...it sucks that people listen to white noise when they could be listening to the newest hits instead? Yeah, sure, but they wont? If you get rid of the white noise, they go back to youtube or whatever. If you push people to other content, they wont click or theyll skip it if what they want is white noise.
Youve got a massive platform, incredibly successful, loved and used by so many, and you go "ah darn, i really hate that my users on my platform choose to spend their time on content that isnt as profitable as other content on my plaftorm"???
Jesus christ thats daft. Serve the users what they want and they will stay with you forever.
I tested right now and it's 5:
Settings -> Accessibility -> Audio/Visual -> Background Sounds -> on/off/sounds/etc.
It may be the number of items that are part of why people consider these settings "hidden". The "Accessiblity" menu is now 23 items long, and the main Settings menu is 53 Apple items plus over 100 application items.
Well yes, when there are thousands of possible configurations to accomodate the vast majority of potential users, and to keep confusion to a minimum by assigning a unique place in the UI to every possible option, it has to be spread out a lot.
Even the most buried possible setting in iOS is 9 clicks or less, and for the bigger features usually a lot less as you've demonstrated, hence it's not correct to call it 'hidden'.
That's assuming the correct path is taken every time. If I didn't know where the white noise tool was, I wouldn't even think to check the settings for a noise generator. But if I did, it would go
Settings then Sounds & Haptics. 16 options, none seem to match. Maybe "personalized spatial audio?" Oh no,that's saying I need special headphones.
OK it's not under Sounds. Maybe it's in the Focus section? That's what I would use white noise for, focus. 6 options. Maybe it's under "Work Focus" or "Sleep Focus"? No.
General? 15 options, all with sub-menus but none seem relevant.
Control Center? Probably not... That seems safe to ignore. Except if I selected the "Hearing" option in Control Center settings, that actually gives me access to the background noise generator in control-center. But that doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
OK next is Display & Brightness and Home Screen. Probably safe to skip. Which then brings us to Accessibility. Again, it doesn't feel likely to me that it's in here, but no other choice in the settings feels correct, except maybe the Music app? Nope nothing there.
I check accessibility. I look past 18 options and see "Hearing" again, might as well tap that option. Even "Background Sounds" doesn't match what I'm looking for mentally, "White Noise". So it's likely my eyes miss it when I scan the list of options.
IMO it's an app. So make it an app, not an accessibility setting.
It's still hidden, just in a breadth of options instead of depth. A needle hidden in a 1 acre lot covered 1cm high in hay is more hidden than a needle in a 10 ft cube haystack.
There's a search tool, for all the menus, right at the top?
Have you ever used an iPhone as a day to day device?
A user manually checking every possible submenu to find what they are looking for would be quite an outlier. If they are that determined then I don't see what the issue is, since presumably they are then going to inspect them all anyways.
That cuts to how much of a mess spotify payouts are in general, where the subscription revenue pool is paid out based on global listens, and the people with fewer hours of use don't control which artists get most of their money. But as far as I'm aware the big labels don't like the idea of changing that.
Spotify has been doing everything in its power to make sure it never becomes a monopoly; it regularly infuriates and sends users running for YouTube, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Music, Tidal, Sirius (dare I say; their successfully competing competitors)
FTA it’s a little more nuanced than that. People are listening to white noise podcasts when regular white noise is available at a cheaper licensing cost.
It feels like a UI challenge as much as anything else, I can’t imagine many users specifically want a podcast. Part of me feels like Spotify deserves it though, they’ve been trying to shove podcasts into users ears for ages now and I don’t want them. Turns out if you shove podcasts in front of people they’ll choose them. Price they pay.
Spotify pays content creators based on how many ads are played.
A white/brown/pink/etc. noise track/podcast is likely to be hours long, so that listeners can have it play long enough to fall asleep. Once asleep, the listener is still technically "listening" to the track/podcast, including the ads that Spotify then must pay the content creator for. With tens or hundreds of millions of listeners each listening to hours of content, this cost adds up.
Spotify has its own white/brown/pink/etc. noise tracks that it doesn't need to pay anyone for. Those are what Spotify would like to see its users stream, because it could save them - by their own calculation - $38 million.
Beyond that, the giant media corporations whining about the fact that money is going somewhere other than their own accounts is... par for the course. Really, this entire situation speaks to the absurdity of the industry itself and its own greed.
Funny how every industry is criticized for being too greedy when the set up of incentives really doesn't leave any other option. It's existence vs being greedy and people (and firms) do what's obvious. If we want a music industry that isn't greedy it needs to be listener and musician owned.
The entire system is greed demanded by law. It's well past time for copyright to fail as a business model, but instead we have it propped up on legal scaffolding (read: threats).
>"It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof," Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl told Music Business Worldwide earlier this year.
Heck, this is the market doing its thing, isn't it? You can't say you want capitalism and then complain because the market demonstrates as much demand for the sound of rain falling on a roof as for a particular singer-songwriter. I think WMG is just annoyed the person who uploaded the rain noise doesn't have to pay royalties to the rain and keeps the entire cut.
I'm sure WMG also thinks WMG's contribution to Ed Sheeran's music on the platform is worth the millions they get paid as middlemen. At least the rain is contributing something by making a noise.
