Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Sound fair to you?

^see what a bad ending this is?

oh no, that one also sounds bad because it is a question I am clearly asking because I presume to know the answer with my smart twitter analysis

Can you give the math behind these facts? Rogan's payout is fair/musicians' payout is fair vis a vis revenue produced?

from businessinsider.com:

Joe Rogan's massively popular podcast will become a Spotify exclusive, the company announced Tuesday. The Joe Rogan Experience, which is downloaded nearly 200 million times per month and makes $30 million annually, will only be uploaded to Spotify starting in September.

one can do some simple math to assess the value of the deal to spotify. I'm not sure the length of the "multi-year" deal. But if it's 3 years, 3*$30 million is close to $100 million. 36*200 million streams is 7.2 billion streams. the per-stream comparison also seems meaningless anyhow. Spotify's market cap has also increased a few billion since the deal was announced, and that's something.

so the problem isn't that spotify erroneously overvalues rogan's bad podcast over its great music. or even that it undervalues the music. the problem is much broader, as sic described. There's plenty of room for outrage toward spotify in the solution, but it should come from a more realistic description of where we are, how we got here, and spotify's own place in a larger issue.

the number involving $30 million is probably misleading, as I don't know the deal w.r.t. advertising $$$ within the podcast. I'm sure spotify cares more about the effect on new user and daily use numbers, since these are the things that seem to matter most in the quarterly reports of an online user data-based targeted advertising business.

a lot of the value is in establishing Spotify as a go-to platform for podcasts, I assume. Like if usually listen to Rogan on Apple or Youtube and have to switch to Spotify, you are more likely to start listening to your other podcasts there.

yes. Going for the "we are podcast netflix" gold ring

They also bought The Ringer for $200 million in order to get Bill Simmons' stable of podcasts, and also to have an in-house sports division. Weeks before sports stopped existing worldwide.

they didn't make them exclusive tho. Not sure why.

a) it's a whole website and suite of podcasts, not a single audio conversation program like Rogan
b) when apparently pivoting your core business, makes sense to try a variety of strategies for customer engagement and assess them all

i listen to bill simmons because he is to sports/pop/meta media capitalism what ryukahr is to super mario maker. i don't really care what he says. i enjoy listening to him talk with somebody like chuck klosterman about survivor because you can feel them working out how to best butter their bread by filling time with meaningless "ideas" peoples' minds can hang on to for a few minutes while they pivot spreadsheets at work. they even joke about people like mike greenberg to distract from the fact that they're blowing the same hot air under the sails of people just trying to distract themselves from their own lives. so they don't really need sports to happen. they just need a flow of income from spreadsheet pivoters, looking for a distraction.

that all sounds a bit "wake up sheeple," and i was invoking the bill/chuck style. But i am admitting myself as part of the sheeple in this case. anything to avoid my own thoughts about real stuff that matters while pivoting these spreadsheets.

the website though

isnt the website mostly about rewatching old movies?

and ranking fast food menu items?

i.e. the expanded version of bill's podcast?

The fuck you talking about?

please read the first 30 words if you don't wish to see this content itt in the future

lol

Glenn, what on earth is the rationale behind the 'RECOMMENDED SONGS Based on the songs in this playlist' thing? It seems to be entirely based on the song/artist names (ie recommending the Frozen soundtrack if you listen to Ben Frost) which seems a fairly unhelpful guide to what someone might want to listen to.

Ha - I don't think that's usually the way it works. It comes up with reasonably sensible suggestions on mine. Maybe Ben Frost gets a lot of listens from kids trying to type Frozen

I started a playlist with the "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" theme and all the recommended songs were Christmas music

and bad boys ost

lol playlist "Snow" by Ben Frost
recommended songs:
Snow Patrol "You're All I Have"
Miike Snow- "Faker"
Hank Snow- "Rockin' Rollin' Ocean"
THe Reindeer Section- "Cartwheels"

Belle & Sebastian- "Fox in the Snow"
Nick Cave- "Fifteen Feet of Pure White"
RHCP- "Snow (Hey)"
Phoebe Snow- "Isn't It a Shame"

clicking refresh until I get "Informer"

Recommended Songs recommends songs based on the playlist title if you don't have any songs in it yet. And it's supposed to switch to recommendations based on the songs as soon as there are any songs, but at the moment it seems to only switch once there are at least 6 of them. But if you add at least 6 and then hit Refresh a couple times to clear out the title-based recommendations, you should get some that make more sense. It works by looking at what other people tend to put on playlists with the songs you have so far, so if you're making a playlist with a strong theme based on something outside of your own head, the recs can be downright uncanny. For that matter, even the title-based recs are sometimes terrific. If you're going for something more personal or particular, though, there's no guarantee it will match what other people have collectively done before.

