Continuing with Spotify?

multiple generations raised on the idea that they shouldn't have to pay for music.

I dunno, almost half of Spotify users pay the monthly fee (I did) -- the difference between paying four monthly fees and one seems a lot smaller than the difference between one and zero. At least, that's the way it was for me and TV -- I never had cable, and then, at some point, realized that Netflix would actually be a good deal for me -- and once I was paying one monthly fee, the barrier was down for me to add others. But I will never buy an individual DVD again, that's a different thing. (And I'm almost universally unwilling to pay $4 to watch an individual movie streaming, but I can't really justify my unwillingness there, it makes no sense.)

Yeah, somehow it's hard psychologically to "rent" a movie now, even though it's just a few bucks... don't know why

yeah I have to remind myself that I used to pretty regularly spend 10-20$ per week renting movies, so occasionally paying 5$ to see a movie at home is not a big deal

we are as financially moral as our options allow

"...I think Abraham Lincoln said that"

RE: Digital movie rentals

If it's something I really want to see, then okay fine I'll pay the $5 or whatever. But even then, it's very much a last resort and I can count the number of times I've done that on one hand. At least in the old days of physical rentals, you got to keep it for a few days and rewatch favorite parts if desired.

RE: New Yorker piece

This sums things up very well:

Ek makes for a quotable villain, yet the rage against Spotify falls into a familiar American pattern: instead of addressing systemic issues, we stage morality plays involving the misdeeds of individuals. One miscreant falls, another rises, and the song remains the same.

(cues up the Stylistics "People Make the World Go Round")

But I will never buy an individual DVD again, that's a different thing.

Am I the only person who bemoans the loss of making-of featurettes, bonus content, deleted scenes, director commentary and the like?

I do too

(I love that sh1t)

I totally miss them.

I think one/a problem with streaming is that Spotify et al. are essentially just glorified on-demand radio stations, with different users tilting more one way or the other - on-demand at one end, curated radio at the other. The issue is that this long-extant model ("free" music on the radio/internet/MTV/wherever) has been directly linked to a commerce model, but it can never work as a commerce model any more than radio can/does without "real" music sales (whether physical or digital). It's a great promotional platform, like radio is or can be, but it can't generate enough revenue to go 'round. It reminds me of that interview with DJ Shadow where he concedes he couldn't credit all the samples on "Entroducing" because every artist always wants half, but you can only divide something in half once before you start hitting significantly diminishing returns, fractions of a fraction, which helps no one. (At least that's how I remember the interview.) And fractions of a fraction is essentially what Spotify et al. are paying out, but there ultimately is no equitable solution to that issue.

Like, people argue, hey, then how can you afford to pay Joe Rogan $100 million? And the answer, perversely, is that $100 million ain't nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially when you're talking about fairly (whatever that means) compensating literally countless artists being streamed on your platform. I think the Hurley piece (which I would have linked to, just wasn't sure how to link to her Facebook post) gives a figure that Spotify would have to hit just to raise its pay-outs a bit more, and it was astronomical. Like $11 billion or something? And as Isbell responded to someone who asked how podcasters can make all this money, "Because record labels just now started getting into the podcast business. Give it time and the podcasters won’t make much either."

Anyway, the Rogan bullshit is a content debate, not really a compensation debate.

_But I will never buy an individual DVD again, that's a different thing._

Am I the only person who bemoans the loss of making-of featurettes, bonus content, deleted scenes, director commentary and the like?

> it can never work as a commerce model any more than radio can/does without "real" music sales

I respectfully disagree... You just need some gatekeeping/limited catalog so that the overall revenues are higher, and targeted better. HBO over the past 20 years has literally leveraged $5-10/month from individual opt-in subscribers who wanted a tasty mix of exclusive new and catalog content from its stable of creators and licensed contributors. It has been culturally seismic in using that subscription money to make content that people talk about and were excited about.

If instead of a mix of its own content and licensed catalog stuff starting with the Sopranos and Deadwood and the Wire, in 2001 or so it had given $50 million dollars to Rush Limbaugh as its major play to have exclusive content, we would be thinking of HBO as a shitty, shitty platform. It would be "that movie channel that has Rush Limbaugh (who is evil)". This is what Spotify has inexplicably done for itself. Its whole model was AGAINST exclusive content for music, it was for liberating all the world's music into one super-convenient streaming library, and instead of using its revenue to finance, oh i dunno, good original music like maybe exclusive live albums or something, maybe a Friday night DJ mix party with people gathering together to listen together and then share the next day, whatever, what does it decide to identify itself with? This awful sort of next-generation trumpy person who is a charismatic no-nothing cynical valueless alt-right creep responsible for mainstreaming horrible ideas that get people killed.