I guess their issue might be that if people listen to white noise 8 hours while asleep every night and Spotify distributes their monthly fee weighted by time listened, then a lot of their fee will go to the white noise for sleep and thus the total fee distributed to their daytime music would be unexpectedly significantly reduced.
The easy fix would be to cap track time weight, although that is susceptible to an attack of splitting the white noise in many parts and publishing a playlist.
I guess a possibility could be to somehow compute "song variety" (i.e. entropy in a model where the decoder can generate noise/randomness) and weight by that, but not sure if the available lossy codecs are good enough to do that.
I hate to say it but certain advertisers might pay more for ads that play while people are sleeping (ie placement during 8 hour tracks of white noise).
This is not a $38m-in-costs crisis for Spotify, this is a revenue opportunity!
I think this is why google really wants to control the brower. Once AI is cheap and on every device, the user has the ability to use it to filter all inbound. Trivial for a local LLM to strip hate speech from a twitter html regardless how much Elon wants you to force you to see it.
Most people don't even use an adblocker, despite how easy it is. I think you will have a hard time trying to get a substantial number of people to install a filter for opinions you/they don't like.
You may want to actually look at the adblock usage. It’s massive unless artificially disabled. Enough for Facebook and Youtube to fight it with escalating countermeasures
I agree with your interpretation, but I'd like to also offer another way to view this phenomenon that Spotify's higher execs also missed: Spotify is lucky and has found a way to monetize a feature that is readily and freely available elsewhere, and they should just be happy to get a bit of profit for it.
I would take the opposite approach and figure out how to maximize the return on the white noise without changing anything for the users; that is, focus on reducing the cost to deliver white noise, work on guidelines for the white noise presenters on how you're going to monetize this without disrupting the fad, etc.
From my perspective, I just can't see how trying to do something special with this fad does anything but immediately kill the fad. There are even FOSS white noise apps, and it won't take long for users to find a free alternative if Spotify messes with the recipe here. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to get Spotify exclusively for the white noise nor that white noise will somehow be a gateway into further Spotify use; I just don't see that the persons who want white noise would use that as an entry point into the service, it's the other way around, with current satisfied users finding out they can also use Spotify to get white noise.
Basically I see this as a happy accident for Spotify that will break if they try to press on it too much. They should treat this like a beneficial fad, and just figure out how to deliver it with the least resource cost, and just enjoy the extra revenue. I don't think it's really going to draw people in except if they play the "yeah, this is legit, we're just gonna get out of your way as much as possible here. enjoy our ads", and ride that money until it dries up.
The entropy in white noise is maximal, if it's really white noise.
One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify white noise, then they can dedup, i.e. serve the same sample for every request for white-noise track.
What I find annoying is that people are wasting bandwidth uploading and downloading an undifferentiated hiss. White noise is trivial to generate locally, without consuming any bandwidth.
[Edit] Real white noise has the same energy at every frequency; the total energy in white noise is effectively infinite. Practical "white noise" is low-pass-filtered, which means it's no longer real white noise.
I wonder if these samples are really pink noise, and Spotify is talking nonsense?
A finite-length sample of the most perfect white noise will not attain maximum entropy. You mention a lowpass filter -- that's accomplished through the sampling frequency. But your proposal is an effective lowpass filter, as any frequency longer than the sample length will clipped to exactly the sample length -- which you'll be able to hear as a distinct rhythm if it's a sub-audible frequency, or a tone if it's shorter.
Well, Spotify serves lossy compressed audio anyway. I don't know much about audio compression, but presumably it's first bandpass-filtered, and then filtered to remove psycho-acoutically unwanted audio components, and then compressed as a bitstream.
I suspect it's from people with long covid with sudden onset of tinnitus trying to find some relief during the sleep. I had to do that for a few months if I wanted to have any sleep at all before my neurological symptoms subsided. It looks like Warner has no idea about it.
Because the value of playing recorded music of an artist some folks enjoy enjoy is microscopic compared to the value of helping people to sleep better. Probably also true for individual listeners, but definitely for society as a whole.
Well, realistically though - and I know your comment was rather sarcastic, but still - some people pay tons of money to go to a live concert, but nobody ever paid for a white noise concert.
So I think it is reasonable to say that pop music is worth more. Let alone the fact that it takes tons more work to create.
Worth is entirely subjective unless there is intrinsic value in these things. For example - if no one listened to or interacted with either, would we still say there's value in their existence? There is probably very little. Otherwise, the value comes from whatever relationship the appraiser has to the music or sound.
Some people value sleep, others value sounds of nature, others value pop music, and others value money. The take on anything or anyone's value or worth usually tells us more about the appraiser than the subject.
Yes, it is subjective for each person, but we can look at aggregate spending and based on that see that there is a lot of financial value in pop music, with a large industry around it. There’s no such equivalent for white noise.
I fully acknowledge that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has tried to sleep better by congregating with thousands of similarly-sleep-seeking others into a jam-packed stadium.
