Keep in mind the person who wrote this run's a DIY venue in Brooklyn so they're pretty torn up about this. Spotify is pretty terrible for struggling DIY artists who mainly rely on album/merch sales at shows.
> This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with.
These devices are awesome. When I go to lunch with my co-workers, it's easy to split the check. I don't have to give my credit card to anyone. And if we're in a time crunch I don't have to flag down the wait staff. Nor do they have to wait for their shot at the payment terminal.
Let's be honest here: how many airport waitstaff out there have ever brightened anyone's day?
Slim to none.
I suspect this artist has never actually eaten at an airport restaurant -- the staff, at least at JFK and LAX, are some of the most demotivated, spirit-broken people I've ever encountered.
I'm often baffled at the way Pitchfork et al have embraced Spotify when it so clearly wants to own everything to do with music so it can extract value everywhere.
I love Spotify the product, but it's a terrible, impersonal experience in a lot of ways, and also doesn't feel very sticky to me. Sure, I need access to the catalogue, but the playlists leave me cold and I could easily switch to another service. I feel like there'll be opportunities for instagram-like upstarts to chip away at their base, offering things that their big, impersonal machine can't as it's so focused on scale.
I'm not so sure. 8tracks tried that by collecting playlists from real people but it hasn't been able to stick. I think people like convenience and nothing is more convenient than a computer telling you what to do.
Totally agree, though it's not viable to start a small-ish spotify alternative today because of the licensing situation. The rights owners really need to get together and create a generic streaming license, similar to what is offered to radio stations.
Spotify is frustratingly dishonest about what’s paid placement on their service.
Recently they introduced a feature called “2017 Wrapped”, which contains a playlist named “Your Top Songs 2017”. I imagined this list would contain the songs I actually listened to most. Instead it’s biased so that many of my favorites don’t appear, yet there are major label songs that I don’t even remember actively playing.
It’s borderline misleading advertisement to pretend these are “my top songs” when obviously the list is a pay-to-play for labels.
My 2017 wrapped is a pretty accurate reflection of what I did listen to, and barely any of it is the sort of stuff you'd think of when you talk about "major label songs".
There is, however, a "The Ones That Got Away" playlist, that, while still not heavy on anything particularly popular, could fit in with your experience. Maybe you were looking at the wrong playlist?
Maybe I'm just unlucky to be in a user cohort where promoted songs are inserted into my top 2017 songs (to test how many extra plays they can get this way). It sucks that they do this to paying customers though.
Mine is pretty spot-on. There are a few odd-balls on there that I attribute to their weighting manually selected songs much higher than those from a playlist.
Spotify is pretty consistent in doing this. If you link your Spotify account to Tinder, it gives you a list of your "Top Artists" to present on your profile, which in my experience only lists artists signed or distributing with major labels or imprints, regardless of what I've actually listened to the most.
really? it's been a pretty cool feature in my experience - gives you something to talk about with people that might not have a fleshed out profile. plus it serves as a sort of filter - if, say, the chainsmokers are in your top artists, realistically you're not going to have that much common ground with me or my friend group
My "Top Songs 2017" playlist is exlusively stuff I've listened to, specifically my most listened to tracks. Maybe not 100% in order of most listened to, but I've definitely listened to all of them a lot.
On the other hand, the "ones that got away" playlist is completely filled with pop dreck, scraped directly from top 40 lists, not worth even looking at.
My top list is missing a lot of stuff and instead contains songs I can't remember ever hearing, taken from albums where I've listened to only one song a couple of times. The copyright for these songs is owned by RCA / Sony Music, so I guess Sony is paying to insert them into playlists to promote the rest of the album.
On the other hand, Spotify's description for the "Your Top Songs 2017" playlist doesn't explicitly make the claim that these would be songs I actually listened to; instead it's more vaguely phrased as "songs you loved this year"... So I guess they're just assuming I would love these.
It also helps that Spotify doesn't show play counts, so there's no way for me to verify the actual top list. I'm thinking of buying more MP3s from now on -- files on local disk don't try to actively manipulate me to listen to something else.
Maybe someone hacked your account and use it without you noticing? My "2017 Wrapped" matches perfectly what I have scrobbled to last.fm this year and it contains mostly old stuff definitely not from major labels(The Smiths, Talking Heads, Slowdive, Joy Division etc).
Mine was pretty good actually. From time to time you find some track you just can't stop listening to - start every morning with it, put it on every time you get home, then hit rewind as soon as it's done and so on - my top songs consisted pretty much of those.
Bandcamp is great. For the artists which I discovered either through Soundcloud or YouTube and have a Bandcamp page, I will follow and receive updates via email. It's a nice system for smaller artists who don't have newsletter support from small to large labels.
I'd have to agree with you. What I've been doing lately is clicking on interesting album art in the recently purchased feed on their homepage.
It amazes me how often I can guess what genre an album is just from the album art alone, I'll find around 10 new artists I really like within an hour of just clicking on album art.
Bandcamp is totally awesome. For an albums that truly resonate with me, I do listen to them on Spotify, but I'll also buy them on Bandcamp, to directly support the artists.
Well, yes, you can stream your purchases (via browser or bandcamp app), but it's obviously not their focus, and certainly not comparable to all-you-can-eat-services like Spotify.
You are totally right. I'm just ticked off about the fact that lots of bands I like make their new stuff streamable on there before it's released elsewhere. I find it very awkward to access that stuff. For me, in that situation, bandcamp just feels like a botched attempt at a streaming service. Especially when I remember it used to be better in this regard.
My guess is that streaming isn't a key feature for Bandcamp users/listeners. They use the platform to actually purchase, download and own music, to add it to their offline collections and libraries that will still be there when a streaming service shuts down (rip rdio) or licensing deals change and your favorite albums disappear from Spotify and Co. (It happens).
At least that's how I, as a frequent music buyer and collector, use Bandcamp.
Concerning the artists that prioritize Bandcamp: Don't forget that most artists don't make any money via streaming - of course they push the channel that actually provides revenue and actual, meaningful sales.
This is amazing!! I'm so glad I checked this out. Thank you for linking it. I've already found so many artists that I otherwise wouldn't have found via Spotify, and I already know this is gonna be hurting my wallet in the next few months. :D I'm seriously so happy right now!
Such a long, meandering article, but the meat of it seems to be here:
“The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
I get that the author wants to listen to "challenging" music that "pushes boundaries" and laments that Spotify's algorithms are surfacing up Muzak instead. But there are other places to go to find your challenging music. For lots of other people, however, music is not some intimate connection with an artist's soul, it's simply something that goes on in the background while you're trying to get something else done or just relax. People seem to want Muzak--who are you to argue with the market when it has spoken?
