Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Like: Are streaming services fairly priced?

yeah obviously not. in an attempt to become a nigh-monopoly, Spotify set a goal to change consumer spending from hundreds of dollars a month to one hundred dollars a year. their "hear it in less shitty quality" option was not a link to buy a CD or download from the artist, but a higher-priced subscription to Spotify. literally devaluing music has resulted in music being a less sustainable option for musicians.

giving Joe Rogan $100 million of musicians' money to broadcast COVID-denialism might result in some of the user base dying, too, so that cuts the pie smaller.

how many Spotify subscribers were spending hundreds of dollars a month on recorded music in 2009?

Podcast acquisitions come out of venture capital, not music royalties. Everything Spotify spends money on, other than (I think) credit-card processing fees, comes out of the 30% cut after royalties are paid...

Even if no streaming services existed, and search platforms that helped users find piracy sites were rigorously prosecuted the way they should have been all along, and those piracy sites were hunted down by the WTO sic'ing the CIA and Interpol on them, music sales would be dropping in the modern era due to the slipperiness of how easy it is in an internet/iphone world to find vastly cheaper music listening substitutes to buying hundreds of dollars worth of cds/mp3s per year. I love spotify so much in spite of its flaws, but if it wasn't there, I would be using software to find radio programs from around the world, there would be enormous efforts made to make cool streaming radio stations famous, there would be websites that help you find exactly what kind of strange music you are interested in right now; and satellite/pandora style radio services would be more popular as well, many of them ad-free and subscription priced. This would be a worse outcome for the music listener, but how much better would it really be for the artists that want to sell mp3s? Would they really sell a ton of mp3s? Isn't the answer no, because that is what the Beatles/Zeppelin/Zappa estates and Drag City etc. found out when they tried not streaming for a decade, in hopes that not being on platforms would continue to drive sales demand?

> Spotify set a goal to change consumer spending from hundreds of dollars a month to one hundred dollars a year.

But this was only ever a lifestyle held by 5% of the population right? Every single adult I knew growing up had a stack of 20-100 cds amassed over a 10 year period. That's exactly the same revenue as Spotify. The difference is, Galaxie 500 fans were the types of people buying $100 of product a month. It's those people, us, who are making out like bandits with Spotify. So it is hurting the marginal artist's livelihood much more.

I don't see how we can go back to the way it was before. People are reading free content on the internet because if you charge for the WaPo,

...there are 10 similar articles to what you want to read on WaPo that aren't as well-researched but cover the same info and aren't paywalled. The same will happen will music and eventually television perhaps (as youtubers/twitchers take over more and more of the content pie)

I’m not sure on that last point, b/c ppl will always pay for superior content. But yeah, I know younger folks who came of age in the Limewire era and never bought a CD in their lives.

(I also agree that the literal devaluation of music is bad, and wish I had a solution behind still personally buying music that I’m a fan of)

*beyond

how many Spotify subscribers were spending hundreds of dollars a month on recorded music in 2009?

how many stopped is the relevant point.

Podcast acquisitions come out of venture capital, not music royalties. Everything Spotify spends money on, other than (I think) credit-card processing fees, comes out of the 30% cut after royalties are paid...

Spotify made $7.44 billion dollars in revenue selling other peoples' music to customers in 2019. The two founders have paid themselves billions of dollars. It would be good if musicians saw more of the proceeds of their creativity and labour than Joe Rogan or an executive from a marketing company, imo.

Whether or not Rogan's deal is fairly valued prima facie, the principal being paid out in that deal has been generated by undervaluing the labour of others, and thus removing their access to other forms of revenue.

(The deal also comes at the exact moment when the primary remaining form of revenue for most working musicians has been completely eradicated due to other circumstances, so it bites harder.)

― Bleeqwot (sic), Thursday, May 21, 2020 8:31 AM (nine months ago)

If the Rogan money comes from an exclusive pile contributed by venture capital investors, even if it was sought specifically to expand the podcast/spoken side of the business, those investors are assessing Spotify's value as created by exploiting the work of musicians.

(Signing Rogan was nagl when he was merely a credulous doofus platforming cryptonazis; it looks worse months into the deal when he's advising to avoid the COVID vaccines because zinc makes you immune.)

I'm not really here to explain capitalism, but the founders haven't "paid" themselves billions of dollars, that's stock-market value from ownership stakes. I agree that the stock market is a weird part of the economy.