I will also point out that, again to the best of my knowledge, extremely little money is made by the music industry on sleeping pills, sleeping hardware (beds, mattresses, pillows) and necessities (covers, duvets), nor on specialised sleeping gear (masks, blinders, apneu machines).
Also: most people try to or need to sleep every night, but can go without a concert for multiple days. If you can sell something on a recurring basis, you don't need to make a ton of profit on each sale to get a nice income stream.
Finally: I think it is harder to improve the sleep of someone struggling with that, than to create entertaining music.
Well when you value low effort content and high effort content equally, you discourage people from making high effort content when they can make money by just recording their roof.
I don't think people will stop making music or podcasts because a tiny sliver of low effort content makes money. There is a cap on how many people can make money by uploading white noise since it's so generic. Plus for a lot of people the money isn't even the primary motivator behind their high effort/quality content.
They suffer from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is a feature not a product. Apple, Google and Amazon don’t need to sustain their business based on streaming music. It’s a gesture to make their hardware more attractive.
That Spotify has some issues distinguishing how to pay their providers between the two and has turned into a much more lucrative place to put your white noise than anywhere else is specifically a Spotify quirk, not the consumer market telling a music CEO that music is worth less than noise.
The honestly pretty obvious answer to "why can't Ed Sheerhan's song be worth exactly the same as rain" is that the market demonstrates that there are lots of other places to get free rain noises or white noise or what have you while far fewer non-ad-or-subscription-supported on-demand song playment options.
> "...an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof... -- Warner CEO"
you know, I've been making this argument to point out monopoly pricing for a long time: how come when I go to a theater, all the movie tickets are the same price? films cost a different amount to make, and some of them are good while others are stinkers. In any other business with a range of products like that, sellers compete on price. Movies are price-fixing-ed.
They charge less for earlier shows. So the thing they’re selling isn’t the movie, but the seat. And they do get more expensive if the theaters are selling out.
I wonder how this works between the theater and the studio. I think some movies are different prices to show, but maybe studios have some control over ticket price as well?
Poorly attended movies lose screens more quickly and move to cheaper venues (second-chance theaters, video/streaming) faster. Theaters want to get consistent usage of their screens if possible -- offering cheaper seats for cheaper movies would be counterproductive.
because it's about ad money and maybe paying to promote a podcast (idk. if that is a thing)
white noise content is the best example of "user most likely doesn't active listen" so an ad on it isn't worth much
for other podcasts you would assume people listen (through yes they might not, but Spotify has no practical way of knowing that), so ads are worth more
Additionally the ad industry values that their ad is associated with "premium content" (whatever that means) and while white noise is "highly valuable for the consumer needing it" it's not "premium content" as it doesn't has much content. I mean it's literally noise, well fine tuned noise you could call art, but still noise. So highly valuable but not premium.
If they were smart they would just lean into this and add support for easily looping shorter tracks into some kind of "atmospheric listening" product.
Surely that would bring down their bandwidth costs at the very least.
There are tons of popular paid apps that do this kind of thing already, there's an obvious market for it.
But I haven't found Spotify to be very smart recently, so they'll probably just keep complaining about it, or do something stupid like update their ToS to disallow this kind of thing.
The technical problem is that noise compresses poorly. What is needed is a way to generate the noise as needed.
Now people don't want just any noise, they want artisanal boutique noise. so all you need is a bpf style language artists can plug into your noise generator, then people can pick the superior custom noise algorithm.
Oddly enough, there already are free and paid products that do exactly this- you can even add birds, insect noise and ambient sounds. Choose light rain, heavy rain, anything else in between. You can even choose the surface the rain is hitting- concrete, tin roof, etc.
On iOS, Rain Rain is my favorite. It’s a free with limitations app, but I don’t find the limitations too bad.
But honestly, we have a HomePod mini that does 99.999% of the work in the house. The HomePod has half-a-dozen or so background noises including rain, ocean and white noises
People will definitely notice the loop point if they're trying to sleep.
My Android app (Chroma Doze, est. 2010) uses this algorithm to splice noise segments together:
When adding two streams together, the perceived amplitude stays constant
if x^2 + y^2 == 1 for amplitudes x, y.
A useful identity is: sin(x)^2 + cos(x)^2 == 1.
Thus, we can perform a constant-amplitude crossfade using:
result = fade_out * cos(x) + fade_in * sin(x)
for x in [0, pi/2]
But we also need to prevent clipping. The maximum of sin(x) + cos(x)
occurs at the midpoint, with a result of sqrt(2), or ~1.414.
Thus, for a 16-bit output stream in the range +/-32767, we need to keep the
individual streams below 32767 / sqrt(2), or ~23170.
Noise does compress poorly, but can you tell the difference between eight hours of a fan blowing, and two seconds of a fan blowing looped for eight hours?
I wonder how much of the technical problem Spotify actually cares about. From the sound of the article, they really only cared about the cost of paying out ad revenue.
Then again, if Spotify really cared about saving bandwidth costs, they would have never gone to CDN from P2P.
Sounds less like Spotify is annoyed than record labels are annoyed. Spotify is being paid by its users regardless of what they decide to listen to.
