Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

*puts on sleeveless letterman's jacket and combs hair on motorcycle*

If you think "love of one's employer" is behind my opinions about music and streaming, I must have done an amazingly bad job of explaining them.

Every time the navigation UI changes I pull some hair out of my head

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."

― armoured van, Holden (sic), Saturday, March 20, 2021 9:07 PM (two months ago)

On May 24th, Rogan was headlining at a regular venue of his in Austin, before a drag show, and he used repeated f- and t- slurs in his set.

After the show, Rogan went to the green room, where Creek co-owner Rebecca Trent asked if the host wanted to take a picture with Rogan. According to Krebs, the host responded “Absolutely the fuck not,” and confronted Rogan over his set.

Rogan argued that if a white hundred-millionaire man uses those slurs onstage to an audience of steroid enthusiasts, it defuses them. The queen disagreed, and the venue informed her that Rogan sells so many tickets that they will not stop booking him, under any circumstances. (LA comic Tony Hinchcliffe was removed from some Rogan support slots by the venue last month after this incident, and did not perform there for a whole four days.)

She has moved her weekly show to another venue.

Rogan’s use of transphobic slurs at The Creek fits into a broader pattern of transphobic behavior. Last year he gave the author Abigail Shrier a (typically) uncritical platform to compare "transitioning among teenagers to historic adolescent phenomena such as eating disorders, self-harm, and… the occult," per Men's Health. “They have this agenda,” he said of LGBTQ+ activists, “and this agenda is very ideologically driven, that anyone who even thinks they might be trans should be trans, are trans, and the more trans people the better. The more kids that transition the better.”

The search button on top used to be always visible, what's the reason behind hiding it. For a while I couldn't navigate. And for some reason, it reacts to ctrl+l instead of ctrl+f.

Every podcast I’ve never heard of gets paid 4 billon dollars to produce episodes exclusively on Duckass Media but every podcast I’ve ever heard of has hosts that will do an hour long episode on whatever topic I want if I send them fifty bucks and loose ketchup packets https://t.co/4QNVKgzZrI

— Brendel (@Brendelbored) June 15, 2021

can't arrange tracks on the playlist again. does it just go haywire after you've listened for a few hours?
It's started adding tracks at the top of the list not the bottom and rearranging everything every time I try to make the playlist I want to listen to in the order I want to.
Brought up a track so that it plays next, then another track to play after it. So the 2nd track moves up to beyond the first one. & won't be reorgansied.

I had an option of picks as part of the layout yesterday and for a few days before that. Actually seemed to be giving some interesting choices but it's now vanished. Weird seemed to be moving to having music at teh bottom of the Home page and then back to podcasts. I don't know if there is a control to determine what choice . I have been listening to a podcast followed by an unfamiliar musical song. So would like that suggestions pick thing back.
Then today its gone to having mixes or at least I've looked in what those mixes are and tried to pick individual tracks from them. To put on playlist. The mixes seem to be based on recent choices of tracks I've used. I guess that's standard and other people use them more .
Did that screw up the way that tracks were adding to the queue?

Really annoying. Was hoping to put something together to remain listening to. have had to restart the computer after it froze and lost changes i made to the playlist from the time.

2020:

https://i.imgur.com/CNP9EIs.jpg

tfw you pay $100 million dollars to someone to broadcast antivax propaganda and COVID conspiracy theories on your platform, insist that his opinions align with company policy doing so, and then he runs a three-hour ad for the white supremacist subscription service that launched the Proud Boys, run by a guy who was fired from his multi-million $ radio job after livetweeting himself harassing & abusing a black woman in Times Square, calling black people "not human" and "illegal savages."

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Monday, May 17, 2021 6:06 PM (one month ago)

apparently this episode also includes theorising that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Tuesday, May 18, 2021 5:32 AM (one month ago)

2021: https://i.imgur.com/5lhP2kN.jpg

What i sthe story with the interface hviung a thumbnail up for a podcast and then not letting you immediately click through to teh latest episode. I keep having to go through like 2 layers, Top thumbnail look at date, find out its several months old or last year's. click op title on bottom of figurehead episode and finally get to new episode. Why not just keep new one as the figurehead you click on at the top when you select the series?
& half the time you have to wait for new episodes to populate below that figurehead.
Bah and indeed humbug.

Navigaton and control seem to be issues that need to be looked at quite heavily.
Would be like if what options as to what one could access from the home page were open to control by the user. Would be good if things were predictable at least.
Or is there a way of making them show up when they're needed.

this isn't spotify specific, but the "pop up" is the most annoying UI device currently used everywhere.

I discovered that Cmd-L to get to search works even if you can't see a search bar

Yeah just wondering if there are any further keyboard shortcuts that I'm not aware of. have been using that Ctrl +l for the last couple of days.
But main thing would be to be able to be aware of what he contents of the Home page were prior to scrolling down Or is that keeping them guessing part of the fun according to them.

Have had some interesting recommendations turn up on the album picks. Some things I haven't heard of that I remember which surprised me.

The home page changes all the time. It isn't meant to be a predictable way to navigate through your own stuff.

hit ? for a full list of keyboard shortcuts...

Ooh - Cmd-F!

When I say predictable its more what sections are going to be in not what the contents of those sections are going to be. Would be good to know that if i scroll down I would find album picks with a dynamic contents so I kept getting things recommended that were different each time.
Also knowing that I had a set of podcasts that I could scroll through that related to one of the podcasts I listen to frequently. Though possibly a different one at different times. I would have thought that kind of thing would be there each time but it doesn't even seem to be that predictable.
& I don't know how you call up something like Album Picks or whatever except for it chancing to be there at certain times. like

also wish it wouldn't dump an entire playlist that I was halfway through and tehn say taht they couldn't play this at this time when I'm transferring from one device to another.
JUst got halfway through a podcast and went to go from phone to desktop and it just blanked out. Gosh how annoying.

The amount of clicking around you have to do after the latest update is so damn dumb. Why separate areas for albums, singles, and compilations. So much easier to just be able to scroll and see everything at once.

Agree with PBKR and agree with the homepage looking random.

Guessing the new Stars of the Lid single is another fake out

2021: https://i.imgur.com/5lhP2kN.jpg

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Sunday, June 20, 2021 5:51 PM (six days ago)

continued:

https://i.imgur.com/a4bRljp.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/RJUFtsC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/kYtYWeM.jpg

The problem was music piracy. The solution was to distribute music without paying the artists.

Jim Anderson (the architect of the Spotify platform) says the mission of Spotify was to distribute music...NOT get artists paid.

you can read an excerpt of the interview below courtesy of @digitalmusicnws. pic.twitter.com/kzHadm3EBN

— MF STO. 😷 (@BigSto) June 30, 2021

I was just reading this (not good, IMO) New Yorker article that was linked from a Pitchfork review. It includes these quotes from Kevin Weatherly, Spotify’s head of North American programming, which I thought were “funny”:

Weatherly is hesitant to suggest that he or anyone else at Spotify makes definitive decisions about how music should be organized or presented, pointing out that the service’s A.I. is merely reactive. “We’re not arbiters of taste,” he said. “We’re not A. & R. We’re here to try to connect our audience with different types of music, regardless of genre.” (…) “Prior to Spotify, you were spoon-fed what music you listened to by traditional gatekeepers. All of that has been shattered.”

(I know Weatherly’s name b/c he was a longtime radio guy, btw)

Prior to Spotify, you were spoon-fed what music you listened to by traditional gatekeepers.

I guess, to be fair, it’s more like being fed thru a garden hose with one of those rotating nozzles.