Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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When underpaying artists for their labor isn’t enough to keep your company going pic.twitter.com/kaSIUUL8gB

— Jabroni And The Air-rifle (@DanBoeckner) March 3, 2020

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 17:18 (four years ago) link

How is that not payola?

DJI, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 18:46 (four years ago) link

Buying ads is not payola.

glenn mcdonald, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 21:35 (four years ago) link

You never got coverage in music mags if your label didn't advertise in it

Oor Neechy, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:30 (four years ago) link

music mags didn't make money off of distributing your music

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:36 (four years ago) link

So it’s like Tower Records (R.I.P.) soliciting labels to place ads in Pulse! magazine.

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:42 (four years ago) link

no, it's like if Revolver Distribution had a publication of its own and in order to get distribution you had to buy ads in their publication. It's absolutely payola.

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:43 (four years ago) link

How is Spotify equivalent to Revolver Distribution here?

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:45 (four years ago) link

how are they similar to a magazine?

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:46 (four years ago) link

Spotify is closer to being a distributor than they are to being a publication

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:46 (four years ago) link

They’re closer to being one record store of many on the same digital “block,” no?

It also kind of sounds like studios having to pay theaters to run movie trailers.

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:47 (four years ago) link

(My analogy wasn’t that they’re similar to a magazine, it was that they’re similar to Tower Records.)

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:48 (four years ago) link

I suppose. Spotify has, what, 30% of the streaming market?

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:49 (four years ago) link

lol I forgot that Tower owned Pulse, sorry about that

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:49 (four years ago) link

I suppose one big difference is that Tower Records was actually a profitable business once haha

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:50 (four years ago) link

Now, if they were soliciting payment to place songs on curated playlists, feature certain artists on “hero” images, etc., I agree that would seem shady. Do they do that?

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 22:59 (four years ago) link

why would they ever admit that they do

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:01 (four years ago) link

I don’t know, but presumably someone would find out and write an article about it

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:05 (four years ago) link

Why would you pay to advertise if it didn't get you onto the only place you can make money? I would be less skeptical of this scheme if Spotify hadn't done everything they could over the last few years to jam themselves in-between artists and listeners and push listeners into listening exclusively to Spotify-created (whether curated or algorithmic) playlists.

I feel like the streaming services should be treated as a common carrier and allow anyone to build value-added services on top of them. At this point, all the vertical integration is pretty clearly NOT A GOOD THING.

DJI, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:14 (four years ago) link

presumably someone would find out and write an article about it

this already happened years ago fyi

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:17 (four years ago) link

here let me google that for you etc

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:18 (four years ago) link

and it's (of course) a game of whack-a-mole - every time something like this draws attention/bad press they back away from it, and then move on to the next payola scheme

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:20 (four years ago) link

Thanks — the first article is subscriber-only, and the second seems to be about a test of something similar to what I was talking about, but maybe marked as “Sponsored”? (though I genuinely appreciate you Googling it for me)

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:24 (four years ago) link

The rising value of Spotify playlists has spurred a new form of payola—the decades-old illegal practice of paying for a song to be broadcast on the radio—with massive amounts of money changing hands behind the scenes. An August 2015 exposé by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for “$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.”

https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/spotify-playlist-black-market/

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:26 (four years ago) link

Ah, that sounds like more like what I was talkin about!

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:27 (four years ago) link

so they were doing it (blatantly), it leaked to Billboard, they stopped doing it, and now they've moved on to some slightly more convoluted scenario (because they still aren't making money)

Οὖτις, Tuesday, 3 March 2020 23:28 (four years ago) link

guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHzL2RJZd1tc1VAHw9WAwL0Uuiwvkcc9Ibyltq2zlFaE6wiY_BjbjYPC4AS3Pm8NLP3ePY3HMbpeFCCdyc-q59S9snQpeGbVhsbBov4QFXxNXzYHFVrCIxL89toWXi3qAhRjAZHJ2H5xAXWETQW376MUXHtgktwFuCOLCN001WlV

makes u think

Fantastic. Great move. Well done (sic), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 00:04 (four years ago) link

really wish the big green shuffle button on iOS would go away.

sleeve, Wednesday, 4 March 2020 02:04 (four years ago) link

All those payola articles are about non-Spotify services selling placement on THEIR playlists, which has always been against the Spotify terms of use. Buying a marquee ad doesn't get you on Spotify-owned playlists, it just gets you the marquee ad. You can definitely argue about whether selling marquee ads is good or bad or fair or unfair, but it's not payola.

glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, 4 March 2020 02:25 (four years ago) link

Huh, sounds like 3rd-parties are monetizing the “value-added services” being requested above, how about that(!)

tamagotchi revival artist (morrisp), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 02:38 (four years ago) link

some high-priority major-label artists/songs are so aggressively featured on some of the big-name playlists (far beyond their apparent ability to actually draw streams) that i'd frankly be very surprised if there weren't some kind of back-scratching/arm-twisting going on, whether or not it technically violates 'terms of use'

dyl, Wednesday, 4 March 2020 04:20 (four years ago) link

if there were something like payola, it'd probably sneak in through some bias in the algorithms. A similar sort of bias could also exist within the thinking of a popular radio DJ, though, and it wouldn't be labeled as payola. payola is ultimately a bit meaningless on a platform where you can just choose music yourself anyway.

latin hypercube in shitspace (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 04:59 (four years ago) link

Every time this thread gets bumped I just want to say “yes I have heard of it” but I’ve resisted until now

But yes I’ve heard of it

Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 05:03 (four years ago) link

but have you heard that they've actually reported positive earnings in some quarters?

latin hypercube in shitspace (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 05:11 (four years ago) link

if there were something like payola, it'd probably sneak in through some bias in the algorithms. A similar sort of bias could also exist within the thinking of a popular radio DJ, though, and it wouldn't be labeled as payola. payola is ultimately a bit meaningless on a platform where you can just choose music yourself anyway.