One thing I didn't see mentioned was how a song's "radio" seems to just play popular titles by bands in the same genre. When I first saw the feature, I was hoping it would be a successful implementation of Pandora's "Music Genome" promise, but it sounds like the same old market-driven gentle nudging toward what's popular, instead of what I actually wanted.
I mostly listen to metal, not big popular metalcore and radio metal, but plenty of death metal, thrash metal, that sort of thing.
The discover playlist, radios and daily mixes have been absolutely awesome for me, when it comes to discovering new bands. Sure, it generally sticks to the most popular songs by said artists, but 1) they're the popular tracks for a reason, and 2) it gets me to explore the rest of that artist's discography.
I listen to similar plus black metal and found spotify to be decent enough. But as you pointed out, popular songs by popular artists. I have a beef with this, especially when you said:
>1) they're the popular tracks for a reason
Yes, popular because that's all anyone ever hears. That feeds into the same mindless pop music mentality of distilled top hits playlists which shackles the people themselves, the art, and the artist.
Honestly I've found underground and promotional channels on Youtube to be much more explorative and satisfying. Odium Nostrum and Black Metal Promotion have been two very solid channels to follow who feature content that I enjoy which isn't on spotify.
Sure, there are recommendations for the obvious popular bands, but I've also gotten ones for bands I'd never heard of before, like Heptaedium, Mist of Misery, Ashbringer, Vector of Underground and Kyy. Not all of it is good, but it is definitely interesting.
I think it's important to take an active role and explore related artists, instead of only seeing the recommendation playlists.
Outside of Spotify, I follow Toilet ov Hell and my friends' recommendations.
There's an argument to be made about the payment structure, though. Let's say I listen to music for five hours a day. Four of those hours I'm working, and it's mindless background music. For the last hour, I'm at home, actively listening, engaged.
The music in the last hour is worth more to me than the other four hours, and in an older model, pricing can reflect that. Easy-listening CDs are cheaper, and I buy new ones less frequently (it doesn't matter if they repeat, because I'm not really listening). But in the streaming model, the last hour of music is worth less. It's a smaller span of time, and I'm more likely to vary what I listen to during it (so no one artist gets as much money).
I don't know if I'd call Spotify responsible for this--it seems like an unintended consequence--but it's certainly unfortunate either way.
Like you say, most people want their easy music and Spotify delivers. The downside of that is the fact that commercially produced music is now targeting Spotify consumption aggressively and using all those fancy analytics Spotify provides. This makes new music more and more alike each other.
Because of this tight feedback loop on Spotify and the producers, I think it's only a matter of time when they cut out the middle man and start producing music with AI algorithms. I'm sure that algorithms can keep the muzak-consuming masses happy. I've already heard some convincing sounding music (sheet music played with synthesizers) and audio (music produced directly as audio waveforms) produced by algorithms.
The second issue is what's described in the comment you quote. Anyone making niche music is suffering. It was never easy for musicians taking this route but the algorithm based recommendations engines is making it harder to be discovered while taking a bigger cut from the small income.
It's not like there is another viable platform out there. Spotify has a near monopoly and they dictate the terms. People aren't buying a second subscription service or buying songs separately let alone buying a physical album.
I find one positive in this all. Because there's no more income from record sales, musicians are performing live more than in decades. I really like live music, so that's nice.
> Spotify has a near monopoly and they dictate the terms. People aren't buying a second subscription service or buying songs separately let alone buying a physical album.
That's not even close to being true. Google Music, Apple Music, Amazon Prime whatever it's called, regular ol' Youtube videos and playlists, services like last.fm or Pandora.. There are lots of ways to discover music that don't depend on record labels and their marketing.
If your music is independent and you want to stay away from the man, you have to put work into marketing your music. That's the step that you'd normally hand off to the record label. At least now you actually have a viable way (lots, actually) of making money as opposed to the past when distribution was much more difficult.
> That's not even close to being true. Google Music, Apple Music, Amazon Prime whatever it's called, regular ol' Youtube videos and playlists
The others have pretty small consumer base but more importantly, suffer from all the same issues as Spotify. To reach the widest audience, you need to be with all of those. Most consumers have only one music subscription service. That's what makes it a near monopoly for them.
YouTube is a bit of an exception, and my favorite for niche and rare music and forgotten live performance recordings of more popular music. But YouTube is not very good for providing income for musicians who don't want to be predominantly 'tubers.
That makes it a near monopoly for whom? Having a big chunk of the industry doesn't mean you have a monopoly, by the way. Anyone can freely choose from a number of music subscription services. There's no monopoly here. The monopoly probably lies in how licenses are handled, and that process comes before Spotify/Google Music/Apple Music/etc. It's an archaic system and what should be the blame here, not the streaming services we currently have. It's always comical to me how people will attack Spotify and co. for things that the record labels are directly responsible for, and after having screwed artists for decades.
> But YouTube is not very good for providing income for musicians who don't want to be predominantly 'tubers.
Okay, this is not a great excuse. I think I understand what you mean by this. But if a musician doesn't want to follow the distribution channels that consumers prefer, then that's on the artist. If you want to take care of distribution for yourself and avoid any big labels, then you take responsibility for the success and failure of your music's distribution.
But YouTube is not very good for providing income for
musicians who don't want to be predominantly 'tubers.
The question here is whether it's better at providing income for niche musicians than the alternatives. It has always been hard to make money doing niche music. Youtube has made it much easier. Complaining that it doesn't make it profitable enough is beside the question. Some products are never going to be profitable no matter what the distribution mechanism is. For those products it may be sufficient to make it possible for an artist to recoup some costs for their hobby.
It's always a common complaint of appealing to the "mainstream" that people neglect to mention has become the mainstream because it appeals to the desires of a lot of people.
There's the feedback loop of creating something people will like based on what they liked previously, which can be self-limiting, but also appeals to the demands of those consumers.
We should broaden our experiences regularly, but for me with all the other things I could challenge myself with, music isn't something I care deeply enough about to, well... care.
I could've written that piece in high school (and I probably did) about a random popular radio channel, or the billboard top 100. Even if it was big label (and ad) driven instead of algorithm (and ad) driven, I honestly don't see a practical difference.
I always prided myself (this is a remorseful confession, not a boast) in discovering small bands no one had heard of, either later becoming big or not, this going back to the 90s and back. I also took issue with hipsters becoming a term in the mid oughts, because I thought they made me look like a douche (which I saw no irony in).