(I meant "paid themselves" rhetorically in the sense of setting up the company's operations such that they get lots of money, not that it's specifically been in the form of fortnightly wages; if reports of their personal wealth are incorrect, apologies to the thread for my credulity or misreading. Glenn and I agree about socialism as well as the stock market.)

Couldn't help but think of this on seeing those RIAA revenue charts nosedive after the year 2000: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/11/business/5-music-companies-settle-federal-case-on-cd-price-fixing.html

The FTC said the cost to consumers of the record companies' illegal price fixing was $480 million over three years when yearly revenue was running at $20 billion, so it's not as if that alone was driving a substantial amount of the gains. We all know the internet is to blame for the post-2000 drop. The record companies' public and moral case was certainly not helped by years of illegally propping up prices though, and I doubt the average consumer draws much of a distinction between the record companies and musicians.

And it’s happening. From streaming on Spotify alone, we’re seeing growth from artists at all stages of their career: since 2017, the number of artists generating more than $50K/yr is up 80%; more than $100K/yr is up 85%; and more than $1M/year is up 90%. pic.twitter.com/x9sHxddEDq

— Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) March 18, 2021

these stats are not very reassuring

i was still buying CDs when i could throughout my years of pirating and i stopped when i started streaming. i'm sure i'm not the only one. i use spotify every day and i'm pretty sure it's been a bad thing for music in general and for my relationship with it

and yet

here’s one. how come spotify can never remember that i want to listen through my airplay speakers? i select them many times a day. i literally never want to listen through my phone speaker. so why does it always default to that?? it’s the little things. like connecting to speakers.

$100,000 worth of medical advice from Rogan and Jim Breuer. The experts thought this pandemic was going to be bad at the start, but it's all overblown and the doctors just won't admit that they got it wrong. Only 6% of the reported deaths are real. Nearly everyone who has died of it is obese anyway. Don't take a test, because then the government will know if you have it. Doctors should just give you zinc and steroids to make it go away if you tell them you have it, which you know for sure because you gave it to your wife (who has stage 4 cancer) and one of your daughters, and your other two chickenshit daughters moved out of the house wearing cowards' facemasks. You didn't tell anyone until three months later, though, because you didn't want any promoters to cancel your comedy club bookings. Also, people transition gender for sympathy bcz if "they were marginalized for being genuinely dumb people, if they transfer over and become another gender, then they get praised."

hey stet fyi that dollar signs break url tags

"$100,000,000 worth of..."

why is this here

hey remember when everyone insisted rogan wasnt that bad

Yea,I loved Newsradio

glad to see Breuer still seems perpetually drunk

why is this here

because spotify is paying joe rogan $100 million for it

Still haven't heard of Spotify

I love how I sometimes forget that Spotify gave an idiot covid denier conspiracy theorist one hundred million dollars, then I go 'oh hey remember when Spotify gave that idiot covid denier conspiracy theorist ten million dollars? Ten million dollars, that's insane! Oh wait...'

My latest spotify gripe/workaround is the way that the "Song Radio" feature functions. I would have expected that "Song Radio" would play songs similar to the one I've selected. What it seems to actually do is pick the midpoint between the selected song and Spotify's music taste profile it's magic'd togetherfor me, which usually means I get songs that I already have Liked or music that sounds nothing like what I seeded. I've found to get the behaviour I expect is to create a new playlist containing just that song, and then the Recommended Songs actually do seem all to be closely related. I found some incredible stuff this way that I would otherwise have had to wait for Discover Weekly to dredge up.

The perfect solution here would be for there to be some kind of Algorithm Personalisation slider somewhere, but as discussed upthread somewhere, Spotify aren't really into giving users control of their experience in that way.

this annoys me as well, I used to love the autoplay feature but these days it tends to just always play the same stuff. Everything even vaguely electronic always gets me:

- something from the latest autechre albums
- Leaves Against The Sky by Actress
- I Don't Love Me Anymore by Oneohtrix Point Never
- Dismantle by Andy Stott
- after that other tracks from these same albums with a couple of other more random artists mixed in

It used to be much more varied than this

A less varied autoplay list might have come from the algorithm becoming more conservative over time (Algorithm Personalisation slider set to high), or it could be that since Spotify knows more about someone the more they use it, the personalised data might "drag" the autoplay selections towards stuff Spotify already knows you like. Either way, it's a weird quirk and it would be nice if the spotify boffins would sort out.

