Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Oh, it already has tons of kudos in the suggestion forum: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Smart-playlists/idi-p/18549

Yeah, that's a well-supported suggestion.

My discover playlist wasn't bad - I listened to it yesterday and only rarely skipped anything (also rarely checked to see exactly what I was hearing).
It was all indie rock - slightly craggier than your average NPR pick. I like that stuff fine but I also listen to A LOT of ambient and that area of my listening wasn't reflected at all.

I have always wanted and still want to follow labels but I guess we're a distance from that implementation-wise.

My Discover Weekly is fine and I'm happy it exists but slightly off-target nonetheless. Like everyone else I have recommendations for Nite Fields (who?), Tala and Sharon Von Etten.

I know there's a way to search labels (mentioned up thread). I got super anal about the labels I really had interest in that are on Spotify - made my own playlists for Kranky, Type, Touch, and Erased Tapes (all public playlists fwiw). I just update them whenever I hear about new releases. But then I've always liked doing that kind of thing manually...

interesting read about the inner workings of spotify re: big data / knowledge organisation related to music listening ad discovery

Inside Spotify’s Hunt for the Perfect Playlist
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/spotify-perfect-playlist/

good systems

I haven't got mine yet

Oops!

http://i.imgur.com/35bCDSN.jpg

Funny enough on its own, but what's even funnier is that the album's title got changed to that by an update from the label in late 2009, and seems to have been that way ever since.

I'll see if I can get it fixed.

oooh just received mine
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1484956/spotify%20discover%20weekly.png

I haven't , im beginning to think I wont get it til next monday

for anyone who's interested, there's a program called Spotiamp that looks like Winamp but is actually a Spotify player that has less stuff to load (no link to facebook) and doesn't force the user to wait through the circle of dots. winamp's "eject" button leads the user to a list of their playlists.

Starring?

damn: all the prince is gone
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2015/07/04/is-prince-the-newest-tidal-co-owner/

interesting and possibly accidental exceptions: the amazingly obscure 94 East compilation Games, his guitar turn on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the R&R hall of fame, a cover of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You", the disposable "The Song of the Heart" on the "Happy Feet" soundtrack, "We March"on the "One Million Strong" compilation, "20454 Radical Man" from the Bamboozled soundtrack and "Good Love" from "Bright Lights Big City"

yeah prince pulled his stuff a few weeks back, pretty damn annoying. it makes me wonder about neil young cuz he announced he was pulling his stuff and here we are over a week later and he's still on spotify.

Tevin Campbell "Round And Round" sorta counts as Prince.

my discover playlist is really great - i'm very impressed - i was just tweeting about it and others seem to agree.

i discovered tracks i didn't know by artists i know, like dennis wilson, eden ahbez, scott walker, and then some things i wasn't familiar with, like "the dolphins" by fred neil.

and now neil young is basically off spotify

ohh ffs, really?

geffen stuff + decade. i have all the neil i need (which is alot) so i guess if i ever need to remotely scratch that itch i can listen to decade. i wish spotify did a better job of integrating yr music library.

'the dolphins' is fucking fantastic. whole self-titled album is really.

"Prince's publisher has asked all streaming music services to remove his catalog. We have cooperated with his request, and hope to bring his music back as soon as possible."

Daaaamnit i listened to prince on spotify probs more than anyone

Speaking personally, not in any Spotify capacity:

I feel like you could defend not putting new material on a service as a business decision (whether good or bad) between you and the service.

But taking existing material off like this is just saying fuck-you specifically to your own fans, who have been listening to your music and literally paying for the privilege with every stream. I feel like these artists (Prince, Neil Young, Taylor Swift) are not acknowledging this, and maybe on some level not actually understanding it.

it would certainly be magnanimous of artists who pull their material to apologize to fans and explain that - while they're removing themselves from a shitty deal on their end - they appreciate their support and understand why people were taking advantage of what's a great deal for the consumer. but artists bear no responsibility to continue supporting collusive agreement between their label and a distribution service just because they found themselves involved in it.

if an artist thinks i'm a shit for using spotify, the artist needs to realize that their issue is with spotify and whoever allows their music to be on the service. i'm actually doing them better than when i buy a used cd. however, if the artist makes clear their issue is with spotify and/or their label, i totally respect it - i wouldn't want to be stuck in a bad deal just because other people enjoy profiting off it.

yeah, i agree with that
it's a business, man

yeah, i may disagree with an artist's reasoning, and i may miss my easy access to "sign o the times" or "red," but i fully support their right to distribute their art however they see fit.

the market/consumer piracy will correct over time

yeah i don't begrudge any artist that keeps their stuff off spotify though it means i'm much less likely to listen to yr music. think the smartest model, esp for established artists, is release singles initially and then eventually put the album up. what beyonce did basically. this has effectively been the model w/ movies and publishing for years - initial release in higher priced format (theaters, hardback), later release cut rate to maximize return.