But to my point: I see absolutely no difference in now and then in the music stage, other than global scope since the rise of the internet. There is of course a lot of stuff that isn't on Spotify, but the barrier of entry to their service seems minimal, as you can regularly discover bandcamp level indie music on there. I can listen to bigger names now on account of being mature enough to acknowledge good music wherever it comes from, but I generally still scavenge blogs, bandcamp and Spotify's discover weekly (which I feel matches what you feed it through play history). I'm inclined to say that Spotify is providing a higher yield than other venues in regards to quality discovery for me.
Not quite - the McDonalds of music might have the most plays on Spotify but there's plenty of challenging niche music as well (even if it's mostly neglected). It's more like Spotify is a major city full of diverse cuisine but 95% of its residents eat every meal at McDonalds.
For me it's Bandcamp as well as independent online record stores like:
- Piccadilly Records
- Norman Records
- Boomkat
- Red Eye Records
- Bleep
Some of these stores offer digital, lossless purchasing options, but more importantly all of them feature staff curated recommendations and featured releases, which are, to me, more effective than Spotify's algorithms. I can't count the number of times Spotify recommends songs I clearly already know and have been listening to via the service before.
The author doesn't differentiate between the contexts of music listening, but when you're at work and need concentration, in a bar, at a party, or doing a workout background music is great and playlists based on moods are on point. Personally I don't see the incompatibility with algorithmically generated playlists and appreciating every song being listened to when appropriate, in fact I find them great to discover new artists and songs, especially in niche genres.
My experience is precisely the opposite: Spotify has been instrumental in exposing me to niche bands and expanding my taste. The "2017 Wrapped" email says I listened to 6944 different songs by 1426 different artists across 103 different genres this year.
This is exactly my experience as well. I have discovered (pun intended) more musical artists and genres than I ever would have found in the olden days of spending countless hours downloading and curating my own musical collection that rarely ventured out of my genre comfort zone. Just looking through my more recent playlists there is so much niche music that I would not have known about with the itunes model.
Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. The truth is that unless you're buying an album (1) or other merchandise, you're not contributing significantly for the artist's survival.
I was chatting with Brock Van Wey last week (aka bvdub, my favorite choice of background music when programming) and he was describing how challenge it is to stay in business nowadays. I naïvely thought these apps were helping those folks...
I for one will try to buy more albums, even if digital, of the bands I listen to all the time.
(1) directly from the artist (e.g. via bandcamp). Google Music, at least, doesn't really give you the mp3 but only a protected file that can solely be played in their software.
You might as well use Patreon or something if you’re just giving them a donation for something you could already stream, then they’ll get both revenues.
For me it comes down to ease of use. If Spotify didn't exist, I doubt I'd be buying albums etc. anyway.
It's the same as torrenting movies, people do it because it's convenient (and free) but now Netflix is here, it's even easier than torrenting. So that's why I'm subscribed to both services and have been for many years.
So artists that leave Spotify, like Taylor Swift for example. I may listen to their music because it's in the charts, but when she left Spotify I just didn't listen to her music at all. So I'm sure Spotify do give the artists attention they would never usually get.
Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites.
Yet Spotify is not only still unprofitable, they're still all but setting money on fire. Some of the more recent reports I've seen are that they're trying to negotiate for lower music royalties.
I can't help but wonder if the ultimate problem here isn't with the idea of all-you-can-eat streaming, but with the idea that all-you-can-eat streaming is only worth $10 a month. What if the earliest services in this space had priced their services at $20 a month? I know, the immediate reaction is "they would have had no customers and it would be a death knell because no one would possibly pay that much," but is it possible we have that reaction because we've just internalized the notion that "$10 per month" is the "proper" price? Back in the Dark Ages--the 1990s and early 2000s--I knew many, many people who were spending $20 or more a month buying individual CDs. If in 1994 I'd have been told, "Hey, what if you could listen to nearly every song ever recorded for the price of only two CDs a month!?" then I'd have been on board.
All four major record labels are investors in Spotify, so the lack of profitability isn't a huge issue if you look at it from their perspective.
Since Spotify wields an enormous influence over what music becomes popular, labels can treat it as a loss leader and keep pumping money into it that they make back from album sales/tours/merch/etc on their top artists. The issue with this is that it vastly favors labels who can leverage this economy of scale, and independent labels for whom album sales are a larger slice of their income can't weather the decrease in payment as well.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that Spotify divides payment per stream up by the total number of streams. Simplified example: if I stream two songs in one month, an indie artist once and a major artist once, they'll each get $5 of my $10. If I stream the indie artist once but the major artist twice, however, they get $6.66 and the indie artist only gets $3.33, even though I the amount I listened to them didn't change. (edit, the pool is actually comprised of all users, I just used one in this example for simplicity)
All this adds up to a system that is heavily stacked in favor of major labels and their respective artists at the expense of independent ones.
As of a while ago (they took down the page explaining it), it's not even split up per user. It's split up per total Spotify streams. Those people that leave their Spotify playing Muzak all day long are diluting your dollars.
So first, why does that not seem like the right way to you? Paying per-play is generally how I would expect broadcast/performance payments to work.
The bigger problem though, is that's not how it works. You may expect those two artists to split your 10$ (ignoring everybody else's cut for simplicity), but what actually happens is the sum total of the revenue that Spotify gets in a month is split up across all of the plays that month[0].
So what actually happens is the two artists you've streamed get paid a few pennies out of your subscription fee, and the rest of it goes to subsidize the streams of other people (heavy users, and/or business that leave it playing all day).
Sorry, didn't mean to cause confusion. I know the pool includes all subscribers; I was also just ignoring everyone else for simplicity. But that just exacerbates how hostile the system is toward independent labels and artists.
To clarify further, my issue isn't that payment is calculated per play, but that it's measured relative to other artists instead of absolutely.
Put another way: an artist that that gets X plays shouldn't make more one month than the next, just because the next month they have to compete with a new album by Taylor Swift.
Edit: to clarify even further, I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do this or even that it's immoral. All I'm saying is that it's a system that's heavily biased in favor of major labels at the expense of independent ones.
> Put another way: an artist that that gets X plays shouldn't make more one month than the next, just because the next month they have to compete with a new album by Taylor Swift.
Why not?
The only way to make that fair to both that artist, and to Taylor Swift, is to make the monthly subscription fee change depending on how much music you listened to.
