Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Try to delete a playlist, get this fuckery:
https://i.ibb.co/5hvJfHG/Untitled.png

Try to look at a playlist, get this bullshit:
https://i.ibb.co/6DJtnWb/Untitled2.png

To be fair to them that looks like a freak bug that probably affects 0.0001% of people based on some obscure combination of hardware and software and that they've never soon before. I'd try a fresh install as a first resort.

Do wish they would return search box to active page instead of menu.

Is this some sort of attempt to force additional "engagement" or whatever with Spotify (i.e bury the one function everyone uses every time they open Spotify one level down).

I’ve been getting a fun new bug where dragging a song to a playlist warns me it’s a duplicate, despite not having been added before—I have to click don’t add and add it again for it to work. If I click to add anyway, the song it adds is the previous one I added, not the one I just dragged to the playlist.

1. Check my credit card statement and realise that I am paying for Spotify Premium, somehow
2. Log in to Spotify, it says I need to update my location and kicks me out, try again, the same happens.
3. Finally twig that I have to go to the desktop version, so recover my password (another story) and do that.
4. Change my location on the desktop version and log in to Spotify again.
5. But I don't have Premium on here? What?
6. Try out every other email address I have (another 15 minutes here while it redirects me to a "something has gone wrong" US page (I am in the UK)
7. It turns out that three different email addresses have Spotify accounts. None of them have Premium.
8. Write an angry note on the Spotify support forum explaining what has gone wrong. Spend 5 minutes adding mandatory tags and going through three capcha processes, whereupon it asks me to log into my account, which then leads to another 404 page.
9. Finally try logging in via Facebook, yes this works! I can tell I have Premium here, only because it isn't nagging me to sign up for it. But can I cancel it? No. Also it has yet another email address listed, one I lost access to about five years ago.
10. Finally signing in on desktop via facebook works! And going through a load of menus I can finally find a "manage subscriptions" option.
11. And just to end this story there are a whole FIVE PAGES of nag screens before I can finally cancel the subscription.

This right here is why I fucking hate Spotify. Well, one of the reasons.

I rather doubt Spotify is any worse than any other subscription service when it comes to managing your unconnected accounts if you sign up for 4 of them using email accounts you no longer have access to and forget which is which.

Something has gone wrong

the root of the problem is

- automatically signing in with whichever Google account is active and not making it clear that you have done this

- having a support forum which is unusable and let's you write a comment which you cannot then post

- not letting users manage or view subscription settings in app, or let you know you have to be on the desktop version to do so

yes, there are lots of apps that do the same to some extent, is this the worst one? not sure, maybe, however "other people are bad so we are also bad" is no kind of argument to make.

for someone with my level of executive dysfunction this means that for reasons beyond my control I have lost £50 I cannot afford for a service I did not use. I can't sue anyone so let me vent on here please.

oh and all the 404s, no other service does that quite so much.

In 2020, when live music was dead, and musicians were suffering, and @Bandcamp started Bandcamp Fridays to help, Apple, Amazon and Spotify quietly dropped their payments per stream. Spotify has reduced their rate by 43% in 2 years. #spotify #bandcamp #justiceatspotify #payartists https://t.co/HcV773XkFM

— Ashtray Navigations (@ashtraynav) June 2, 2021

Well, I think I finally understand their business model for transitioning from unprofitable to profitable.

So Spotify pays out royalties based on how much money they collect in ad revenue and subscription fees. This must mean that they (and the other services, tbf) have been collecting less money per new user?

Seems like this model encourages userbase growth and maximizes overall revenue to the labels (and the artists). Your per-stream payout is lower but there are more streams.

Also seems like the labels should have set a minimum per-stream price. Maybe they did, and we just haven't hit it yet :/

The labels are not in it for their artists

This must mean that they (and the other services, tbf) have been collecting less money per new user?

How is this even possible?

Right, both the addition of discount plans and expansion into countries with lower relative prices result in lower averages per user and per stream, but more streams and more total money.

And, of course, none of these services set their payments by stream, so "quietly dropped their payments per stream" is a giveaway that the writer either doesn't know how this works, or is counting on the reader not knowing...

Also, payments are done by product by region, not through averages, so although expanding into Bangladesh (e.g.) makes the overall effective average go down, it doesn't change the amounts or rates paid for US Premium streams.

Not sure if you know the answer to this, Glenn – but when a 30-second (or shorter) song clip is used in something like an Instagram Story, does any $$ change hands? Or is it just treated as promotional?

I doubt it, but I have no idea if there are specific business arrangements for Instagram...

Also, payments are done by product by region, not through averages, so although expanding into Bangladesh (e.g.) makes the overall effective average go down, it doesn't change the amounts or rates paid for US Premium streams.

A comfort to know that expansion into Bangladesh doesn't change the reprehensibly low rates paid for US Premium streams

You are free to call 70% of revenue "reprehensibly low" if that's how you feel, of course, but it's a larger share to royalties than LPs, CDs or iTunes downloads had...

percentage of revenue is probably not the right stat to talk about... the issue (if i'm not mistaken) is how the artists can make a living wage/fair compensation, and how the cheap/free streaming model, by involving much less revenue to start with, already means a huge cut to that? and then within that frame, it's fair to say, "if spotify's raking in all this dough, then they do have the opportunity to get the artists closer to a living wage/fair compensation." like - the pie has gotten smaller. so it's not really meaningful to say "well, they're getting 70% of this much smaller pie, that's a higher percentage!" right?

Except streaming is on course to maybe bring the music industry back to CD-era levels, so it's actually not a *much* smaller pie currently, and it might not be smaller at all soon.

