looking service with rights to all the majors cleared. Could be interesting? If nothing else just to see it fail miserably...

trying this now. blatant rip of itunes design-wise but looks better in many ways. all i really want to do with it is listen to whole albums easily and it seems to let you do that very well (i haven't heard the ads yet tho).

20 second xbox ad came in after 5 songs. not bad really.

needs last.fm support asap

the ads don't bother me that much either, haven't noticed if 5 songs is always the limit? in any case it's 5 songs of any length, and you can listen to "In C" for example straight through which is cool.

I love it!

I think there is progress towards spotify scrobbling happening here:

http://www.last.fm/group/Scrobble+for+Spotify

carsmile sent this link: http://code.google.com/p/scrobblify/

scrobbles perfectly

for Windows maybe!

Yeah this looks terrific, I like how easy it makes it to dip into artists with huge discographies.

Although I haven't actually listened yet, just been browsing so far.

i am so in love with this thing <3

some artist tag crapness tho

the radio is fun for discovering things totally insane and cheesy

Oh wow the quality is actually pretty good.

The radio thing is indeed cool. I'm trying to get it to find me some techno from the 50s.

the quality is good, the range not so much, but this could well prove useful.

Presumably the range will increase as they agree deals with more record companies? It seems fine for major label stuff and a quick search for eg Kompakt pulls up a lot.

does it pass the melt banana test?

the range seems identical to what's on 7digital (and therefore itunes i think). eg they have trina's first and third albums but inexplicably not her second or fourth. i dunno how much use i'll have for spotify but kudos for how well it works, the quality of the tracks etc - the tags need ironing out but i'm sure they'll do this in time.

actually it'll be most useful for stuff like the goldfrapp album this year - i didn't really expect to love it but i wanted to hear it, so obv i wouldn't buy it but couldn't be arsed blagging it. that's a ton of consumer laziness in there.

oh god i should've said i was american! fuck. could've got access to all the hip-hop and r&b which never makes it over to this godforsaken, miserable island.

Do they have a license for the US now? I don't think they did a couple of weeks ago...

Four MB albums, Deano: Teeny Shiny, Bambi's Dilemma, Charlie and Scratch or Stitch.

does not work in australia yet

Just searched for The Recession and that shows up in its entirety, and it hasn't been released here at all right?

It's really good for the one-album playback when you've no idea if you'll like it or not and can't be arsed downloading.

yeah i'm basically going through albums i've been wondering about checking out but didn't have the hd space for.

no the recession was released here, but the label didn't bother telling the pr - she only realised when she looked on amazon and found it had been there for a fortnight

"80s funk house disco" radio suggests Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers!

> Four MB albums, Deano

thanks. we don't have any, amazon.co.uk mp3 store has scratch n stitch and a couple of tracks from compilations, emusic had a lot... all these people seem to be getting their info from the same places though, they all make the same mistakes (search for broadcast on amazon - details are about duophonic / warp broadcast but the listed albums aren't)

One detail I like: when it gets to the end of what I've queued up, it just continues with the current album without me needing to ask it to. (I suppose I can see how someone might not like this, though.)

Finally got round to sorting scrobbling for this (there's a windows messenger box ticked by default in the last.fm client that somehow stops Scrobblify from working). So far I'm really liking Spotify - handy for hearng stuff you randomly think on that you haven't got in your library or for legal trying before you buy. The adverts don't annoy me in the slightest.

fails Boredoms test :(

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

anyone got a spotfiy INVITE?

If not, try the "oooh ask me please!" option on the website ("Get started" -> email in "Not invited?" field). Took about five days for me, was surprised to get it at all actually.

jordan, webmail me an email address to send an invite to.

didn't get asked for an invite here, just got straight in

This is amazing! You type in what you want to listen to, and then you are listening to it. all this needs is to work on an iphone, and then i'll buy an iphone, and then i will have achieved bliss.

Mine appears to have made it through an album without giving me any adverts. Maybe they've bumped me up to a pro account without realising it.

you can now scrobble to last.fm from within spotify (it's in 'preferences')

That's handy, saves me running that scrobblify thing at the same time.

Spotify lists 'The Prodigy' as 'Prodigy' and makes last.fm think this guy sings Smack My Bitch Up and Out of Space
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/252/17704623.jpg

can someone please send me an invite?

thanks!!

Er....

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/

Think there's still a waiting list though.

<3 this service btw.

Got in straight away with the link I posted.

Aha they've obviously opened it up!