Really, the only problem with Spotify's system is that people who listen to a lot of music... Pay less to each artist for an hour of music, then someone who listens to very little music. The problem is not that indies are getting screwed, the problem is that Spotify charges someone streaming 24 hours a day the same amount that they charge someone streaming 24 minutes a day.
> The only way to make that fair to both that artist, and to Taylor Swift, is to make the monthly subscription fee change depending on how much music you listened to.
It doesn't follow at all that a constant price per stream can only be achieved by charging users a variable price based on usage. Film and TV streaming services charge a fixed monthly rate to each user, and light users almost certainly subsidize heavy ones.
It may be that a $10 a month simply isn't enough for Spotify to pay as per stream much as they are now. But that's Spotify's problem to solve — labels and artists really should only care inasmuch as it affects their streaming royalties. The fact that Spotify has figured a system out that lets them stay afloat and pay some amount in royalties doesn't mean it's a system that treats all participants equally.
> The problem is not that indies are getting screwed, the problem is that Spotify charges someone streaming 24 hours a day the same amount that they charge someone streaming 24 minutes a day.
This is how subscriptions work. Someone who watches six hours of Netflix a day gets more out of their subscription than someone who watches six hours a month. Someone who reads the New York Times cover to cover gets more out of their subscription than someone who just reads the front page. Someone who buys from Amazon every week gets more out of their Prime subscription than someone who buys every month or two.
It's no different for Spotify. People for whom the price isn't worth it can just use the free tier or buy albums (the original pay-as-much-as-you-use way to consume music!) instead.
Same -- I've been a paying Spotify subscriber since 2012 and I have only two playlists. Both are for niche genres where most bands have only one or two songs I like. Spotify hasn't changed my listening habits, just the technology I use to listen.
Oh but that's precisely what I'm saying — Spotify _has_ changed my habits, and it's changed them a lot. Through the Discover Weekly playlist and the related artists sidebar, it was single-handedly responsible for me finding out about a tonne of bands I love.
> Spotify has been instrumental in exposing me to niche bands and expanding my taste.
Hm... maybe I'll have to try it, but I'm not optimistic. The best way I have expanded my musical horizons was back in the day when iTunes shared your music library by default with other people on the same local net. I could go to the Uni library and browse through a wide variety of people's collections while doing my work. We even "talked" using our music library names, and occasionally met in person.
"Show me more of the things I already like" won't be terrible, but it won't be the same thing.
As a very deliberate listener this has been the case for me too but I don't know that the same applies broadly. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something I liked in somebody's car, apartment, etc. and asked what it was only to find that they had no idea and it had popped up on their Discover Weekly, radio playlist for some other band/song, or some random mood playlist.
Many people probably have similarly shocking listening stats but for the average user how many of those songs were just background noise and wouldn't be recognized again? Spotify is also a little crafty with the genre stats by using a ton of sub-genres that nobody has heard of to create the illusion of diversity. As for expanding taste, wouldn't Spotify-generated playlists theoretically do the opposite by attempting to replicate your demonstrated taste and converge on certain themes?
Again, I would describe my experience with Spotify as you did, I just don't think Spotify inherently expands peoples' tastes so much as it provides an endless supply of somewhat anonymized music that people already have a taste for.
Spotify's model is driven by what users consume the most, so it sounds to me like this isn't something Spotify is driving but instead the market is driving.
"Challenging" music is good and necessary to further art, but it's not a kind of music that the majority of Spotify's audience go out of their way to consume.
Live Nation is significantly worse for the music industry than Spotify is.
Live shows are awesome, but let's not pretend there's no middleman involved. Unless you're seeing a tiny band, going to a live show involves dumping fist fulls of dollars into the pockets of a huge monopoly.
There are thousands of tiny bars, pubs, house parties, outdoor venues, local street parties, and street corners where musicians play live and Live Nation is not involved at all.
The radio when driving by myself, preferably news to stay up to date or bring in new information rather than having my private listening material isolate me from the outside world.
When I commute, there are a number of venues along the way which offer live music 7 nights a week, I have my favorite and a couple preferred backups, with no to low cover charge except for weekends, when I'm not commuting anyway.
A mixture of familiar and new musicians usually more than one night a week.
I tip the bands who I appreciate and if no one is dancing then I get out there and boogie which brings more people out front and the musicians love it.
Also only drink alcohol in this environment, never at home or anywhere else, and always in very limited amounts just to socialize and support the venue, since I want it to wear off before driving afterward. Tip the bartenders too at least 30 percent.
I don't make time for this, more like happy hours after working late so I can keep up a 50 to 60 hour week (to accomplish twice as many scientific breakthroughs compared to 40 hours).
The alternative would be fewer breakthroughs and almost as many hours in traffic when leaving the lab at 5.
I am now acquainted with hundreds of musicians and other music lovers, many of them engineers or amazingly brilliant in many different ways. A while back one of the visiting bass players turned out to be the chairman of the math department for a major university a few hours from here.
Turns out I could start a new company as easily as my own band with like-minded exceptional individuals whom I have much deeper insight into than most founders.
Yes it is costly, about as much as a few CD's a week, more if I eat at the venues having excellent kitchens.
Musicians still often just give me a CD even though I tell them I only listen to it once before passing it on to some one else.
Unfortunately that involves a time investment of several hours per gig ( stopping work early, getting changed, transport, attending ) versus a click.
It is also not generally conducive to multitasking. Yes I listen to stuff whilst washing dishes; it gives me 30 minutes of me-time. Then on with the chores, toddler, dog, bills...
I'm not in the music industry, so it's hard for me to feel the pain for many of the writer's muddled points:
> As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll
I can't see what's wrong with this. Is it a sin to consume music to meet an emotional need or match a mood?
> One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform.
This artist doesn't have to be on Spotify.
> If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
Again, Spotify is a platform whose interests are for itself.
> Spotify’s ambition to superannuate labels is evident. In its quest for total power and control, Spotify has prioritized its own content, and it has made it notably more difficult to find albums rather than playlists.
Of course Spotify prioritizes its own content. No one forces independent artists to be on Spotify.
The writer is lamenting the death of an entire industry, but to blame Spotify is absurd. Blame big labels for pushing Top-40 pop nonsense for the past twenty years. Blame every single person for not valuing art. Blame modern culture for consumerism. Blame the internet for creating an expectation of instant gratification.
