Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

honestly don't know what i've done to get jack kerouac on my discover weekly. also the pogues, other irish music, ethiopan jazz, but i can tolerate those.

honestly i've been pretty much mainlining autechre for weeks on end just to see what it throws up and it's like 'hey try some woody guthrie!'

I see the false Pavement has now been broken off and given their own artist page (guess I was one of those 168 listeners in Los Angeles).

Appears to be down

desktop app is not working.

web version search isnt working but if you have the url to the album it will play

a former uk ilxor from the very early days of ilx signed up for Spotify today and clearly broke UK spotify.

Working for me through Android.

desktop app seems to be working again

it was really laggy and unresponsive yesterday evening for me. seems fine now.

mostly an interview with Jared at Bandcamp, but still goes here. liked the Ed. note

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903547253/a-tale-of-two-ecosystems-on-bandcamp-spotify-and-the-wide-open-future

[Ed. note: We've been noticing, anecdotally but with increasing frequency, that many new releases we'd like to include on our playlists don't make the jump from being posted on Bandcamp to appearing on platforms like Spotify.]

That was great, thanks!

Good article, though the introductory paragraphs are a bit like RADIOS DO THIS, RECORD SHOPS DO THAT, WHY DO PEOPLE LISTEN TO THE RADIO NOT GO TO THE RECORD SHOP?!?!

“Hide song” doesn’t sync across clients?

Just idly wondering if tags would be a possible/useful feature? I have so many bloody playlists that some days I'd like to be able to search my own library by mood, or country or feel.

I imagine anything more complex around personal tagging of tracks than the starring, at least across multiple devices, would be a big headache to implement. Would be brilliant to have, though. I'd love a notes field, or the ability to add your own accurate year info.

Yes, I imagine it's down to the complexities of management. Ah well.

Have they cut down number of daily mixes? I seem to have 4 rather than 6.

you have angered spotify, and they are being passive aggressive about it. (I have 6).

what's up with the weird unofficial albums that pop up from time to time?

i came across this one the other day:https://open.spotify.com/album/5YJnD5KqNUwbV3AnXEIYTU?si=t-HZeuSDRWqcHBrnbsty-w

and i just have to wonder who exactly is responsible for such things. and why.

Good question

it's basically unlistenable. idgi. is anyone going to the tony toni tone and getting fooled into playing it for more than thirty seconds?

reminds me of torrenting a jurassic 5 album back in the day (lol) that was industry chaff where they looped the hook for four minutes. had me thinking they got into some minimalism shit.