Downside is loads more ads (I've heard two during the same album), but you can hear them coming after a while and tune out. Still great.

thanks Chewshabadoo but I need an invitation code.

Please!

If i hear gareth jones from cardiff reciting pi again i'll scream

(advert)

And I'm not buying that White Lies record either.

At least it doesn't scrobble the adverts

jonathan from spotify sounds remarkably like Michael Vaughan

I'm just an unfrozen caveman, Alba

What is this FLAC of which I have heard the learned speak

That's why I actively bought used records, and often would refrain from buying something new just because I knew eventually it would show up used. Oops, no royalties for the artists in that scenario. I guess I've been anti-artist from the start, and used record stores were parasites.

I've heard this argument before and it is nonsense. Fact is that someone, at some point in the chain, paid $16-$18 for that CD / record, the artist share of which would require thousands of streams to equal

well, these streaming services are providing a mechanism for people to hear your music to potentially buy or go see you in concert. if you don't want to agree to that bargain, don't do it. complaining after the fact, after you've signed a contract, is just a bunch of sour grapes and entitled behavior. Don't like the cut you get per stream, don't sign up for streaming. it's simple. alternately, write music as popular as Beyonce or Radiohead and you'll be making millions from streaming with absolutely zero additional effort required on your part.
― brotherlovesdub, Monday, August 3, 2020 3:50 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think you have the slightest idea what you are talking about

Ok, i could accept that i'm wrong. Care to tell me where my comment strays from reality? I'm not a musician and have never read or signed a contract. Perhaps you have and can shed some light on it.

In the 80s, I bought way more bootleg records than I do now

Ok, i could accept that i'm wrong. Care to tell me where my comment strays from reality? I'm not a musician and have never read or signed a contract. Perhaps you have and can shed some light on it.

For starters, many artists don't negotiate those terms - their labels do. And very few labels take a poll of the artists on their roster before agreeing to these deals. I don't know if anti-streaming artists like Zola Jesus are on Spotify but I'm willing to bet many of them are because they had no say in the matter.

write music as popular as Beyonce or Radiohead and you'll be making millions from streaming with absolutely zero additional effort required on your part

and this is just silly. No one sets out to write unpopular music. The freakiest of free jazzers still want an audience. There are obviously many factors that determine success, and very few of them have anything to do with talent, ability, or hard work. Surely you know this

I mean, that’s not what they were suggesting so much as “no money? try harder” which is... wrong but not wrong.

My experience with “giving advice to potential professional musicians” is actually the opposite— to maintain an amateur relationship to one’s music-making for as long as possible. The sweet spot is “have a day job, keep music as a lucrative hobby”. I’ve only ever encountered two emerging musicians and told them “do this as your job you’re doing great” and one of them was Grimes in 2011, ha.

Music-making just isn’t lucrative enough for anyone to consider it as a career option, and furthermore, pegging a requirement of saleability/profitability on your art practice literally makes you crazy, makes music-making feel hollow and empty, and eventually leads all music-makers to die broke, alone, depressed, and buried in a pauper’s grave.

hmm idk sounds kinda rock n roll

soundslike, it feels like you're preaching to the choir here, idk if there are any regular ilm posters who don't buy lots of music from bandcamp or elsewhere.

Don't know if I'm a regular ILM poster anymore, but I've been here long enough. And I literally have not bought an album in years because I have a Spotify subscription, which I make use of every single day.

It sucks that the business model isn't friendly to artists, but buying music out of guilt just feels like a waste of time. (How do I decide whose music to buy and whose to stream? What do I do with it once I've bought it? Put it on a hard drive in a drawer?)

I pay $120/year for Spotify. In the pre-streaming era, I'd guess there were maybe only a couple of years when I spent much more than that on new music. I bought a handful of new albums but acquired most through trading and file-sharing. With streaming, I'm happy not to have to scrounge as much as I used to. And for that convenience, I would gladly spend twice as much on Spotify as I do.

Maybe I never actually *loved* music because I never dropped half my paycheck at a beloved record store every week. But I'm also not sure that I would have continued to care about new music past my 30s had I not been able to access it as easily.

as someone who has been working music industry adjacent for the past fifteen years, i would suggest that i have never known an artist who has gotten by on record sales.
everybody i know who makes a living making music makes money on commission, composing, touring, licensing, merch, songwriting, celebrity, marrying rich, being born rich.
which is not to say it doesn't happen! but i think it's about as likely as getting a job playing in the nba.
which is not to say it shouldn't happen more often! but pretending that streaming is what's put an end to the halcyon days of artists living of royalties is ahistorical.

which is to say, fgti and pgwp otm

I bought a lot of CDs once upon a time (more than jaymc but probably well down the ILM ranks) but I haven't owned anything that could play a CD in more than half a decade - I tried to get into vinyl and I completely get the special joy of putting on The Shape of Jazz to Come or Dopesmoker and listening to it in its entirety vs. skipping around as iTunes and now streaming pushes me to do but I just don't like dedicating the space and resources.