I'm an artist and there's definitely a new type of listener that is listening for vibe. My most successful songs on Spotify are often described as "vibey" by listeners. People will comment on the "sound of the sounds" and the overall feel of it. Curiously I find other musicians less likely to comment about vibe. Instead they will comment on the songwriting or on the production— often picking out esoteric elements of the songs.
It makes total sense that people are listening for vibe. Music is way more accessible than ever before. We pipe in music constantly to set mood or create ambience (or to cancel surrounding noise). I recently saw my father-in-law (who's in his mid-60s) sit down with his laptop and simply listen to some of his favourite folk music. He wasn't browsing the web. He was just listening. It was funny how unusual it seemed.
I wonder if outrage from the music industry over the decline of active-listening has more to do with the feeling that artists are just less important. People mostly listen to music now— rather than individual artists.
Artists kind of do have to be on Spotify. Not in the sense that there's a gun to their head, but in the sense that the gun is pointing to the head of their career.
Artists hardly make any money from album sales, unless it's direct payment to them, trough services like Bandcamp. The labels and management take way too big cuts.
Most bands make their money from touring and merch, and it's been this way for a long long time.
Artists get screwed over touring too. Live Nation owns most of the arenas they can perform in as well as the places they can sell their tickets through, so most of the money you pay for tickets go to them instead of the artist. And record deals usually include a % of merch sales, which is the reason t-shirts are like $30.
One of the hardest things for an artist to realize is that most people don't give a shit about what you do and, while what you do can be important to some people, it is not objectively important.
The author of this article hasn't come to that realization yet.
I had been thinking this exact same thing -- streaming music has changed my consumption habits, and I noticed that my musical tastes started trending more and more toward the "muzak" spectrum (simple beats, repetitive melodies, minimal vocals). "Chillhop" is basically the muzak of 2010s; I mean it has been for a while but its popularity seems to have surged alongside streaming music.
> The band was happy to be included and inspired to see their peers push back against corporate exploitation. “The difference now is that, if you don’t bow down to Spotify, you might as well tell whoever runs the guillotine that’s above your neck to just let her rip,”
The punk thing thing to do would be to release a song called "Fuck $Brand" that outlines all the scandals and abuses the brand has been involved in over the years.
Yeah, it's kind of passive aggressive. But when execs at $Brand find out about it, maybe they'll start a corporate blacklist and put your band at the top of it.
Yet another complaint that the brief period of musicians as occasional break-out stars is over. What the author describes is the baseline position of musicians: mostly background performers. And when she writes of “music” she really means pop music, as classical musicians have by and large never made serious money.
The author is trying to frame a cultural 'music discovery' problem as a Spotify UX problem.
I don't think Spotify's netflixified playlists are a big issue. In fact, I think they are decently curated.
The 'music discovery' problem stems from the centralization of music radio (in the late 2000s), causing a selected handful of superstars to reign supreme protected by the centralized barriers to entry.
Spotify has created the inverse problem. Instead of a handful of superstars (other than the ones grandfathered in before streaming became commonplace), the US Top 50 chart (over a given 10 week time period)is fragmented with 100% interchangeable rap songs with DIY production chops. 'Interchangable' is the key word here- none of these artists are able to rise to headliner status and major music festivals are in jeopardy because they are running out of legacy headliners to keep them afloat.
TLDR: Centralized radio enabled labels to conspire to make superstars. Spotify (not intentionally) prevents artists from becoming superstars. There are exceptions, of course, but the revenue numbers from previous generations dwarf those of, say, Fetty Wap.
TL;DR payment for number of plays favors certain kinds of music over others, but it is not really anyone’s fault.
My observation is that there’s an underlying flaw in the compensation model. I think it was non-obvious and a solution is even less obvious so I don’t really blame Spotify or other services.
Some music is made to be listened to over and over. This category includes ambient and background music, but also any catchy pop-like song (in the broadest possible definition of pop).
Other music is more narrative and challenging. It might be very important and emotionally impactful, but the listener tends to consume it more like a movie. They might listen to it once or twice.
This is a piece of mine I really am proud of. I don’t expect anyone to have it on repeat or add it to a bunch of playlists:
Back when the model was buying records, there was potential for some remuneration for creating challenging recorded work. Even if it was niche, if enough people appreciated it one could hope to cover costs.
But at a fraction of a cent per play, even if a dedicated listener base absolutely adores your challenging recordings, it’s completely unrealistic to hope to make money from it.
Possibly Patreon or something like it can fill that gap. But I really don’t think being frustrated with Spotify is a productive avenue.
The main problem with Spotify is their payment structure to artists. When I pay their monthly fee, I want that money to go to the artists that I listen to. There would be a simple way to do this - take the money I pay, minus the Spotify cut to provide the service and then proportionally divide it among the artists that I listen to.
Do they do that? Oh no! Instead, they aggregate together all the music listened to and all the money paid them, take off their cut and then divide the total amount proportionately to artists.
Effectively this means that I'm paying for music that I don't listen to. I hate the fact that some of my money is going to Justin Bieber.
> How can artists distribute and sell their work in a digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests?
Well the distribution side is easy. Unless you have something special, you can just put it on a torrent and have other people help you distribute it. It's the making money part that is hard.
It's still amazing to me that we have things like Spotify trying to control distribution. We don't need any more gatekeepers trying to block users from digital media. Instead we need to start figuring out how our economic models are so broken that they led us to our current situation.
Virtual goods are so fundamentally different that we have companies who don't even realize that they've been automated out. And even worse: We have users who don't understand that and are willing to give these companies money.
This is really true. I used to use grooveshark, which is very similar to spotify in terms of functionality, but what it had that spotify lacks is user generated playlists. I find spotify horrible for finding new music, however once you know who you want to listen to its great.
So you don't consider those playlists you can create and share on Spotify as user generated? However I agree that they could be featured more prominently.
Apart from that Grooveshark was a service without legitimate content. As a streaming service you can't rely on user uploads and ignore the whole licensing aspect of the business.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadThese devices are awesome. When I go to lunch with my co-workers, it's easy to split the check. I don't have to give my credit card to anyone. And if we're in a time crunch I don't have to flag down the wait staff. Nor do they have to wait for their shot at the payment terminal.
Slim to none.
I suspect this artist has never actually eaten at an airport restaurant -- the staff, at least at JFK and LAX, are some of the most demotivated, spirit-broken people I've ever encountered.
I love Spotify the product, but it's a terrible, impersonal experience in a lot of ways, and also doesn't feel very sticky to me. Sure, I need access to the catalogue, but the playlists leave me cold and I could easily switch to another service. I feel like there'll be opportunities for instagram-like upstarts to chip away at their base, offering things that their big, impersonal machine can't as it's so focused on scale.