I find Spotify does a great job surfacing new music but once you start going back in time even a couple years you often get the same stale popular tracks.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the algorithms are trained. For new songs, there is little to no previous engagement (the "cold start" problem) and recommendations are made based on underlying track attributes (see https://medium.com/cuepoint/visualizing-hundreds-of-my-favorite-songs-on-spotify-fe50c94b8af3 for some examples - Loudness, Danceability, Valence, Energy, etc). For old songs, there is years of data and success labels may be created based on engagement - i.e. a customer listening to a song for a certain amount of time. These labels are used to train supervised recommendation models where the content-based features are used only as part of the prediction. You end up with a situation where the tracks that are most broadly appealing to the largest number of people get promoted, creating a feedback loop that turns off power users who want more diversity.

There are some extremely smart people at Spotify working on this issue but it is a difficult balance to strike between recommending new and interesting songs and giving people stuff that has been successfully recommended in the past.

Yeah, a more discovery-oriented radio option would be nice. I don’t think It’s that much down to personalization as if I start the same song as radio on my wife’s account I get similar results (though I guess our listening patterns aren’t wildly dissimilar in the grand scheme of things).

I got frustrated with this recently doing some disco/hi-NRG artists' radio playlists on a road trip. It seems like what's going on underneath the surface is the algorithm 1) finds similar artists, probably a mix of Netflix-style collaborative filtering and musical content analysis and then 2) recommends some of the most popular tracks from those similar artists. (Alternately, they could be doing it at the track level and then applying a diversification or ranking scheme to ensure both similarity and variety at the artist level, but the result is similar.)

Discover Weekly seems to do a really good job if you are listening to a lot of new music.

It keeps dumping my recent activity and recent searches recently. So I have to look things up instead of having the links already populated.
Or last week it had the images for links up but wouldn't connect with tehm and just gave me a message saying something went wrong.
What is up with this device

this is definitely a frustration with dance music, it is difficult to get it to recommend something outside of a closed loop of artists and tracks. Like if you've already dug a little bit, it isn't going to get you down any further.

wtf is this "my episodes" bullshit and why can i not just download a podcast without it becoming one of "my episodes" ??? they are two separate buttons!!!

I have to start and stop the app and or WiFi and of mobile data multiple times to open a single podcast episode every time

yeah, sometime in the last year it shifted into this thing where even opening the "downloads" tab, it's spinning around looking for signal/connection and i'm like, this is why i downloaded the goddamn podcasts in the first place.

I'd totally switch to using Spotify as my podcast app if there weren't free alternatives that are both more reliable and feature-rich. Surprises me that polishing up the app to best in class is considered a less effective way of getting market penetration than spending a fortune on sclusies.

I can't say I'm a fan of this new build at all. Where's the search bar? And why can't I drag and drop albums into a folder any more?

"mesh cinereaL" by autechre is missing the last 38 seconds on spotify. It's all there on Youtube Music, so this looks like an issue specific to Spotify. It's a couple of extra bleeps and bloops on a 24 minute track, but this is very important.

wait, are you saying they've tried to remove the search bar again? Which platform?

if you listen to 'Deceit' all the way through, spotify will say 'ALBUM RADIO BASED ON Deceit' at the top. feels like an admission of sorts.

Argh, this new version is barely usable. What is going on?

Which build are you talking about, on what platform?

spotifythread.biz

Just the latest update to my Mac. Not sure on the version. They've taken away the search bar at the top so now you have to click search. Editing playlists is all fiddly and unresponsive. And I can't seem to drag albums into folder playlists any more; instead I have to make a new playlist in the folder, title it, then drag it in

1.1.54 apparently.

I have the search bar and I can still drag albums into playlists. I'm on Mac 1.1.55.498.gf9a83c60 so maybe update?

ah i can see it says an update is available (thought i had just updated). damn, that means talking to a company admin

having seen the update but not downloaded, it looks terrible and appears to hamstring various usabilities, every change seems user hostile

I gave up struggling with the Windows desktop app about three months ago. It had become agonisingly slow, with 90% of searches searches taking over a minute, and sometimes up to 10 minutes. I tried switching off hardware acceleration, and I even - with great reluctance - switched off the ability to incorporate local files. Neither made the slightest difference. So I just use the web version within Chrome now; it has its downsides (no standardisation of volume betweeen tracks, no scrobbling etc), but it's better than the alternative.