I finally got my discover weekly playlist
http://i.imgur.com/U8AJ7IV.png
http://i.imgur.com/TCXGAgc.png

i haven't looked but if neil really took off everything but Decade that's pretty smart. You wanna play "Southern Man" on a loop, knock yerself out, i'll await my check for five bucks every quarter. You wanna find out if The Monsanto Years is good, I WANT CASH.

think the smartest model, esp for established artists, is release singles initially and then eventually put the album up. what beyonce did basically.

that all sounds to me like a potential smart model for LABELS. as for artists, i think the smartest model is whatever the hell they want to do with their art whenever the hell they want to do it.

it means i'm much less likely to listen to yr musici

Yeah, and because fewer people will listen if an artist pulls out, and spotify employees and other tech industry mouthpieces will spin it as "saying fuck-you specifically to your own fans" and "not actually understanding it", these major artists like Young, Prince, and Swift are the only ones with the clout to actually pull out. It's too risky for smaller artists. So good for them for getting the ball rolling. Because the absence of a label like Drag City (as noble as that is) isn't going to lead to any real change.

If you're gonna take your music off streaming services take it off all of them (including YouTube) or you're a repulsive corporate heel.

This was interesting. Much re-hashing, but some good analysis as well: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/less-money-mo-music-lots-problems-look-biz-jason-hirschhorn

There's a very basic error early in that piece, in that Aloe Blacc's vaunted (anti-vaunted) $4000 was from Pandora, not Spotify. The Spotify royalties from that volume of streams would have been somewhere around $1,200,000. At this point "Wake Me Up" has generated 370m streams on Spotify, for over $2.5m in royalties. From just one streaming service. That's a pretty qualitative difference.

But the longer the piece goes on, the more balanced it becomes. Worth reading to the end.

you're right that the 4k number comes from pandora, but it was also aloe blacc's share of the songwriting royalties (split by three people) for "Wake Me Up." Your $2.5m number is based on the estimated mechanical royalty rate to performers. according to this: http://thetrichordist.com/2014/11/12/the-streaming-price-bible-spotify-youtube-and-what-1-million-plays-means-to-you/ the songwriting royalty rate is closer to 0.000521, but just as you're using .006 for the mechanical, we'll bump it up to .0006 for the songwriting.

370m streams = $222,000 in songwriting royalties
222,000/3 = $74,000

still a qualitative difference from the 4k but not nearly as extreme as 4k to 2.5m

xposts p sure ol' neil pulling streams had approx zero impact on gross plays per user (why because #whodafuqisneilyoung?)

Whoops, "mechanical" royalty is meant to describe the songwriting royalty not the performer. Not that it changes the issue (songwriters still get the smaller rate) but I didn't mean to confuse things further

Spotify's published .006-.0084 range (which I usually simplify to .007 for estimation purposes) is for total royalties, of which 21% goes to the songwriters (publishing) and 79% to the performers (mechanical), by US regulation. So that's $544,000 songwriting royalties and about $2m performer royalties for 370m streams. Blacc sang on "Wake Me Up", as well as co-writing it, so I would assume he gets some share of both parts, but that depends on his deal.

do you have a link to somewhere re the 21/79 split? i can't seem to find that number anywhere

ha, missed this - 19 Entertainment is suing spotify re: its alleged equity stake in spotify

http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6605841/sonys-spotify-equity-artist-royalties-lawsuit-breakage

part of why i find it so frustrating when the streaming side describes that lump perofmer royalty as going to the "rights holders" and then acting like it's up the label what happens next, is that they're ignoring the large advances (and alleged equity stakes) given to the major labels. while it's true spotify/apple/etc didn't invent the byzantine accounting that leads to major label artists seeing so little of that amount, they're not being transparent about how they've aided the major labels in making money artists can never hope to see a dime of.

gah typos. 19 Entertainment is suing SONY re equity. and spotify is acting like its up to the label what happens next

from the suit by 19 ent

"Each of the major record labels also own an interest in Spotify," states the amended complaint. "On information and belief, those other record labels have engaged in the same self-dealing as Sony with respect to the diversion of payments to them, and the below market streaming royalty rates to artists. Together, and individually, Sony and the other major record labels therefore have significant power to exert control over Spotify in order to not only dictate how revenue will be paid, but wrongfully and in bad faith divert money from royalties that must be shared to other forms of revenue that they can keep for themselves."

i definitely understand why spotify execs have gotten defensive about "middlemen" fucking up the relationship between them and artists - companies like sony extracted favored nation deals and just shrug innocently when its biggest artists complain or even back out - but it's still facetious to act like spotify is looking out FOR the artists when they give those deals

21% comes from http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#royalties-in-detail

But I said it wrong. Correct is "In the United States, for example, statutes dictate that publishers receive ~21% the amount that master recording owners receive." Not 21% of the whole.

So 5:1, not 4:1, and $.007 would break down into about .0058 for performers and .0012 for writers. 370m streams produces about $2.1m for performers and $450k for writers. Still, that publishing rate is approximately 20x the rate Blacc attributes to Pandora.

so i've apparently "maxed out" the number of albums i can save to "my music". well it still allows me to save them but it doesn't retain them when i exit the program. *siiigghhhh*

i can make playlists of albums and put them in separate folders, i guess. should have done it that way all along. folders!

Folders are key. And in case it isn't obvious, you can put folders inside folders, too.