Recently they introduced a feature called “2017 Wrapped”, which contains a playlist named “Your Top Songs 2017”. I imagined this list would contain the songs I actually listened to most. Instead it’s biased so that many of my favorites don’t appear, yet there are major label songs that I don’t even remember actively playing.
It’s borderline misleading advertisement to pretend these are “my top songs” when obviously the list is a pay-to-play for labels.
There is, however, a "The Ones That Got Away" playlist, that, while still not heavy on anything particularly popular, could fit in with your experience. Maybe you were looking at the wrong playlist?
Maybe I'm just unlucky to be in a user cohort where promoted songs are inserted into my top 2017 songs (to test how many extra plays they can get this way). It sucks that they do this to paying customers though.
I am shocked that this is a thing
On the other hand, the "ones that got away" playlist is completely filled with pop dreck, scraped directly from top 40 lists, not worth even looking at.
On the other hand, Spotify's description for the "Your Top Songs 2017" playlist doesn't explicitly make the claim that these would be songs I actually listened to; instead it's more vaguely phrased as "songs you loved this year"... So I guess they're just assuming I would love these.
It also helps that Spotify doesn't show play counts, so there's no way for me to verify the actual top list. I'm thinking of buying more MP3s from now on -- files on local disk don't try to actively manipulate me to listen to something else.
It amazes me how often I can guess what genre an album is just from the album art alone, I'll find around 10 new artists I really like within an hour of just clicking on album art.
"Digital Album Streaming + Download Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more."
At least that's how I, as a frequent music buyer and collector, use Bandcamp.
Concerning the artists that prioritize Bandcamp: Don't forget that most artists don't make any money via streaming - of course they push the channel that actually provides revenue and actual, meaningful sales.
“The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
I get that the author wants to listen to "challenging" music that "pushes boundaries" and laments that Spotify's algorithms are surfacing up Muzak instead. But there are other places to go to find your challenging music. For lots of other people, however, music is not some intimate connection with an artist's soul, it's simply something that goes on in the background while you're trying to get something else done or just relax. People seem to want Muzak--who are you to argue with the market when it has spoken?
The discover playlist, radios and daily mixes have been absolutely awesome for me, when it comes to discovering new bands. Sure, it generally sticks to the most popular songs by said artists, but 1) they're the popular tracks for a reason, and 2) it gets me to explore the rest of that artist's discography.
I think it's important to take an active role and explore related artists, instead of only seeing the recommendation playlists.
Outside of Spotify, I follow Toilet ov Hell and my friends' recommendations.
The music in the last hour is worth more to me than the other four hours, and in an older model, pricing can reflect that. Easy-listening CDs are cheaper, and I buy new ones less frequently (it doesn't matter if they repeat, because I'm not really listening). But in the streaming model, the last hour of music is worth less. It's a smaller span of time, and I'm more likely to vary what I listen to during it (so no one artist gets as much money).
I don't know if I'd call Spotify responsible for this--it seems like an unintended consequence--but it's certainly unfortunate either way.
Like you say, most people want their easy music and Spotify delivers. The downside of that is the fact that commercially produced music is now targeting Spotify consumption aggressively and using all those fancy analytics Spotify provides. This makes new music more and more alike each other.
Because of this tight feedback loop on Spotify and the producers, I think it's only a matter of time when they cut out the middle man and start producing music with AI algorithms. I'm sure that algorithms can keep the muzak-consuming masses happy. I've already heard some convincing sounding music (sheet music played with synthesizers) and audio (music produced directly as audio waveforms) produced by algorithms.
The second issue is what's described in the comment you quote. Anyone making niche music is suffering. It was never easy for musicians taking this route but the algorithm based recommendations engines is making it harder to be discovered while taking a bigger cut from the small income.
It's not like there is another viable platform out there. Spotify has a near monopoly and they dictate the terms. People aren't buying a second subscription service or buying songs separately let alone buying a physical album.
I find one positive in this all. Because there's no more income from record sales, musicians are performing live more than in decades. I really like live music, so that's nice.
That's not even close to being true. Google Music, Apple Music, Amazon Prime whatever it's called, regular ol' Youtube videos and playlists, services like last.fm or Pandora.. There are lots of ways to discover music that don't depend on record labels and their marketing.
If your music is independent and you want to stay away from the man, you have to put work into marketing your music. That's the step that you'd normally hand off to the record label. At least now you actually have a viable way (lots, actually) of making money as opposed to the past when distribution was much more difficult.
The others have pretty small consumer base but more importantly, suffer from all the same issues as Spotify. To reach the widest audience, you need to be with all of those. Most consumers have only one music subscription service. That's what makes it a near monopoly for them.
YouTube is a bit of an exception, and my favorite for niche and rare music and forgotten live performance recordings of more popular music. But YouTube is not very good for providing income for musicians who don't want to be predominantly 'tubers.
> But YouTube is not very good for providing income for musicians who don't want to be predominantly 'tubers.
Okay, this is not a great excuse. I think I understand what you mean by this. But if a musician doesn't want to follow the distribution channels that consumers prefer, then that's on the artist. If you want to take care of distribution for yourself and avoid any big labels, then you take responsibility for the success and failure of your music's distribution.
Edit: Yoko Ono
But I think it is a little disingenuous to call those artists "noise artists" insofar as their mainstream success is concerned.
There's the feedback loop of creating something people will like based on what they liked previously, which can be self-limiting, but also appeals to the demands of those consumers.
We should broaden our experiences regularly, but for me with all the other things I could challenge myself with, music isn't something I care deeply enough about to, well... care.
I always prided myself (this is a remorseful confession, not a boast) in discovering small bands no one had heard of, either later becoming big or not, this going back to the 90s and back. I also took issue with hipsters becoming a term in the mid oughts, because I thought they made me look like a douche (which I saw no irony in).
But to my point: I see absolutely no difference in now and then in the music stage, other than global scope since the rise of the internet. There is of course a lot of stuff that isn't on Spotify, but the barrier of entry to their service seems minimal, as you can regularly discover bandcamp level indie music on there. I can listen to bigger names now on account of being mature enough to acknowledge good music wherever it comes from, but I generally still scavenge blogs, bandcamp and Spotify's discover weekly (which I feel matches what you feed it through play history). I'm inclined to say that Spotify is providing a higher yield than other venues in regards to quality discovery for me.
A person that understands that popularity doesn't settle much?