I pay for Spotify, I have Apple Music via a family sharing thing that my brother pays for, and I buy stuff from small artists on Bandcamp just to support them... but there's really nothing else musicians/the industry could do to get more out of me. I don't want merch or special access to an artist's social media, ticket discounts wouldn't mean much because I don't go to anything large enough for tickets to be expensive.

Jaymc's post is eerily word for word what I could have written about my own experience.

When I was in my 20s I was probably spending about £200 a month on vinyl/CDs but then you get older and have car/house/kids etc there's just no way I could afford to spend that much anymore.

So I now have Spotify and I maybe buy one or two CDs a year, usually direct from small record labels (and I reckon at least the last six or seven I bought are still unopened in their cellophane wrapping)

And for that convenience, I would gladly spend twice as much on Spotify as I do.

This to me is a huge component. Spotify/streaming being so much cheaper than just about any other media service (cable, hulu, netflix, amazon, etc, etc,) while at the same time being orders of magnitude more comprehensive than any of these other services (i.e. you pretty much get nearly all new big releases with a single streaming service whereas for tv/film you would need a minimum of 2-3 services to get even decent coverage).

In my view Spotify should be at least in the $40-50 per month range before you even get into the record company shenanigans on accounting. And I am going to venture that the main reason why it is not in that range is that Spotify have researched and found that they would have vastly fewer subscribers than they do, it would have taken longer to become a market leader, and it would have delayed them from getting to their precious IPO, which was the end goal all along.

The Spotify IPO was, very unusually, a direct listing with no additional stock sold. So pretty much the laborious opposite of a cash-out.

And Spotify have never been in the mp3 (or Ogg Vorbis) selling business, right?

I definitely remember a time, possibly about a decade ago, when there were "buy" buttons in the track listings, for downloading the corresponding mp3s for an extra fee. It may only have worked for parts of the catalogue for all I remember, and I don't think it lasted more than a few months.

Ah, I'd forgotten that.

and this is just silly. No one sets out to write unpopular music.

― Paul Ponzi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Unwanted_Song

<3

The Spotify mp3 buy was real. Spotify didn’t distinguish between full length mixes and a 3 minute track so I was able to download the full length mix of some of the Late Night Tales albums for a fraction of the cost of buying each track seperately.

i guess i found my hill to die on pic.twitter.com/Sgv3AkgnHs

— ZOLA JESUS OF TSUSHIMA (@ZOLAJESUS) August 5, 2020

made me think of fgti itt:

For 100,000 streams Spotify pays $400.....Apple pays $600.....Tidal pays $2,800. Unfortunately none of y’all fuck with Tidal....it’s either Spotify or Apple Music....lol the black business pays more and gets the least amount of love. Smh

— Trizz (@Tr1zz) July 31, 2020

they also charge more, came late to the party, bellyflopped their initial publicity push and have been playing catch up since. which is not to say i couldn't see switching over to them at some point in the future! just that their lack of market share is not inexplicable.

This is unfair but the "founding member" artists of Tidal are almost all people I loathe and want to see go bankrupt.

I liked Tidal when I tried it, though its interface is almost an exact Spotify clone (for better or worse). If I had to give up YTM for some reason, I would probably go with Tidal.

Tidal pays 70% of their revenue in royalties, divided up by streams the same way Spotify and Apple pay. The "rate" is not a thing in itself, it's just the result of dividing total royalties paid by total streams. Tidal's main draw is the $20/mo HiFi plan, which nobody else offers, so presumably a significant share of their subscribers pay for that, but if 100m Spotify users all moved over to Tidal's regular $10 plan because Tidal's "rate" is higher, the rate would go down.

Also, at last report Tidal had single-digit millions of subscribers, so if you're getting 100k streams on Tidal, you're probably Jay Z.

Tidal's main gimmick was a circuit city home theater A/B room

Reading through those quarterly shareholder reports, it seems as if the main issue with Spotify (insofar as artist compensation is concerned) is the free-with-ads service. I'm torn. Saying "get rid of the free-with-ads program" is kinda classist, but how else can we get around the fact that the main DSP is giving away the music for free and making crazy profits off of it?