Spotify has editorial playlists which result in huge incomes for the bands lucky enough to land their songs on them. This is pretty much the only way any acts other than the most popular ones (and of course there is overlap between the two categories) can make any money in streaming. And they have spent years getting people to trust their algorithms/judgement. And they make it much easier to listen to their editorial playlists than any user-generated playlists by spotlighting them in the UI and making them easy to access via Google Home/Alexa. So claiming that you can choose whatever you want to listen to is true, but also not really that true for most users, I’m guessing. This is why any type of pay-to-play system in Spotify would just as meaningful as any other payola scheme, and possibly MORE meaningful since radio stations didn’t pay bands for every listener that bought their record.

DJI, Wednesday, 4 March 2020 05:21 (four years ago) link

but... you can't pay to be featured on those lists

corrs unplugged, Wednesday, 4 March 2020 09:28 (four years ago) link

Latest entitled whinge: no one is currently getting 0.0009p from me per play because the web player is an absolute mess: frequently won't load at all, skips songs, the CSS is often all over the place.

Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 11:58 (four years ago) link

xxp corrs otm, but I also think it matters that radio existed on a limited and regulated spectrum as a source of music discovery that a very different cost than the alternative at the time, buying so many records. these playlists and the freedom to discover new music oneself exist on the same platform at the same cost to the listener. any preference for the playlist is just laziness or favoring music-as-event over music itself on the part of the listener.

latin hypercube in shitspace (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 21:41 (four years ago) link

Sure, I guess, but the Spotify UX seems to be actively herding people toward music-as-event ("Chill" being the most popular event, apparently) listening, rewarding the artists who embrace that model, and selling advertising with at least the implicit idea that advertising will increase artists' "exposure." In this model, what other exposure is there that is worth a damn other than placement on high-traffic playlists?

DJI, Wednesday, 4 March 2020 21:58 (four years ago) link

I seem to receive emails and push notifications whenever big thief does anything. I've always assumed that their label pays for it.

latin hypercube in shitspace (Sufjan Grafton), Wednesday, 4 March 2020 23:23 (four years ago) link

What is the/is there even a distinction between "liking" a song and adding it to your library?

I'm going through my Liked Songs playlist and it seems that before June of last year I have entire albums worth of songs in my Liked Songs (albums I presumably meant to add to my library), but after that I see mostly one off songs. Did Spotify change this last year? If I remove all the liked songs will it also remove them from my library?

musically, Friday, 6 March 2020 16:01 (four years ago) link

I just figured this out this morning. My phone app (Android) taking forever to load my saved albums led me to toss most of them into playlists and remove from "Albums"... it worked. But what I think was even more helpful was emptying out "liked songs".

At some point in the fall, liking albums stopped having all the songs from those albums automatically go to liked songs. So this list has just been static for me since that point anyways (I only ever add single tracks to playlists).

I'm not sure when the Albums list started having recommended albums on the bottom of it, but it seems this is done just by analyzing your Liked Songs. Since I've emptied that, there are no recommended albums on the bottom, which probably helps the loading too.

I've never hit the library limit fwiw. Not sure why that is a big deal for a lot of people... you can have unlimited playlists, right?

maffew12, Friday, 6 March 2020 16:53 (four years ago) link

right I guess it was June

maffew12, Friday, 6 March 2020 16:54 (four years ago) link

The issue for me with the library limit was that I THOUGHT I was clearing out my albums and moving them to playlists efficiently, but I would still consistently get the error message when liking just one song. Taking a weedwhacker to my liked songs explained some of that...I had 9300 tracks in there.

Note: removing liked songs from your liked playlist does not seem to affect your albums

Note 2: if you have 9300 liked songs and you try to remove them all at once you will explode your computer

musically, Friday, 6 March 2020 17:23 (four years ago) link

to be fair 9300 is a very big number. today's computers can only handle small number like 8 and 45.

Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Friday, 6 March 2020 17:27 (four years ago) link

haha. Whatever version of the Windows desktop client I was using, it only let me remove 100 songs at a time. Took a bit!

But yeah, I reached the same conclusion, that liked/libraryfied Albums and Songs no longer have anything to do with each other.

Using the Download toggle on Liked Songs used to be a handy way to sync your whole Library... now that I'm using the Library as like my current rotation, that would be handy. Might have to figure something out with a Smarter Playlists script.

Bleh!

maffew12, Friday, 6 March 2020 17:43 (four years ago) link

Sorted out making one big playlist of Liked Songs + Albums (i.e., what 'liked songs' used to be) for easy device sync'ing.

http://smarterplaylists.playlistmachinery.com/importer.html?pid=11f60469a07b01116b477b82e3962bef

Run it on a schedule sync additions and deletions you make.

maffew12, Friday, 6 March 2020 22:21 (four years ago) link


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