Then why are they using Spotify? That's like eating at McDonalds and complaining that the food is bland and un-challenging.
what are those? I have to work hard to find interesting music, so I'm curious if I'm ignorant of some really huge obvious places for music discovery.
- Piccadilly Records
- Norman Records
- Boomkat
- Red Eye Records
- Bleep
Some of these stores offer digital, lossless purchasing options, but more importantly all of them feature staff curated recommendations and featured releases, which are, to me, more effective than Spotify's algorithms. I can't count the number of times Spotify recommends songs I clearly already know and have been listening to via the service before.
Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. The truth is that unless you're buying an album (1) or other merchandise, you're not contributing significantly for the artist's survival.
I was chatting with Brock Van Wey last week (aka bvdub, my favorite choice of background music when programming) and he was describing how challenge it is to stay in business nowadays. I naïvely thought these apps were helping those folks...
I for one will try to buy more albums, even if digital, of the bands I listen to all the time.
(1) directly from the artist (e.g. via bandcamp). Google Music, at least, doesn't really give you the mp3 but only a protected file that can solely be played in their software.
It's the same as torrenting movies, people do it because it's convenient (and free) but now Netflix is here, it's even easier than torrenting. So that's why I'm subscribed to both services and have been for many years.
So artists that leave Spotify, like Taylor Swift for example. I may listen to their music because it's in the charts, but when she left Spotify I just didn't listen to her music at all. So I'm sure Spotify do give the artists attention they would never usually get.
Yet Spotify is not only still unprofitable, they're still all but setting money on fire. Some of the more recent reports I've seen are that they're trying to negotiate for lower music royalties.
I can't help but wonder if the ultimate problem here isn't with the idea of all-you-can-eat streaming, but with the idea that all-you-can-eat streaming is only worth $10 a month. What if the earliest services in this space had priced their services at $20 a month? I know, the immediate reaction is "they would have had no customers and it would be a death knell because no one would possibly pay that much," but is it possible we have that reaction because we've just internalized the notion that "$10 per month" is the "proper" price? Back in the Dark Ages--the 1990s and early 2000s--I knew many, many people who were spending $20 or more a month buying individual CDs. If in 1994 I'd have been told, "Hey, what if you could listen to nearly every song ever recorded for the price of only two CDs a month!?" then I'd have been on board.
Since Spotify wields an enormous influence over what music becomes popular, labels can treat it as a loss leader and keep pumping money into it that they make back from album sales/tours/merch/etc on their top artists. The issue with this is that it vastly favors labels who can leverage this economy of scale, and independent labels for whom album sales are a larger slice of their income can't weather the decrease in payment as well.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that Spotify divides payment per stream up by the total number of streams. Simplified example: if I stream two songs in one month, an indie artist once and a major artist once, they'll each get $5 of my $10. If I stream the indie artist once but the major artist twice, however, they get $6.66 and the indie artist only gets $3.33, even though I the amount I listened to them didn't change. (edit, the pool is actually comprised of all users, I just used one in this example for simplicity)
All this adds up to a system that is heavily stacked in favor of major labels and their respective artists at the expense of independent ones.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150219221341/http://www.spotif... The "Royalties in Detail" section.
/me gives a sidelong glance at every WeWork streaming Spotify 24/7
The bigger problem though, is that's not how it works. You may expect those two artists to split your 10$ (ignoring everybody else's cut for simplicity), but what actually happens is the sum total of the revenue that Spotify gets in a month is split up across all of the plays that month[0].
So what actually happens is the two artists you've streamed get paid a few pennies out of your subscription fee, and the rest of it goes to subsidize the streams of other people (heavy users, and/or business that leave it playing all day).
[0]: https://www.stereogum.com/1587932/spotify-explains-royalty-p...
To clarify further, my issue isn't that payment is calculated per play, but that it's measured relative to other artists instead of absolutely.
Put another way: an artist that that gets X plays shouldn't make more one month than the next, just because the next month they have to compete with a new album by Taylor Swift.
Edit: to clarify even further, I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do this or even that it's immoral. All I'm saying is that it's a system that's heavily biased in favor of major labels at the expense of independent ones.
Why not?
The only way to make that fair to both that artist, and to Taylor Swift, is to make the monthly subscription fee change depending on how much music you listened to.
Really, the only problem with Spotify's system is that people who listen to a lot of music... Pay less to each artist for an hour of music, then someone who listens to very little music. The problem is not that indies are getting screwed, the problem is that Spotify charges someone streaming 24 hours a day the same amount that they charge someone streaming 24 minutes a day.
It doesn't follow at all that a constant price per stream can only be achieved by charging users a variable price based on usage. Film and TV streaming services charge a fixed monthly rate to each user, and light users almost certainly subsidize heavy ones.
It may be that a $10 a month simply isn't enough for Spotify to pay as per stream much as they are now. But that's Spotify's problem to solve — labels and artists really should only care inasmuch as it affects their streaming royalties. The fact that Spotify has figured a system out that lets them stay afloat and pay some amount in royalties doesn't mean it's a system that treats all participants equally.
> The problem is not that indies are getting screwed, the problem is that Spotify charges someone streaming 24 hours a day the same amount that they charge someone streaming 24 minutes a day.
This is how subscriptions work. Someone who watches six hours of Netflix a day gets more out of their subscription than someone who watches six hours a month. Someone who reads the New York Times cover to cover gets more out of their subscription than someone who just reads the front page. Someone who buys from Amazon every week gets more out of their Prime subscription than someone who buys every month or two.
It's no different for Spotify. People for whom the price isn't worth it can just use the free tier or buy albums (the original pay-as-much-as-you-use way to consume music!) instead.
Hm... maybe I'll have to try it, but I'm not optimistic. The best way I have expanded my musical horizons was back in the day when iTunes shared your music library by default with other people on the same local net. I could go to the Uni library and browse through a wide variety of people's collections while doing my work. We even "talked" using our music library names, and occasionally met in person.
"Show me more of the things I already like" won't be terrible, but it won't be the same thing.
Many people probably have similarly shocking listening stats but for the average user how many of those songs were just background noise and wouldn't be recognized again? Spotify is also a little crafty with the genre stats by using a ton of sub-genres that nobody has heard of to create the illusion of diversity. As for expanding taste, wouldn't Spotify-generated playlists theoretically do the opposite by attempting to replicate your demonstrated taste and converge on certain themes?
Again, I would describe my experience with Spotify as you did, I just don't think Spotify inherently expands peoples' tastes so much as it provides an endless supply of somewhat anonymized music that people already have a taste for.