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

You are free to call 70% of revenue "reprehensibly low" if that's how you feel, of course, but it's a larger share to royalties than LPs, CDs or iTunes downloads had...

― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, June 3, 2021 9:31 AM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

A question in good faith: do you know of a single artist whose career spans both the LP and CD era and the streaming era who is in better shape now than they were in 1992? Are you aware of any such artists who have publicly embraced streaming over the old model as a sustainable way for artists to continue producing work?

a larger share to royalties than LPs, CDs or iTunes downloads had...

How many $30 CDs can I get each week for $10 a month?

The best estimates I've seen for average music-spending per person at the height of the CD boom were $25-45/year. The CD retail chain kept about 55% of that, so that was $12-20 per person per year in effective royalties. A $10/month streaming subscription is about $84/year in royalties. A "free" ad-supported account is more like $15-20. So overall it's pretty comparable, and maybe the average is actually higher. So the industry premise is that we can get more money into the system by getting more people to spend $10/month even though the tiny fraction of people (like me) that used to spend $1000s/year are no longer doing that.

I do appreciate all these stats, some more I would like: how many people are on premium vs free accounts (and is that proportion changing); and are there significantly more people trying to make a living (or any money) from recorded music, now the barrier to entry is much lower?

That RIAA chart is really interesting; I didn't realize CD sales had shrunk to that extent (also helpful that it has the "Revenue adjusted for inflation" checkbox – looks like there's still a ways to go before we come close the 1999 peak by that measure).

I too would love to know how many artists are trying to make a living from it. There are >10m artists on Spotify, but that includes a lot of people (like me) who aren't trying to make money, which makes any statistics about "% of artists" basically meaningless...

For that matter, how many artists were making a living from music in 1992? And how many of those were getting royalties, vs on unrecouped major-label contracts.

The best estimates I've seen for average music-spending per person at the height of the CD boom were $25-45/year. The CD retail chain kept about 55% of that, so that was $12-20 per person per year in effective royalties. A $10/month streaming subscription is about $84/year in royalties. A "free" ad-supported account is more like $15-20. So overall it's pretty comparable, and maybe the average is actually higher. So the industry premise is that we can get more money into the system by getting more people to spend $10/month even though the tiny fraction of people (like me) that used to spend $1000s/year are no longer doing that.

This is interesting, but feels like it's not apples and apples, stats wise. If the average per person (all people, or just music buyers?) was $12-20 before, I'd love to know what that average is now – presumably quite a few people don't stream music at all, but I don't know how that compares with the numbers who never bought CDs/records in the old era.

And the other part of this equation is just how many more artists and releases there are than there used to be. I'm sure the vast majority of revenue is generated off the back of a small number of artists, but of course it's all the little artists that people care about in all this. Or maybe not the tiny ones, who people recognize would never had made much money in any era, but the ones big enough to have some media attention and be able to tour to a following.

xpost

Right, we don't have real numbers for how many people bought CDs.

From the last Spotify quarterly report (https://investors.spotify.com/financials/press-release-details/2021/Spotify-Technology-S.A.-Announces-Financial-Results-for-First-Quarter-2021/default.aspx), we can see that the overall global average revenue per person is about $48/year, which would be about $34 in royalties. The RIAA database is US-only, of course, and Spotify doesn't report results by country.

The overall conclusion I draw from the RIAA graph, though, is that the music industry got wrecked and is maybe as little as halfway back to its peak. So if anybody who was part of that peak feels like things are worse now, then yeah, all signs are that things are still worse. But they're improving again, and streaming is why.

improving for who?

https://loudandclear.byspotify.com also has some official Spotify numbers showing that the artist pyramid is flattening a bit over time. As best I can tell from comparing findable sales figures for some top albums and artists from the CD era, the most popular artists on streaming account for a smaller portion of the overall market than the most popular artists did in 1999. Which makes sense, as CD sales were much more of a winner-takes-all market by the nature of having to buy in increments of whole CDs.

Ha – just had a look at that site and thought the "OK I understand" was a super-patronising button to push when artists had understood that Spotify was great (it actually relates to the cookie preference message in small type)

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

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

It ought to have checkboxes by each paragraph, and then a "Concede selected assertions" button at the bottom...

Ha ha

this is now getting crazy. I add a new track or show to the bottom of the queue then need to drag it up and it doesn't move the thing i'm trying to . Sometimes moves someth8ng else downwards.
I'm not getting this since intuitively If I click on something that's what I'm expecting to drag.

actually just dumped like 18 tracks i had brought in from searching when it did that just now.

A question in good faith: do you know of a single artist whose career spans both the LP and CD era and the streaming era who is in better shape now than they were in 1992? Are you aware of any such artists who have publicly embraced streaming over the old model as a sustainable way for artists to continue producing work?

― Paul Ponzi, Thursday, June 3, 2021 10:17 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

you dodged this question, glenn

Actually, Glenn is under no obligation to respond to aggressive lines of questioning from ILX randos. If I were in his position I'd ignore questions like yours as well.

I didn't think my question was the slightest bit aggressive and was asked in good faith but ok

Always the mark of a good faith question when you need clarify that it’s actually in good faith...

Also, Glenn did address the question (5 posts later), and asked a question back.

this whole performance is frankly weird

Yeah Glenn's not exactly responsible for Spotify's pricing policy and has been usually beyond helpful when someone has a techy Spotify query or whatever

which means he has no obligation to defend it either

He defends aspects of the operation that he sincerely believes in: I read him as believing the royalty division is extremely fair, and as being agnostic about (or disinterested in) whether the price-per-user is fair.

ok. this amount of love for one's employer is quite foreign to me, is all