On YouTube one of my most-watched videos in terms of watchtime for a while was brown noise overlaid on a recording of ocean waves. The video was three hours long I think and monetized. YouTube probably doesn't care if that share of my YouTube Premium subscription money goes to the guy who uploaded that video, a professionally recorded studio production or some person doing vlogs in their bedroom. Why should Spotify?
It depends on if these users are paying for premium or not. Since the streams are described as having embedded ads, users probably aren't too worried about removing Spotify's own ads, and I doubt track skips or selecting specific tracks in the album are in demand by any primarily white noise users
To me the embedded ads which the article identifies as the source of revenue for these white noise streams would also seem to defeat the point for me, but apparently that doesn't bother people so I don't see why spotify's ads would be different.
My guess is that it's far more likely that major labels start their own music streaming services, mimicking the Netflix/Hulu/Disney/HBO/Peacock etc explosion in video streaming.
No idea if it would be a smart business decision by the labels, but they could definitely do it and Spotify would only be left with independent artists and labels who don't join the bandwagon.
YouTube has no risk of this. There's no entity, or coalition of entities, capable of pulling content from YouTube that would create a noticeable dip in traffic.
> My guess is that it's far more likely that major labels start their own music streaming services
They can't. Unlike movies, there's great value in back catalogs. If Die Hard isn't available on a movie streaming service you will likely not care. If Pink Floyd (or Beatles, or Aretha Franklin) isn't available on a music streaming service, a huge number of people will care.
There are ~4 big companies that control 70-80% (by different estimations) of music. But individually they own different chunks. Sony can't start a streaming service if they don't have music owned by Warner etc.
> ... it concluded that shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit
I don't think that's how ... well, _anything_ works. It's like saying "If got rid of the actual program on our TV channel and filled the whole spot with adverts, we could make three times as much money from adverts".
They're not there to buy your product, they're there because there's a free thing they want. When that free thing goes away, so do they.
Been listening to playlists of brown noise on Spotify lately while working, when I get tired of listening to actual music but still want some background noise. More indistinct and less distracting than other ambient sounds.
The primary benefit to me of using Spotify for this is that I'm already set up to control music on my sound system from my phone.
It is amusing to me watching the effects of capitalism take hold over something as simple as literal noise. I used to use a website for this purpose but then they started getting super weird with popups and "please donate" click-thrus.
I decided to write my own noise generator. It's not hard. If you have access to OpenAI (or a semester's worth of DSP education), you could write one in a few hours.
Capitalism has literally nothing to do with it. This is just people reacting to market incentives. Capitalism requires (free) markets but markets aren't Capitalism.
which was especially fun when 'who' said that there was only one TTY session active in the computer lab at night, and you were logged in from your dorm. Or so I'm told.
An app I use, at least on Android, is "Atmosphere: Relaxing Noises." Outside of a couple banner ads I don't get interrupted or anything and it has a lot of mixing options. I highly recommend it. IDK if they have an IOS version or not
>"It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof," Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl
Why not? You've already made millions in profit on Ed Sheeran's content. Once you've broke even on the cost of making the content delivering more of it costs exactly the same. Regardless if its music or sounds of rain falling on a roof.
If Ed Sheeran's music was removed from spotify tomorrow it would significantly decrease the amount people listened, and presumably some people would stop subscribing.
If any particular white noise album went away it would have no impact on revenue, people would just listen to a different one.
> it would significantly decrease the amount people listened, and presumably some people would stop subscribing.
Not sure about that.
The main value proposition of Spotify is that is a audio marketplace that consolidates legacy music catalog via big labels (EMI, Roadrunner, Universal, etc) plus the Podcast platform sindication and in a certain stance discoverability.
Everything keeping the friction in a minimum level.
Of course Ed Sheeran is a big name, but I think it’s debatable that, let’s say the top 1% of his fan base in the Spotify user base would trade the huge amount of friction due to his catalog removal.
Sorry to insist in this point, but as far as I know a big artist left the platform does not has a huge impact. For instance: Neil Young left the platform at Jan/22 and the user base had a constant growth.
Another point that I forgot to mention: not all subscribers are equal to Spotify.
A heavy user that listens Ed Sheeran is less desirable than a heavy user that listens a bunch of podcasts. On the former Spotify needs to collect and pay to the labels and for the latter the cost is marginal.
If we’re talking about one artist, eventually the platform natural growth will offset the effect of a single artist leaving. Platform and network effects is something strong.
If you’re talking about a “catalog removal”, for instance, Universal removes all artists in their portfolio I am more than happy to agree that Spotify will suffer.
I think the idea was born with Sleepify[1] in 2014. (I love how Wikipedia classifies its genre a silence). This was kind of a stunt back then, receiving mainstream media attention and ultimately allowing the band behind it to finance a small tour.
Of course, repeating this one-time creative feat is just boring and annoying and for Spotify it is just a slippery slope. If they forbid silence, people will upload white noise, if they forbid white noise people will just resort to some low effort AI generated sound. None of which is desirable for anyone.
In case you need it, a static page which will give you an infinite amount of white/pink/waterfall noise: https://www.quaxio.com/noise.html
No tracking and no ads, ever.