5 seems like enough, actually. If I add Deaf Center, Forest Swords, Grouper and Oneohtrix Point Never to that Ben Frost song, refreshing gets me recs for Taylor Deuprae, Anna Thorvalsdottir, Bersarin Quartett, Lawrence English, Sarah Davachi and Fennesz, none of those songs involving snow...

I've found so much good stuff from the playlist radio function - that thing that arrives after a playlist/album has finished. It's a great feature.

Cheers, glenn--it's always interesting learning how it all works.

https://pitchfork.com/news/spotify-lifts-10000-song-library-limit/

About damn time

nice. hope it doesn’t bork things too much.

Good thing they did that after I cleaned up my Liked Playlist. Really,

fucking finally

yeeeeeeesssssss

though this feels a bit like the programming meme where you insert pauses in the code to remove later.

how is spotify with local files these days? i’m so sick of apple music forgetting where in a 3-hour DJ mix i was.

My general sense is that it is not as good as it once was, but I don't have specific problems I'm grappling with at the moment

hmm. Might make a bigger library. Is it just my crap phone or does having a large library make the Android app slower? Even when not much of it is downloaded.

Blessed day

So a week or two back something changed again and instead of showing the most recent "appears on" features, the iphone app now shows the most popular "appears on" albums/playlists instead, which i guess is all fine and dandy if you're looking for the most heavily anthologized Elton John tracks or whatever, but a total disaster for anyone (me) trying to keep track of new dancehall riddims, which are now basically unsearchable unless you already know the name of the riddim. No more "oh hey, that's i-octane singing, let me check if i can find out the name of the riddim through looking at his artist page." Sigh.

I had prepared this very same post. It’s the same on desktop btw, but it’s worse on mobile because it only shows you 25 releases - which was sort of okay when it was the 25 most recent ones, but now it’s a disaster, especially when you’re following genres like dancehall or Afropop or rap or any other genre where people do lots of features on other people’s tracks or albums, and that’s actually most genres these days, I’d think. So no, I don’t get this decision at all.

Case in point: a couple of days ago maura posted a song on the rolling r&b thread, it was Miguel on someone else’s track. It had slipped my mind who the main artist was, so I checked Miguel’s Spotify page for his latest collaboration - but it was not to be found among the 25 that were shown. How is that helping the user at all - or the artist for that matter? “Hey, I’ve done a new thing, but guess what, you don’t get to see it!”

(and yeah, it’s probably worst for dancehall. The other week I wanted to check for riddims an artist was on in 2011 or 2012 and was forced to search 120 or whatever releases sorted in random chronological order)

The Appears On thing involves issues that have nothing to do with what you're seeing. Hopefully it'll be back soon...

I don't know if this helps at all as a workaround but you can add year:2020 to your search to get this year's releases. Doing that with Miguel got me his appearance on Too Much by Ro James as the first track on Songs.

And for new dancehall releases, you could try

http://everynoise.com/new_releases_by_genre.cgi?genre=dancehall®ion=US or https://open.spotify.com/search/genre%3Adancehall%20year%3A2020/tracks but I know Spotify's idea of what's in a genre isn't always the most accurate.

That search-for-year thing is very useful, thanx alba.

Glenn, if you’re hopeful I’m hopeful too, but you do sound awfully mysterious!

“Coming soon to a theater near you: 5G - The Movie - it has nothing to do with what you’re seeing...”

lol,
And thanks, Alba, I'll definitely try that.

i love searching by year look at this amazing time capsule from the early 40s

https://i.imgur.com/ga8TQLq.png

Amazing colorization work!

Track 2 seems a pretty inappropriate tribute to Pearl Harbor but what can you expect from one of those "edgy" swing bands.