Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Glen: is the backward search text in the desktop app a known bug? It’s driving me crazy.

I've heard of it happening to people, but I can't find any information about it, sorry...

WHAT is this giant green play button suddenly sitting at the top of my playlist, and why does it insist I shuffle my carefully ordered mix?

Ugh and the edit function is now minimized and not sticky. These are very irritating changes

i rolled back my app to an earlier version and set it to never auto update after they removed my search bar a year or two ago,.. it seems like most updates tamper frivolously with essential features?? Lol

You guys need to give Tidal a shot, lol

some really classy distribution by blooming jazz records

https://i.imgur.com/nd52dEU.png

the shittiest company

https://twitter.com/DanBoeckner/status/1234862578830102536/photo/2

When underpaying artists for their labor isn’t enough to keep your company going pic.twitter.com/kaSIUUL8gB

— Jabroni And The Air-rifle (@DanBoeckner) March 3, 2020

How is that not payola?

Buying ads is not payola.

You never got coverage in music mags if your label didn't advertise in it

music mags didn't make money off of distributing your music

So it’s like Tower Records (R.I.P.) soliciting labels to place ads in Pulse! magazine.

no, it's like if Revolver Distribution had a publication of its own and in order to get distribution you had to buy ads in their publication. It's absolutely payola.

How is Spotify equivalent to Revolver Distribution here?

how are they similar to a magazine?

Spotify is closer to being a distributor than they are to being a publication

They’re closer to being one record store of many on the same digital “block,” no?

It also kind of sounds like studios having to pay theaters to run movie trailers.

(My analogy wasn’t that they’re similar to a magazine, it was that they’re similar to Tower Records.)

I suppose. Spotify has, what, 30% of the streaming market?

lol I forgot that Tower owned Pulse, sorry about that

I suppose one big difference is that Tower Records was actually a profitable business once haha

Now, if they were soliciting payment to place songs on curated playlists, feature certain artists on “hero” images, etc., I agree that would seem shady. Do they do that?

why would they ever admit that they do

I don’t know, but presumably someone would find out and write an article about it

Why would you pay to advertise if it didn't get you onto the only place you can make money? I would be less skeptical of this scheme if Spotify hadn't done everything they could over the last few years to jam themselves in-between artists and listeners and push listeners into listening exclusively to Spotify-created (whether curated or algorithmic) playlists.

I feel like the streaming services should be treated as a common carrier and allow anyone to build value-added services on top of them. At this point, all the vertical integration is pretty clearly NOT A GOOD THING.

presumably someone would find out and write an article about it

this already happened years ago fyi

here let me google that for you etc

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6670475/playola-promotion-streaming-services

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/19/spotify-sponsored-content/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHzL2RJZd1tc1VAHw9WAwL0Uuiwvkcc9Ibyltq2zlFaE6wiY_BjbjYPC4AS3Pm8NLP3ePY3HMbpeFCCdyc-q59S9snQpeGbVhsbBov4QFXxNXzYHFVrCIxL89toWXi3qAhRjAZHJ2H5xAXWETQW376MUXHtgktwFuCOLCN001WlV

and it's (of course) a game of whack-a-mole - every time something like this draws attention/bad press they back away from it, and then move on to the next payola scheme

Thanks — the first article is subscriber-only, and the second seems to be about a test of something similar to what I was talking about, but maybe marked as “Sponsored”? (though I genuinely appreciate you Googling it for me)

The rising value of Spotify playlists has spurred a new form of payola—the decades-old illegal practice of paying for a song to be broadcast on the radio—with massive amounts of money changing hands behind the scenes. An August 2015 exposé by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for “$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.”

https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/spotify-playlist-black-market/

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2018/03/spotify-cuts-off-playlist-payola-service-spotlister.html

Ah, that sounds like more like what I was talkin about!

so they were doing it (blatantly), it leaked to Billboard, they stopped doing it, and now they've moved on to some slightly more convoluted scenario (because they still aren't making money)

guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHzL2RJZd1tc1VAHw9WAwL0Uuiwvkcc9Ibyltq2zlFaE6wiY_BjbjYPC4AS3Pm8NLP3ePY3HMbpeFCCdyc-q59S9snQpeGbVhsbBov4QFXxNXzYHFVrCIxL89toWXi3qAhRjAZHJ2H5xAXWETQW376MUXHtgktwFuCOLCN001WlV

makes u think

really wish the big green shuffle button on iOS would go away.

All those payola articles are about non-Spotify services selling placement on THEIR playlists, which has always been against the Spotify terms of use. Buying a marquee ad doesn't get you on Spotify-owned playlists, it just gets you the marquee ad. You can definitely argue about whether selling marquee ads is good or bad or fair or unfair, but it's not payola.

Huh, sounds like 3rd-parties are monetizing the “value-added services” being requested above, how about that(!)

some high-priority major-label artists/songs are so aggressively featured on some of the big-name playlists (far beyond their apparent ability to actually draw streams) that i'd frankly be very surprised if there weren't some kind of back-scratching/arm-twisting going on, whether or not it technically violates 'terms of use'

if there were something like payola, it'd probably sneak in through some bias in the algorithms. A similar sort of bias could also exist within the thinking of a popular radio DJ, though, and it wouldn't be labeled as payola. payola is ultimately a bit meaningless on a platform where you can just choose music yourself anyway.

Every time this thread gets bumped I just want to say “yes I have heard of it” but I’ve resisted until now

But yes I’ve heard of it

but have you heard that they've actually reported positive earnings in some quarters?

if there were something like payola, it'd probably sneak in through some bias in the algorithms. A similar sort of bias could also exist within the thinking of a popular radio DJ, though, and it wouldn't be labeled as payola. payola is ultimately a bit meaningless on a platform where you can just choose music yourself anyway.

but... you can't pay to be featured on those lists

Latest entitled whinge: no one is currently getting 0.0009p from me per play because the web player is an absolute mess: frequently won't load at all, skips songs, the CSS is often all over the place.

xxp corrs otm, but I also think it matters that radio existed on a limited and regulated spectrum as a source of music discovery that a very different cost than the alternative at the time, buying so many records. these playlists and the freedom to discover new music oneself exist on the same platform at the same cost to the listener. any preference for the playlist is just laziness or favoring music-as-event over music itself on the part of the listener.

Sure, I guess, but the Spotify UX seems to be actively herding people toward music-as-event ("Chill" being the most popular event, apparently) listening, rewarding the artists who embrace that model, and selling advertising with at least the implicit idea that advertising will increase artists' "exposure." In this model, what other exposure is there that is worth a damn other than placement on high-traffic playlists?