Uses WebAudio API. Based on the code from https://noisehack.com/generate-noise-web-audio-api/, but for some reason, the code wasn't working as-is in today's browsers. So tweaked things for a couple minutes.
Under the hood it’s just making calls to Math.random(), so the white noise generated is exactly as reliable a source of randomness as the system as the system could give you directly.
The combination of the operating system (Linux/MacOS/Windows) and the particular hardware it has access to. With different hardware, /dev/(u)random has different qualities of entropy.
that's horrifying. I do slightly disagree with the final thoughts and works say that one of the xoshiro 256 generators is probably better than the 1024 ones. 256 bits of state is plenty to give you a longer cycle length than you will ever need (even considering birthday paradox) and the reduced state means it fits in a single cache line
I've seen visual demonstrations of PRNG bias before, but are the biases of typical implementations of Math.random "above the noise threshold" (pun intended) where humans could distinguish them from truly random streams of audio?
I don't think so, no. The way I understood op was to use the generated audio itself as a source of entropy, which would be a bad idea if not using a CSPRNG perfectly tuned to the sampling rate and lossless audio I think :)
but I'm just guessing there regarding the effects of quality.
So the question now is, if it were calling `crypto.getRandomValues()` instead, would it sound different?
EDIT:
This is not a 100% joke question. I'd expect both versions to sound the same, but at the same time, there's a threshold on the RNG spectrum between "getRandomNumber() { return 4; }" and some truly random quantum source, where if you feed the RNG to audio output, people will be able to distinguish between "bad RNGs" (left of threshold), and "good RNGs" (right of threshold). I wonder where that threshold falls.
I don't believe it would. While there can be pretty bad PRNGs, they are typically implemented to produce a particular statistical distribution which would be identical to a real random source for the purposes of white noise. This is due to the fact that audio is a superposition of frequencies which takes time and multiple samples to cohere.
PRNGs can be bad for things like crypto because each individual generated value has significant implications for the entire set of operations.
It wouldn't sound different, even if you have absolute pitch, whatever the "speed" of the random sounds would be.
Both algorithms will generate sufficiently random values from a human perspective. Unless you carefully look into them, with a very specific mathematics / crypto knowledge, you wouldn't even be able to tell which one is pseudo-random, and which one is random: and if you somehow are able to, then it would just mean that the underlying RNG is very, very bad.
Probably not different enough that you could pick one from the other without a lot of practice, but depending on what PRNG you use, there's a good chance there's repeating patterns at different frequencies in the lower bits. Take a look at the visualisation bitmaps in https://www.random.org/analysis/ - I'd guess there's enough structure in that signal to appear in the 'white noise' as an audible whine.
I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.)
Another one is https://mynoise.net/, which has a neat mode where the sliders will very slowly move on their own, so you get slowly adjusting soundscapes.
I don't know if it works offline though, and probably not when your phone is locked. They also published recordings on spotify though; some are an hour long, others you can probably download them and loop them though. https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv?si=yL...
This website quite possibly saved my sanity when renting a tiny one bed flat in London with my partner and newborn baby. The traffic noise was unbearable, it was the hottest summer on record and he was a terrible sleeper.
Also, if you donate to mynoise you get some download credits that you can use to get an mp3 of your preferred slider settings. Great option for using it offline and it helps keep the lights on.
If you’re using iOS, there’s a built-in system for Background Sounds[0] that has quite a few options, and is built into the OS, which means it definitely still works while your phone is locked, or even otherwise engaged. It even gets out of the way for other audio and comes back very gradually.
This is great!
Might I suggest to add an X button to go back to the menu select. As if you accidentally select one on your phone, you have to refresh instead of hitting back.
Heads up this doesn’t seem to work on my iPhone 12. I confirmed audio on other apps works for me (I’m not accidentally streaming to an earbud or something) but this page doesn’t play any audio.
Recently iOS included a native noise generator that bypasses the need for external services like Spotify or websites. It offers six different kinds of noise to listen to on your phone.
It’s in the iPhone control center under the ear icon (which you may have to enable). The feature is called ‘background sounds’.
It's not really the kind of audio that you'd be able to notice looping. The white/pink/brown noise files are each a minute long, and the stream/ocean/rain sounds are comprised of 17-20 sound files between 1-3 minutes long (and I'm guessing it randomizes the playback order).
> entire episodes of white noise, seemingly aimed at listeners who are asleep.
> Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes
> shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit
I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s
A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones. Is the sum of those wasted ads that's equal to $38 M?
> A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones.
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …'
My guess would be the idea is to shift listeners from white noise that Spotify pays royalties for toward white noise that Spotify owns. The hidden factor is ads that don't actually play for Spotify subscribers. The general idea behind paying for an ad-free experience is that royalties and revenue are either paid by subscription fees or by advertisers. The free tier gets ads and the paid tier doesn't. If Spotify shifted users to content they don't pay royalties for, then users wouldn't notice the difference, but behind the scenes Spotify can claim the royalties and ad revenue for itself rather than pay them out to a third party.
For example, if Spotify replaces the podcaster who makes $18k month in royalties with Spotify's own white noise podcast, then the immediate effect is that $18k/month doesn't leave Spotify's pockets.