$10 a month for free music forever is so... reasonable, too. And ulysses otm, TIDAL's launch was embarrassing

A music enthusiast friend of mine, however, who had both a TIDAL and a Spotify account, said that he much preferred TIDAL's playlist creation and so forth-- he said it was generally just much higher quality than Spotify's. Anyway

Can artists put their own ads in the middle of albums like podcasts?

that would be an interesting hell

Sigue Sigue Sputnik lp had adverts between tracks in '86

Werent beyonce and her husband doing dodgy shit to funnel extra Tidal royalties their own way?

Tidal was accused of that and there was an investigation, but I don't know if there is any more recent news.

"beyonce and her husband" would have been a far superior name for the carters

Sorry if this issue has been addressed already (it’s a huge thread !) : after an update, I have lost almost all my albums library (on iphone).
It’s weird since when I look for a specific album that was in my library, it still has the heart/selected thing but it’s not in the library anymore...
This is pretty annoying since I had a BIG albums library and it’s the main way I used the app... almost feel like quitting Spotify now that all that work has been reduced to dust...

Even downloaded albums have disappeared from the library although they’re still downloaded !

from the Pavement thread (possible chicanery):

interesting new Pavement album came out on Spotify last friday

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Monday, August 10, 2020 2:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Is that like the (now removed) new Neutral Milk Hotel song that popped up on Spotify over the weekend? Seemed like Jeff Mangum going future bass was a 2020 twist too good to be true.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, August 10, 2020 2:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this will be 1/2 of ILM's favorite Pavement album lmao

― Thicc Nhat Wanh (rip van wanko), Monday, August 10, 2020 2:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Anybody know what’s going on? There’s also a new «Yo La Tengo» single on Spotify in a similar vein, i.e relatively basic instrumental EDM

― Mule, Tuesday, August 11, 2020 2:24 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Someone lost the keys to the Matador office?

― Washington Foosball Team (morrisp), Tuesday, August 11, 2020 2:36 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks for bringing that over, I was about to do the same. Curious to why this is suddenly happening to prominent indie bands.

Useful to remember that all music is delivered to Spotify through licensors, in bulk. No artist is logging in and uploading songs, that isn't a thing (yet). So when stuff like this happens, it's not an account-security issue, it's that somebody decided to type "Moses Gunn Collective" into the "artist" field on their new release, and the artist was obscure enough that they got away with it for a few days before somebody reported it.

(It's still a real problem, mind you, and this recent spate of junk aimed at indie bands is all coming from one licensor and being investigated...)

Thanks, Glenn. Just out of curiosity, why does the obscurity of the artist matter for something like this? Why isn’t the new entry treated as a different artist (with the same name), instead of automatically linked up with an existing one?

I forgot to add: she continued to insist she was right after I started to GIS.

Thanks, Glenn. Just out of curiosity, why does the obscurity of the artist matter for something like this? Why isn’t the new entry treated as a different artist (with the same name), instead of automatically linked up with an existing one?

Of course, but what I’m saying is, why are they automatically linked up in the database? Why is it not treated as a different entity unless proven otherwise (whatever that would mean)? A lot of bands have identical names (historically, anyway).

I thought that problem had been solved when the Spotifys of the world finally stopped infecting the artist page for Unrest (the ‘80s/‘90s indie band) with albums & tracks by more recent hardcore/metal bands with the same name (there’s still one of those on YouTube Music, actually).

We get stuff from the same real bands via multiple distributors all the time, due to the fractured nature of global licensing, so "different entity unless proven otherwise" would produce the opposite problem where one band would routinely end up with many separate profile pages that would have to be manually combined. So there's a complicated bit of software that tries to use multiple cues to figure out what the right assignments are for ambiguous submissions. It usually works, and we have a team of people checking questionable cases and fixing things. This particular case is in some ways the hardest, because a new "Moses Gunn Collective" release arrives and we've only ever seen one artist by that name, so there has to be some piece of data that really clearly indicates this is not that band. For you, as a human who knows the band, it's clear when you listen. Computers can't do that nearly as well. We do use some audio analysis to flag potential mismatches, but with 50k+ releases every week, it's hard to check all the ones that might be wrong. So we tend to check in popularity order, to try to catch the cases that will affect the most listeners...

tl/dr: I hate Yo La Tengo

not sure this phenomenon hurts Yo La Tengo much. Would be more accurate to say "tldr: I hate Yo La Tengo listeners". and fair enough, spotify, fair enough.

xxp Interesting, thx glenn