Ex-Easter Island Head only lose out from more people listening to Taylor Swift if the per-stream payments change, otherwise it won't affect them surely?
― death in Skegness (seandalai), Tuesday, 2 December 2014 23:33 (nine years ago) link
TH, not sure I understand the argument. If the number of albums that *drive* Spotify decreases as it becomes more mainstream, then non-elite musicians will make less money because Spotify will pay them less? Or because they will somehow end up with fewer streams?
if 90% of Spotify listening is to this very small slice of the catalog, then as Spotify becomes a mainstream service that slice will get smaller because mainstream listeners are less eclectic and adventurous in their listening. i.e. it will become more difficult for non-megastars to make any money at all on Spotify, not less difficult. and then those non-mega musicians and labels have to make a choice, either accept Spotify as a marketing tool or pull their music altogether. the majors don't give a shit because they own pretty much all of that little slice that makes up 90% of listening. plus they own a stake in spotify.
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 12:46 (nine years ago) link
not really spotify's fault that people all listen to the same stuff
― iatee, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 14:32 (nine years ago) link
FWIW heard Kelefa Sanneh on a podcast make a very good case (and have others make similar cases) that it's really the labels screwing artists again here, not Spotify, although it might be a hair-splitting distinction given that the labels own big chunks of Spotify. Basically the labels earn revenue three different ways -- from lump sum payments, from royalty payments, and from their equity in Spotify. But they only share the royalty stream of income with artists, and they make sure to maximize the other two and minimize that one.
― 18th Century Celebrity WS of Shame (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 14:40 (nine years ago) link
Personally, I appreciate Spotify because if there is bad news to be had regarding Spotify and music consumers' depressing habits, I'd rather have it right in front of me.
When I was growing up, there was no way of understanding music consumer behavior, short of taking notes when you visit houses or dorm rooms. Thanks to sites like last.fm or services like Spotify, we can get an idea.
― Threat Assessment Division (I M Losted), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 14:56 (nine years ago) link
actually, there were these things called magazines and "industry trades"...
― da croupier, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 15:46 (nine years ago) link
i'll admit last.fm and spotify make it easier to cull information about the listening habits of individuals though. i just wouldn't qualify "jesus bob sure likes that ariana grande song" as "understanding music consumer behavior"
― da croupier, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 15:54 (nine years ago) link
We get reports from Next Big Sound that shows us aggregate data on Spotify for our music. It's free, too. Not that our numbers are high enough to gain any big insight, but it's still interesting.
― schwantz, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 17:12 (nine years ago) link
There's definitely something new about the ability to tell what people are actually listening to and how much, and not just what they buy.
― 18th Century Celebrity WS of Shame (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 17:15 (nine years ago) link
I was given sting's lute album as a gift, and I never even opened it ;_;
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 17:18 (nine years ago) link
i liked this piece, more nuanced than most http://oneofthosefaces.com/2014/12/02/the-incalculable-value-of-music/
― lex pretend,
Its better than most, but there's still an inference or implication that we our entitled in some way to media
I should be able to consume media like a buffet, not a set meal
Overall I think this is true, but i also dont think we're entitled to any one persons music or song, if they want to pull it, surely thats up to them. Theyre not obligated to put it on spotify, or even release it at all, and if they want to charge £400 for it, thats up to them.
I havent followed this taylor swift spotify thing particularly closely, but surely she can do whatever she wants with her music, why is anyone entitled to it - and also why should she have to justify herself to anyone
― saer, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 17:30 (nine years ago) link
she was not strictly required to justify it. but people will just guess or fabricate your reasons for the public act of not releasing your music on spotify when you are as big as she is. so she decided that it was best to make a statement so that people can clearly know the thoughts behind her actions.
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 17:58 (nine years ago) link
people would have guessed 'money' and her reason was 'money'
― iatee, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 18:51 (nine years ago) link
but what would the raccoons have guessed?
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 18:56 (nine years ago) link
― iatee, Wednesday
and thats as valid a reason as any other, no?
― saer, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 18:58 (nine years ago) link
raccoons aside, people aren't really attacking TS for her decision here.