I still don't understand. If people like a background noise while sleeping, they will keep having one, be it chill / lounge / etc ... Music. The issue will remain the same.
but if all the "podcaster" is contributing is white noise, spotify can provide that without paying a "podcaster" anything so as a business it makes no sense to allow it to continue. If you have multiple "podcasters" earning 5 figure monthly off of white noise why pay them if you don't have to?
Are there any long-term effects on hearing or health caused by listening to white noise while sleeping? Or from the hum of an air conditioner, humidifier, or dehumidifier?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadAfter all, removing features your customers are using too much is a recipe for profit.
https://www.engadget.com/spotify-almost-removed-white-noise-...
Youve got a massive platform, incredibly successful, loved and used by so many, and you go "ah darn, i really hate that my users on my platform choose to spend their time on content that isnt as profitable as other content on my plaftorm"???
Jesus christ thats daft. Serve the users what they want and they will stay with you forever.
There are so many hidden gems in accessibility settings, at this point it should be called advanced settings instead.
It may be the number of items that are part of why people consider these settings "hidden". The "Accessiblity" menu is now 23 items long, and the main Settings menu is 53 Apple items plus over 100 application items.
Even the most buried possible setting in iOS is 9 clicks or less, and for the bigger features usually a lot less as you've demonstrated, hence it's not correct to call it 'hidden'.
Settings then Sounds & Haptics. 16 options, none seem to match. Maybe "personalized spatial audio?" Oh no,that's saying I need special headphones.
OK it's not under Sounds. Maybe it's in the Focus section? That's what I would use white noise for, focus. 6 options. Maybe it's under "Work Focus" or "Sleep Focus"? No.
General? 15 options, all with sub-menus but none seem relevant.
Control Center? Probably not... That seems safe to ignore. Except if I selected the "Hearing" option in Control Center settings, that actually gives me access to the background noise generator in control-center. But that doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
OK next is Display & Brightness and Home Screen. Probably safe to skip. Which then brings us to Accessibility. Again, it doesn't feel likely to me that it's in here, but no other choice in the settings feels correct, except maybe the Music app? Nope nothing there.
I check accessibility. I look past 18 options and see "Hearing" again, might as well tap that option. Even "Background Sounds" doesn't match what I'm looking for mentally, "White Noise". So it's likely my eyes miss it when I scan the list of options.
IMO it's an app. So make it an app, not an accessibility setting.
It's still hidden, just in a breadth of options instead of depth. A needle hidden in a 1 acre lot covered 1cm high in hay is more hidden than a needle in a 10 ft cube haystack.
Have you ever used an iPhone as a day to day device?
A user manually checking every possible submenu to find what they are looking for would be quite an outlier. If they are that determined then I don't see what the issue is, since presumably they are then going to inspect them all anyways.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWUZ5bk6qqDSy?si=...
As well as for other colors, such as brown noise.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX4hpot8sYudB?si=...
It feels like a UI challenge as much as anything else, I can’t imagine many users specifically want a podcast. Part of me feels like Spotify deserves it though, they’ve been trying to shove podcasts into users ears for ages now and I don’t want them. Turns out if you shove podcasts in front of people they’ll choose them. Price they pay.
There is something incredibly surreal about this statement.
Spotify pays content creators based on how many ads are played.
A white/brown/pink/etc. noise track/podcast is likely to be hours long, so that listeners can have it play long enough to fall asleep. Once asleep, the listener is still technically "listening" to the track/podcast, including the ads that Spotify then must pay the content creator for. With tens or hundreds of millions of listeners each listening to hours of content, this cost adds up.
Spotify has its own white/brown/pink/etc. noise tracks that it doesn't need to pay anyone for. Those are what Spotify would like to see its users stream, because it could save them - by their own calculation - $38 million.
Beyond that, the giant media corporations whining about the fact that money is going somewhere other than their own accounts is... par for the course. Really, this entire situation speaks to the absurdity of the industry itself and its own greed.
Why not?
I'm sure WMG also thinks WMG's contribution to Ed Sheeran's music on the platform is worth the millions they get paid as middlemen. At least the rain is contributing something by making a noise.
The easy fix would be to cap track time weight, although that is susceptible to an attack of splitting the white noise in many parts and publishing a playlist.
I guess a possibility could be to somehow compute "song variety" (i.e. entropy in a model where the decoder can generate noise/randomness) and weight by that, but not sure if the available lossy codecs are good enough to do that.
This is not a $38m-in-costs crisis for Spotify, this is a revenue opportunity!
...
60 seconds of web seaching later... Sigh. Apparently this sort of marketer manipulation started over three years ago unfortunately: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a36719140/sleep-... and https://www.science.org/content/article/are-advertisers-comi...
... things that make you say: "There oughta be a law..."
I would take the opposite approach and figure out how to maximize the return on the white noise without changing anything for the users; that is, focus on reducing the cost to deliver white noise, work on guidelines for the white noise presenters on how you're going to monetize this without disrupting the fad, etc.