> Anyway, the Rogan bullshit is a content debate, not really a compensation debate.

I agree. It's just that the Rogan BS really helped clarify for me this sort of itchy feeling I've had about Spotify, which was that in spite of it being literally the best thing that ever happened for music junkies, the company just doesn't give a shit about music really. I know it's a cliche to hate on tech companies while using them all day. It's genuinely strange to me and it shouldn't be. Netflix clearly doesn't really get the potential of visual storytelling either but my goodness at least they try.

All you have to do is go use Bandcamp for like 5 minutes and you'll realize which service actually values musicians and music, and which is trying to create a new payola system.

this was good, despite the annoying title:

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/100280-007-A/has-streaming-saved-the-music-industry/

payola? how so? (I've uploaded and sold a few albums on Bandcamp but not enough to really understand the finer points

Spotify is creating a payola system by driving everyone toward their (algorithmic or editorial) playlists, to which they can then sell access.

Would like very much to see a ProPublica style deep dive into Spotify's recent military AI investment and the connections therein.

There's not a lot of info about Helsing.ai, the startup in question, it was just founded and has about 100 people right now. It's not really Spotify's board or anything approving investment in it, it's just the founder Ek wanting to plow his money into european tech companies and not caring if the profile of those companies are totally at odds with his still running an entertainment platform.

https://siliconcanals.com/crowdfunding/helsing-raises-102-5m/

If you are looking to draw connections, the CTO is formerly of Thiel's analytics company Palantir:

https://medium.com/@ursula2000/what-i-learned-at-palantir-phase-transitions-bd1cd796d341

Re: the payola accusations... I wouldn't call offering a reduced payout for a coveted playlist spot getting exposure payola, exactly. It reminds me more of those old label compilations of this season's new rock songs offered for $0.99 in stores / through the mail. The artists on those comps probably had a reduced royalty on those albums because it was all promotional and sold at a loss.

In fact I was a little intrigued and baffled when I read about the whole scheme last year. Say you are in charge of a team that runs mostly algorithmic playlists for several big genres, your job is to make sure the stuff in those playlists stays fresh from day to day while having stuff in it that people actually like, and you are looking at the numbers of how well those playlists perform week over week and trying to tweak what goes in the playlist and why and how, it's quite interesting to think about. For Rap Caviar you are maybe tracking some of the people who consistently seem to be selecting the songs that later become popular in that genre and you sometimes sneak in stuff that is trending with those people, or trending in certain shifting geographic areas, etc. You need some sort of system to weed out old stuff that is getting bumped back up every fourth of July and Christmas for example or because it was in a recent film...

If you open up some of those playlists to artists who want to force their more mediocre songs on the public, you are making your playlists worse, more likely that the customer will switch off. Payola works in small doses on radio because the market is captured... how could it work when the customer has thousands of playlists to choose from? The whole algorithmic game is undermined whenever a crappy track winds up on a playlist or algorithmic "radio" station. You'd see that playlist gradually turning to crap.

I guess what I figured was it was just an experiment they were trying, to see if smaller labels or artists who were having trouble getting exposure but really really believed in their latest song, if they wanted to sort of put their money where their mouth was and offer their song at a discount for a while in the service, and that signal was a sort of convincing way to say, "yes, this actually is a really great song." And that maybe you might get some interesting suggestions coming from the labels/artists that way. I dunno, it could actually be quite interesting to let people take that chance.

xxxpost I have no reading comprehension so I thought the payola accusation was about Bandcamp

xxxxps Criterion Channel has all the extras btw but i bet you knew that

They don't have the Cannonball Run commentary track!

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I'm also trying to shift more of my spending/listening to Bandcamp, but I'm too hooked on streaming at this point to abandon it completely.

that app comprises at least 35% of my listening (all bought stuff, but it's a mega convenient app and easy to use)

(and you can listen to not bought stuff too)

iirc Criterion Channel has extras ported from discs, and is not generating dozens of hours of new content to accompany each feature film acquisition?