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:01 (nine years ago) link
people who make art for a living should do whatever they want to maximize their earnings
it's slightly disingenuous for her to pretend like her situation is comparable to anybody else's though
― iatee, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:10 (nine years ago) link
she is like a painter. a painter named Thomas Kinkade.
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:12 (nine years ago) link
Seems like there are separate problems of whether Spotify hurts your sales vs whether you can fight the tide.
― 18th Century Celebrity WS of Shame (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:13 (nine years ago) link
you can break that down even more when you consider the option of not putting everything on spotify. there's not "fighting the tide" and there's putting your kids in the backseat and driving into the ocean.
― da croupier, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:31 (nine years ago) link
you still don't actually have much leverage when you do that unless you are taylor swift and can hold back the single most in demand album of the year. when consumers have a sea of hundreds of thousands of things to choose from, everything is devalued. how many individual books could disappear from the NYPL without anyone noticing?
― iatee, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:44 (nine years ago) link
I kind of dont agree with that, the strength of the library is the library itself not any one book, and priviledging any one book or song or artist is ossifying for me, taking the tree out of the forest and saying look at this one tree. It doesnt devalue a tree that there are other trees.
Anyway for me its not so much about what taylor swift does or doesnt do, thats her own business, its the entitlement of those that feel they are somehow owed the music they want in the format they want
― saer, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 19:54 (nine years ago) link
This thing is up now: https://www.spotify-yearinmusic.com/index.html
― glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 21:42 (nine years ago) link
Top artists: 1) Steely Dan 2) Future Islands 3) Paramore 4) Owen Pallett 5) Beck. Lots of ILX thread influence there...
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 22:09 (nine years ago) link
more like whitify amiwite?
― 18th Century Celebrity WS of Shame (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 22:13 (nine years ago) link
curious what the metric was for the personal top 5 albums - was it number of tracks from an album? times you played the whole thing? the five albums i got suggested there might not have been five albums i played all the way through this year
― da croupier, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 22:17 (nine years ago) link
hey glenn can you tell me how off my numbers are? i.e. 40K albums = 90% of streams?
― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 22:24 (nine years ago) link
I think you're overestimating the dominance of the hits. Paul Lamere looked at then-current numbers in some detail last year:
http://musicmachinery.com/2013/11/23/revisiting-the-long-tail/
The top ~200k-ish songs at the time accounted for only 80% of plays, and longitudinal data suggested that listening was getting less concentrated over time, not more.
― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, 4 December 2014 02:16 (nine years ago) link
33K minutes of listening time this year for me. Thought it would be more but I'll trust their numbers.
― brotherlovesdub, Thursday, 4 December 2014 03:31 (nine years ago) link
53.784k for me. I apparently average 5 hrs every Wednesday.
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, 4 December 2014 03:48 (nine years ago) link
ha, glenn did you create all of the genre playlists?
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, 4 December 2014 03:52 (nine years ago) link
Yes, in the sense that I wrote the code that produces them.
― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, 4 December 2014 03:53 (nine years ago) link
awesome. does your code generate the "play it forward" list as well? is this the first year for "your year in music"? maybe I just missed it previously. anyway, it's great and better than last.fm in many ways. It'd be cool if even more stats became available in the future.
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, 4 December 2014 03:58 (nine years ago) link
No, I didn't do the Play It Forward thing, and I don't know how it works. Mine was odd.
They did a less-elaborate thing last year, before we got acquired. And yes, more stats would be cool. Stay tuned.
― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, 4 December 2014 04:02 (nine years ago) link
Haha - according to Spotify my favorite genres are Warm Drone, Drone, Ambient, Glitch... and Freak Folk.
My top two songs of the year are Angel Olsen's "Unfucktheworld"... and "Monster Mash". Thanks to my son on that last one.
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Thursday, 4 December 2014 06:19 (nine years ago) link
where does this info live?
― a stupid red mute juggalo (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 4 December 2014 07:00 (nine years ago) link
I couldn't get the page to work, assumed it was premium only or some side effect of running Noscript on Firefox
― sleeve, Thursday, 4 December 2014 07:01 (nine years ago) link
I think that only some of the stats are limited to premium, so it is likely the latter.