From my perspective, I just can't see how trying to do something special with this fad does anything but immediately kill the fad. There are even FOSS white noise apps, and it won't take long for users to find a free alternative if Spotify messes with the recipe here. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to get Spotify exclusively for the white noise nor that white noise will somehow be a gateway into further Spotify use; I just don't see that the persons who want white noise would use that as an entry point into the service, it's the other way around, with current satisfied users finding out they can also use Spotify to get white noise.
Basically I see this as a happy accident for Spotify that will break if they try to press on it too much. They should treat this like a beneficial fad, and just figure out how to deliver it with the least resource cost, and just enjoy the extra revenue. I don't think it's really going to draw people in except if they play the "yeah, this is legit, we're just gonna get out of your way as much as possible here. enjoy our ads", and ride that money until it dries up.
One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify white noise, then they can dedup, i.e. serve the same sample for every request for white-noise track.
What I find annoying is that people are wasting bandwidth uploading and downloading an undifferentiated hiss. White noise is trivial to generate locally, without consuming any bandwidth.
[Edit] Real white noise has the same energy at every frequency; the total energy in white noise is effectively infinite. Practical "white noise" is low-pass-filtered, which means it's no longer real white noise.
I wonder if these samples are really pink noise, and Spotify is talking nonsense?
Taken to the extreme, you're looping a single datum: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png
Probably not the CEO's point though.
So I think it is reasonable to say that pop music is worth more. Let alone the fact that it takes tons more work to create.
Some people value sleep, others value sounds of nature, others value pop music, and others value money. The take on anything or anyone's value or worth usually tells us more about the appraiser than the subject.
Probably.
I will also point out that, again to the best of my knowledge, extremely little money is made by the music industry on sleeping pills, sleeping hardware (beds, mattresses, pillows) and necessities (covers, duvets), nor on specialised sleeping gear (masks, blinders, apneu machines).
Also: most people try to or need to sleep every night, but can go without a concert for multiple days. If you can sell something on a recurring basis, you don't need to make a ton of profit on each sale to get a nice income stream.
Finally: I think it is harder to improve the sleep of someone struggling with that, than to create entertaining music.
They suffer from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is a feature not a product. Apple, Google and Amazon don’t need to sustain their business based on streaming music. It’s a gesture to make their hardware more attractive.
The honestly pretty obvious answer to "why can't Ed Sheerhan's song be worth exactly the same as rain" is that the market demonstrates that there are lots of other places to get free rain noises or white noise or what have you while far fewer non-ad-or-subscription-supported on-demand song playment options.
This is frankly very very obvious.
you know, I've been making this argument to point out monopoly pricing for a long time: how come when I go to a theater, all the movie tickets are the same price? films cost a different amount to make, and some of them are good while others are stinkers. In any other business with a range of products like that, sellers compete on price. Movies are price-fixing-ed.
Edit: this article has some discussion https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/why-do-...
white noise content is the best example of "user most likely doesn't active listen" so an ad on it isn't worth much
for other podcasts you would assume people listen (through yes they might not, but Spotify has no practical way of knowing that), so ads are worth more
Additionally the ad industry values that their ad is associated with "premium content" (whatever that means) and while white noise is "highly valuable for the consumer needing it" it's not "premium content" as it doesn't has much content. I mean it's literally noise, well fine tuned noise you could call art, but still noise. So highly valuable but not premium.
Surely that would bring down their bandwidth costs at the very least.
There are tons of popular paid apps that do this kind of thing already, there's an obvious market for it.
But I haven't found Spotify to be very smart recently, so they'll probably just keep complaining about it, or do something stupid like update their ToS to disallow this kind of thing.
Now people don't want just any noise, they want artisanal boutique noise. so all you need is a bpf style language artists can plug into your noise generator, then people can pick the superior custom noise algorithm.
hashtag: only_half_joking
But honestly, we have a HomePod mini that does 99.999% of the work in the house. The HomePod has half-a-dozen or so background noises including rain, ocean and white noises
My Android app (Chroma Doze, est. 2010) uses this algorithm to splice noise segments together:
Then again, if Spotify really cared about saving bandwidth costs, they would have never gone to CDN from P2P.
On YouTube one of my most-watched videos in terms of watchtime for a while was brown noise overlaid on a recording of ocean waves. The video was three hours long I think and monetized. YouTube probably doesn't care if that share of my YouTube Premium subscription money goes to the guy who uploaded that video, a professionally recorded studio production or some person doing vlogs in their bedroom. Why should Spotify?
No idea if it would be a smart business decision by the labels, but they could definitely do it and Spotify would only be left with independent artists and labels who don't join the bandwagon.
YouTube has no risk of this. There's no entity, or coalition of entities, capable of pulling content from YouTube that would create a noticeable dip in traffic.
They can't. Unlike movies, there's great value in back catalogs. If Die Hard isn't available on a movie streaming service you will likely not care. If Pink Floyd (or Beatles, or Aretha Franklin) isn't available on a music streaming service, a huge number of people will care.
There are ~4 big companies that control 70-80% (by different estimations) of music. But individually they own different chunks. Sony can't start a streaming service if they don't have music owned by Warner etc.
I don't think that's how ... well, _anything_ works. It's like saying "If got rid of the actual program on our TV channel and filled the whole spot with adverts, we could make three times as much money from adverts".
