Thread For Chatter About The Streaming Music Economy

i have a sonos speaker which mostly goes unused bc when i tried to match it up to my main itunes library it said something about wanting to keep my laptop on all the time

i have a couple of rolling playlists in spotify (for other ppl) and idk whether this is just because i'm on the free version but every time i go in it's so slow, freezes all the time, search function is unreliable etc etc. horrible experience all round.

Maybe it's time to update the app? Before I switched to Premium I had a really old version that I for some reason thought was superior to the new ones and didn't update. Well, it wasn't better.

http://www.thembj.org/2016/06/the-drama-of-artist-payments/

^nothing too new here, but seems a reasonable and of the moment primer
(unless someone wants to disabuse me of that notion?)

_Should_ a song cost as much as an avocado? Discuss.

how ripe is the avocado?

Trying to buy more records new, but most of my records these days are bought off Discogs or the Cat Protection shop in Llandudno

I'm surely not the first to think this, but it just occurred to me that the economy of streaming is very different in that in order for songs to generate profit they need replay value - whereas you only need to sell a copy once, doesn't matter economically if people listen to a cd or not

Yeah -- i have favorite records, like all time favorite records, which I have never listened to more than a couple of times a year just because that's the kind of records they are.

And some conceptual/experimental music is probably not meant to be streamed over and over

The letter and signatories to the letter we've sent to @BorisJohnson this morning.#BrokenRecord pic.twitter.com/i8o9AWGRVs

— Tom Gray #BrokenRecord (@MrTomGray) April 20, 2021

wait, what are the two words??

The "two words" thing is kind of a flourish, but the idea is that there's an "otherwise than" in that particular law that, if removed, would facilitate applying the UK's "equitable remuneration" laws to streaming music by treating it as a form of broadcasting instead of a form of sale.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473

I've read some pretty convincing theories around a possible trajectory for Spotify that gets further away from artist-centric music listening:
-Since they obviously make their money from subscriptions and ads, they only stand to lose money when you listen to music that has publishing/copyright holders.
-It's easy to imagine using machine learning to just generate long, endless AI background music based on your 'preferences'

But how would this square with their current moves toward TikTok-y videos from artists, which sucks in its own way but puts the human element right in front of the listener? Maybe it's a two-pronged approach...get human artists to use 'Discovery' mode and make even less money from listeners in exchange for exposure, and try to wrest eyes from other social media platforms, and then generate infinite copies based on what does well for the listeners who don't care about who makes the music?

sounds about right, what a terrible platform, anything with shareholders turns to garbage