― $0.00 Butter sauce only. No marinara. (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, 4 December 2014 07:03 (nine years ago) link
googled my way there. 60k minutes listening. my most listened songs weirdly swayed by doing singles jukebox and with the music i listen to when i jog; way more pop and rap represented than what i remember listening to this year.
― a stupid red mute juggalo (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 4 December 2014 07:17 (nine years ago) link
snootie wild "made me" as #1 song of the year all too accurate tho
― a stupid red mute juggalo (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 4 December 2014 07:18 (nine years ago) link
I had to turn Ghostery off to load the year in music page, fair to assume it doesn't play well with blockers in general
My top genres are art rock, r-neg-b, experimental, balearic, new wave. Couldn't crack the 40k-minutes barrier, maybe next year!
― death in Skegness (seandalai), Thursday, 4 December 2014 09:44 (nine years ago) link
31% grave wave - don't know what that is exactly, but sounds about right to me
― sosmix klopp (NickB), Thursday, 4 December 2014 10:25 (nine years ago) link
It worked better for me in Safari than in Chrome
my total was just under 25k minutes
Top 5 artists and albums are amusingly inaccurate, unless maybe I've forgotten leaving that Charlie Christian Genius of the Electric Guitar album on repeat for a few days ... almost none of the albums I listened to multiple times show up, while others I played once make the list
The top songs list seems slightly more representative but omits most of the tracks I had in heavy rotation in the last two months, a period during which I increased my use of Spotify quite a bit
not really complaining -- this is a neat feature and I look forward to geeking out on more stats in the future
― Brad C., Thursday, 4 December 2014 13:26 (nine years ago) link
i want to lodge a protest about corny indie fuxxor not being a genre in this
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 4 December 2014 13:43 (nine years ago) link
― death in Skegness (seandalai), donderdag 4 december 2014 10:44 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Same here. Could not get it to work. Had to turn off AdBlocker, Ghostery, Disconnect and Privacy Badger for it to work lol
6k listening, mostly pop and hiphop, which indeed is what I use Spotify for most. My listening is scattered over Spotify, iTunes and vinyl.
― a pleasant little psychedelic detour in the elevator (Amory Blaine), Thursday, 4 December 2014 13:50 (nine years ago) link
minehttp://i.imgur.com/Y9mMQc1.pnghttp://i.imgur.com/9u81R8Q.png
I listen mostly to my vinyl and cd's now but I still get good value from Spotify Premium but sadly Soundrop and all the other apps are getting killed off on dec 31st.
― Cosmic Slop, Thursday, 4 December 2014 14:08 (nine years ago) link
Most of the time I listened to my starred playlist, 2,390 songs on random. I skip a lot, but I never skip a NOFX or Blink 182 song. Judge me if you wish. Also lol @ Sixteen Tons showing up in my most played song.
Artists1. NOFX2. Blink 1823. Chiddy Bang4. Caribou5. Kris Menace
Albums1. Infinity + 1 - A-Trak2. Idiosyncrasies - Kris Menace3. War on Errorism - NOFX4. Boston - Boston5. Pump Up The Valuum - NOFX
Songs1. Idiots Are Taking Over - NOFX2. Do This Thing - Blänk3. Take Two Placebos And Call Me Lame - NOFX4. Kaili - Caribou5. M+M's - Blink 1826. Backwards Walk - Frightened Rabbit7. Mattersville - NOFX8. Sixteen Tons - Tennessee Ernie Ford9. Dammit - Blink 18210. Little Girl - MSTRKRFT Edition - Death From Above 1979
SeasonsWinter - Frightened RabbitSpring - Kris MenaceSummer - The WhoAutumn - Caribou
89% on mobile16,520 minutes of listeningMost active day - Friday 2 hours average
― Jeff, Thursday, 4 December 2014 14:23 (nine years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0
― Jeff, Thursday, 4 December 2014 14:24 (nine years ago) link
huh what now about the apps being killed off? which apps?
― Raccoon Tanuki, Thursday, 4 December 2014 14:35 (nine years ago) link
all apps afaik
― Cosmic Slop, Thursday, 4 December 2014 14:36 (nine years ago) link