"Challenging" music is good and necessary to further art, but it's not a kind of music that the majority of Spotify's audience go out of their way to consume.
Eliminate the middleman.
Get out and support your local bands.
Live shows are awesome, but let's not pretend there's no middleman involved. Unless you're seeing a tiny band, going to a live show involves dumping fist fulls of dollars into the pockets of a huge monopoly.
Heavy Metal music as an example, tends to be promoted by smaller scale promoters local to one town or city or area.
When I commute, there are a number of venues along the way which offer live music 7 nights a week, I have my favorite and a couple preferred backups, with no to low cover charge except for weekends, when I'm not commuting anyway.
A mixture of familiar and new musicians usually more than one night a week.
I tip the bands who I appreciate and if no one is dancing then I get out there and boogie which brings more people out front and the musicians love it.
Also only drink alcohol in this environment, never at home or anywhere else, and always in very limited amounts just to socialize and support the venue, since I want it to wear off before driving afterward. Tip the bartenders too at least 30 percent.
I don't make time for this, more like happy hours after working late so I can keep up a 50 to 60 hour week (to accomplish twice as many scientific breakthroughs compared to 40 hours).
The alternative would be fewer breakthroughs and almost as many hours in traffic when leaving the lab at 5.
I am now acquainted with hundreds of musicians and other music lovers, many of them engineers or amazingly brilliant in many different ways. A while back one of the visiting bass players turned out to be the chairman of the math department for a major university a few hours from here.
Turns out I could start a new company as easily as my own band with like-minded exceptional individuals whom I have much deeper insight into than most founders.
Yes it is costly, about as much as a few CD's a week, more if I eat at the venues having excellent kitchens.
Musicians still often just give me a CD even though I tell them I only listen to it once before passing it on to some one else.
It is also not generally conducive to multitasking. Yes I listen to stuff whilst washing dishes; it gives me 30 minutes of me-time. Then on with the chores, toddler, dog, bills...
Take the time to attend shows.
> As an industry insider once explained to me, digital strategists have identified “lean back listening” as an ever more popular Spotify-induced phenomenon. It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll
I can't see what's wrong with this. Is it a sin to consume music to meet an emotional need or match a mood?
> One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform.
This artist doesn't have to be on Spotify.
> If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
Again, Spotify is a platform whose interests are for itself.
> Spotify’s ambition to superannuate labels is evident. In its quest for total power and control, Spotify has prioritized its own content, and it has made it notably more difficult to find albums rather than playlists.
Of course Spotify prioritizes its own content. No one forces independent artists to be on Spotify.
The writer is lamenting the death of an entire industry, but to blame Spotify is absurd. Blame big labels for pushing Top-40 pop nonsense for the past twenty years. Blame every single person for not valuing art. Blame modern culture for consumerism. Blame the internet for creating an expectation of instant gratification.
It makes total sense that people are listening for vibe. Music is way more accessible than ever before. We pipe in music constantly to set mood or create ambience (or to cancel surrounding noise). I recently saw my father-in-law (who's in his mid-60s) sit down with his laptop and simply listen to some of his favourite folk music. He wasn't browsing the web. He was just listening. It was funny how unusual it seemed.
I wonder if outrage from the music industry over the decline of active-listening has more to do with the feeling that artists are just less important. People mostly listen to music now— rather than individual artists.
Most bands make their money from touring and merch, and it's been this way for a long long time.
And LN seems to be a lot more benign here, compared to their behavior in the US.
The author of this article hasn't come to that realization yet.
Or maybe it's just me getting old. :)
The punk thing thing to do would be to release a song called "Fuck $Brand" that outlines all the scandals and abuses the brand has been involved in over the years.
Yeah, it's kind of passive aggressive. But when execs at $Brand find out about it, maybe they'll start a corporate blacklist and put your band at the top of it.
I don't think Spotify's netflixified playlists are a big issue. In fact, I think they are decently curated.
The 'music discovery' problem stems from the centralization of music radio (in the late 2000s), causing a selected handful of superstars to reign supreme protected by the centralized barriers to entry.
Spotify has created the inverse problem. Instead of a handful of superstars (other than the ones grandfathered in before streaming became commonplace), the US Top 50 chart (over a given 10 week time period)is fragmented with 100% interchangeable rap songs with DIY production chops. 'Interchangable' is the key word here- none of these artists are able to rise to headliner status and major music festivals are in jeopardy because they are running out of legacy headliners to keep them afloat.
TLDR: Centralized radio enabled labels to conspire to make superstars. Spotify (not intentionally) prevents artists from becoming superstars. There are exceptions, of course, but the revenue numbers from previous generations dwarf those of, say, Fetty Wap.
My observation is that there’s an underlying flaw in the compensation model. I think it was non-obvious and a solution is even less obvious so I don’t really blame Spotify or other services.
Some music is made to be listened to over and over. This category includes ambient and background music, but also any catchy pop-like song (in the broadest possible definition of pop).
Other music is more narrative and challenging. It might be very important and emotionally impactful, but the listener tends to consume it more like a movie. They might listen to it once or twice.
This is a piece of mine I really am proud of. I don’t expect anyone to have it on repeat or add it to a bunch of playlists:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KRQk7TWndBw
It is deliberately challenging.
Back when the model was buying records, there was potential for some remuneration for creating challenging recorded work. Even if it was niche, if enough people appreciated it one could hope to cover costs.
But at a fraction of a cent per play, even if a dedicated listener base absolutely adores your challenging recordings, it’s completely unrealistic to hope to make money from it.
Possibly Patreon or something like it can fill that gap. But I really don’t think being frustrated with Spotify is a productive avenue.
Do they do that? Oh no! Instead, they aggregate together all the music listened to and all the money paid them, take off their cut and then divide the total amount proportionately to artists.
Effectively this means that I'm paying for music that I don't listen to. I hate the fact that some of my money is going to Justin Bieber.
Well the distribution side is easy. Unless you have something special, you can just put it on a torrent and have other people help you distribute it. It's the making money part that is hard.
It's still amazing to me that we have things like Spotify trying to control distribution. We don't need any more gatekeepers trying to block users from digital media. Instead we need to start figuring out how our economic models are so broken that they led us to our current situation.
Virtual goods are so fundamentally different that we have companies who don't even realize that they've been automated out. And even worse: We have users who don't understand that and are willing to give these companies money.
Apart from that Grooveshark was a service without legitimate content. As a streaming service you can't rely on user uploads and ignore the whole licensing aspect of the business.