They're not there to buy your product, they're there because there's a free thing they want. When that free thing goes away, so do they.
The primary benefit to me of using Spotify for this is that I'm already set up to control music on my sound system from my phone.
I decided to write my own noise generator. It's not hard. If you have access to OpenAI (or a semester's worth of DSP education), you could write one in a few hours.
Scapegoating "capitalism" doesn't strike me as sufficiently nuanced thinking.
For instance, Tidal, has playlists dedicated to things like rain sounds e.g. https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/5ed2512d-b27b-4d0c-845d-3f...
How can one sleep when those come up?
Or do they only inject ads between songs, so that if the song is long enough, the user will never hear any ads?
Or it's paid subscribers.
I want an app that just does this and nothing else that is not terrible.
I wish it had a few more (eg rain without bird noises). Being able to add my own would be great.
Why not? You've already made millions in profit on Ed Sheeran's content. Once you've broke even on the cost of making the content delivering more of it costs exactly the same. Regardless if its music or sounds of rain falling on a roof.
If any particular white noise album went away it would have no impact on revenue, people would just listen to a different one.
Not sure about that.
The main value proposition of Spotify is that is a audio marketplace that consolidates legacy music catalog via big labels (EMI, Roadrunner, Universal, etc) plus the Podcast platform sindication and in a certain stance discoverability.
Everything keeping the friction in a minimum level.
Of course Ed Sheeran is a big name, but I think it’s debatable that, let’s say the top 1% of his fan base in the Spotify user base would trade the huge amount of friction due to his catalog removal.
Another point that I forgot to mention: not all subscribers are equal to Spotify.
A heavy user that listens Ed Sheeran is less desirable than a heavy user that listens a bunch of podcasts. On the former Spotify needs to collect and pay to the labels and for the latter the cost is marginal.
If we’re talking about one artist, eventually the platform natural growth will offset the effect of a single artist leaving. Platform and network effects is something strong.
If you’re talking about a “catalog removal”, for instance, Universal removes all artists in their portfolio I am more than happy to agree that Spotify will suffer.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/26773/profitability-devel...
Of course, repeating this one-time creative feat is just boring and annoying and for Spotify it is just a slippery slope. If they forbid silence, people will upload white noise, if they forbid white noise people will just resort to some low effort AI generated sound. None of which is desirable for anyone.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepify
No tracking and no ads, ever.
Uses WebAudio API. Based on the code from https://noisehack.com/generate-noise-web-audio-api/, but for some reason, the code wasn't working as-is in today's browsers. So tweaked things for a couple minutes.
Not sure what you mean by this. Which system?
So no, Math.random is very much not
> as reliable a source of randomness as the system
[0] https://v8.dev/blog/math-random
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322529#c99
[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151641
https://v8.dev/blog/math-random
EDIT:
This is not a 100% joke question. I'd expect both versions to sound the same, but at the same time, there's a threshold on the RNG spectrum between "getRandomNumber() { return 4; }" and some truly random quantum source, where if you feed the RNG to audio output, people will be able to distinguish between "bad RNGs" (left of threshold), and "good RNGs" (right of threshold). I wonder where that threshold falls.
I don't believe it would. While there can be pretty bad PRNGs, they are typically implemented to produce a particular statistical distribution which would be identical to a real random source for the purposes of white noise. This is due to the fact that audio is a superposition of frequencies which takes time and multiple samples to cohere.
PRNGs can be bad for things like crypto because each individual generated value has significant implications for the entire set of operations.
Both algorithms will generate sufficiently random values from a human perspective. Unless you carefully look into them, with a very specific mathematics / crypto knowledge, you wouldn't even be able to tell which one is pseudo-random, and which one is random: and if you somehow are able to, then it would just mean that the underlying RNG is very, very bad.
I just sample from my own brain if I want truly random noise.
Ba-dum-tisss...
An app, though, not a website.
I don't know if it works offline though, and probably not when your phone is locked. They also published recordings on spotify though; some are an hour long, others you can probably download them and loop them though. https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv?si=yL...
If you’re using iOS, there’s a built-in system for Background Sounds[0] that has quite a few options, and is built into the OS, which means it definitely still works while your phone is locked, or even otherwise engaged. It even gets out of the way for other audio and comes back very gradually.
A real hidden gem.
0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212775
My baby will love this
It’s in the iPhone control center under the ear icon (which you may have to enable). The feature is called ‘background sounds’.
> Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes
> shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit
I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s
A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones. Is the sum of those wasted ads that's equal to $38 M?
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …'
For example, if Spotify replaces the podcaster who makes $18k month in royalties with Spotify's own white noise podcast, then the immediate effect is that $18k/month doesn't leave Spotify's pockets.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22311574/peak-design-video...
how can you have copyright on white noise???
Thanks, I didn't understand what the problem was before, and was thinking "if the white noises still has ads, who cares?"
Anyway, Pandora has essentially "solved" this problem with the "are you still listening?" button that pops ups, so IDK why they don't just do that.
So I guess no, its not the same.
Honestly, there are days when I go to sleep with metal blasting from the ear buds. That can be calming depending on how the day went.