*iiuc

Bandcamp’s app is getting better. They just released an update that supports queuing. Playlists seem like a logical next step and would be cool.

It’s just buying physical media from Bandcamp gets expensive

Then don’t buy it - just pay for the music if the medium is unreasonably priced. I’m in Australia so it’s always $22 with $29 shipping etc.

Am I the only person who bemoans the loss of making-of featurettes, bonus content, deleted scenes, director commentary and the like?

There are boutique labels still making these!

just seen Daily beans has just left the platform.
Not been keeping up with the exodus so is that one of many.

Bandcamp or a new player should set an artist-friendly ethical standard of 2 cents a stream royalty rate. i wonder how many artists would jump ship from Spotify if they did that.

With pay as you go "top up your account" type options vs. "heavy streaming", "lite streaming", "unlimited streaming" monthly plan options

i'm starting to feel like Bandcamp + NTS + BBC Sounds + Rinse is more than enough music for 5 lifetimes and if i really need to hear a specific track i can just google it tbh

Bandcamp doesn't pay anything to the artist if you stream without paying, right?

right but it’s not convenient. i pay in order to add it to my “library” of stuff in the app, which is very nice to use.

I guess what I figured was it was just an experiment they were trying, to see if smaller labels or artists who were having trouble getting exposure but really really believed in their latest song, if they wanted to sort of put their money where their mouth was and offer their song at a discount for a while in the service, and that signal was a sort of convincing way to say, "yes, this actually is a really great song." And that maybe you might get some interesting suggestions coming from the labels/artists that way. I dunno, it could actually be quite interesting to let people take that chance.

Even if it doesn't impact the "quality" of songs in a playlist, you dont see how this incentivizes a race to the bottom that in the end only serves to undermine artists bottom lines and boost Spotify's profits?

There was also the thing a number of years ago, it may be linked on this thread, where iirc some journalist went down the rabbithole & discovered what appeared to be "fake" artists filling out a number of playlists, with spotify apparently commissioning royalty-free playlist filler from freelancers for a flat fee. It obviously wasnt happening on Rap Caviar et al, but on some of the utilitarian playlists favored by less-engaged listeners like "rainy day jazz" or w/e. They may not even still be doing that bc it seems like it could be more trouble than its worth, but just another example of how Spotify is constantly exploring to innovative new ways to self-deal.

iirc Criterion Channel has extras ported from discs

queue has gone dark again, is that tied in with anything else. I just can't see what i have cued up following the podcast I am listening to.
Figuring taht since I'm on it I might as well stick with it until I find something else. That is play through at least the play queue i had set up beforehand. Which was continually changing up til now. Oh well.

aight finally cancelled spotify (and qobuz) going to try the $9.99 Tidal HiFi tier - this should be CD quality (no MQA encoding but I'm skeptical of that whole format, it's cheaper than Qobuz (which I love) but this whole spotify thing made me want to go through all my digital subscriptions and tighten my belt a bit, all these little things that are "only $10 a month" add up

sounds really good so far

Napster

A friend says his younger sister uses Napster, of all things (it's apparently a streaming service like any other now?). She's too young to even remember the P2P days

using Napster, having a Friendster account, playing the Hollywood Stock Exchange--the late 90s/early 00s are coming back!

all these little things that are "only $10 a month" add up

Truth bomb. I have about every subscription and didn't realize how much they all were combined and about fainted

The best thing about Tidal (for me at least) is that it integrates into Rekordbox/Serato/djay so you use the songs for mixing.

Spotify pulled that functionality two years ago and Apple Music never allowed it.

^^

Just want to add, I've started putting music on platforms that offer user-centric royalties. And so far it's worked out at about 2 cents a stream. I think this is the way forward. Deleted my music off Spotify a couple of months ago and haven't regretted it.

For any musicians on here, I would recommend giving these platforms a try. There are a couple of new ones: there is minm.co (a new site that is running smoothly with easy upload feature). Then there is resonate.is (still quite basic but they are promising an update soon so worth keeping an eye on).
The more people upload stuff on these platforms, the more traction they will get.

If any of those work with DistroKid I’ll take a look and activate them if I can.

Apparently dozens of old Rogan episodes have been removed from Spotify. Rogan also apologized for his frequent use of the n word (which India.Arie had cited when removing her music).