Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Are we not Devo? We are Devo!

I've got the wrong Devo too, and, for the second week running, a chapter of the audiobook of Bob Dylan's Chronicles – in German!

I got Roosevelt for the 37th time despite telling it I don't like Roosevelt almost as many times.

Wish there was an 'about' button for albums.

And the album cover could be at least 25% bigger in full screen mode.

More! Even on desktop with the left panel expanded to the max, it's only about 8cm square on my screen. Would be great to be able to double click on it or whatever and get a big version.

I wouldn't mind more access to those little looped video clips that I only get on the iPhone.
Is there a name for them?
*googles*
Oh, Canvas.

I'm very happy with them being phone only! Though as someone said above, having album's exact release date on mobile only seems like a weirder discrepancy.

Christ the shuffle is shite. Plays the most recently plays first. Deep cuts will wait another century

It's March 1 and 'It's Spring' by Sun Ra is on my Discover Weekly. I'm not saying I don't believe it's all algorithmic but …

Hi Glenn - Are you still lurking? I have a question about your (awesome!)New Releases by Genre website:

Is there a way to add more than one genre to the query?

Yes! Pick the first one, and then you'll see little gray "+" links when you hover over the others in the list. You can keep adding them until the URL-length maxes out...

I’d like to do the opposite. Is there a way to remove genres? I’ve no interest in Dinner Jazz or ASMR for example.

wow that's a cool site!

silly me for thinking this bump was to address the many protests happening at Spotify hqs around the globe yesterday

There's no anti-filter, but you can just pick the genres you DO want.

(Token in-person "protests" at closed offices during a pandemic seem like the definition of "publicity stunt", but I didn't go see if anybody showed up outside the Boston office.)

Thanks, Glenn! Now if you would support Tidal, that would be great (had to add Tidal after Spotify removed DJ support). ;)

Paul, maybe you'd like to address them and throw up a link? I don't know what's being protested, there's lots of options.

Thanks Glenn, will do that. I said I’ve no interest in ASMR recordings but do find some of the covers unintentionally amusing.

Glenn this site is very great, but I am unclear, is there a way to just let it play the songs on the list or to make it into a Spotify playlist? What I'm getting is the ability to click one song at a time and hear like 30s of it (and then if I like it I can click through to the album on my Spotify and mark that I like it there.)

If you put it into "checklist" mode you can check all the stuff you want, and it makes a list of Spotify URIs at the bottom that you can just copy and paste into a playlist...

cool works!

Paul, maybe you'd like to address them and throw up a link? I don't know what's being protested, there's lots of options.

are we supposed to just guess what Paul is thinking about every day, google that, and then post links to it in every thread on the board though?

I just thought forks was interested in a link so I gave him one sheesh

I wasn’t calling you “sheesh” there, sic, in case you thought that was some weird punning treeship thing

"publicity" for what?

The group is calling for increased transparency in the company’s business practices, an end to lawsuits filed against artists, and a user-centric payment model that pays a cent per stream, among other things.

very much agreed! tbc my post was directed at glenn's "publicity stunt" comment, which I find v puzzling as a criticism or dismissal of any protest really

bringing publicity to an issue by protesting about it? it'll never catch on as a tactic

I was referring specifically to them protesting at Spotify's physical offices when the company's staff have all been working from home for over a year.

Protests are for public opinion, not to convince data-crunchers and UI designers to change CEO policies, by slowing the employees down while getting a sandwich. If they're going to gather outside a place, it might as well be somewhere that says "spotify" on the building in case ppl see the photographs, rather than at a random petrol station.

I don't think publicity stunts are the only possible kind of protest, and I would be super-happy to talk to protesters if they come back after my office reopens. But I know that dialogue is not actually their goal, having made offers to talk to them in other formats and been declined. (Nor do their specific financial demands make any structural sense, but I totally support the call for transparency...)

Okay, I'll bite: do you think that artists are being fairly compensated for pay-per-spin at the 1/3 of a penny to 1/5 of a penny rate? You see that as sustainable for an independent performer?

but if you INVEST that 1/3rd of a penny, it might become 2/3rds of a penny in 3 months

I suspect that the response will be along the following lines:

*the problem is the record companies, not Spotify;
*let's make the pie bigger instead of talking about how we divide the pie;
*we didn't create this world (Napster did) and things are never going back.

The major labels might be the bigger problem for individual artists on bad deals, but that topic has its own set of complexities that mostly don't have to do with streaming.

The Napster point is half right, in that streaming isn't what crashed the recorded-music business. If you haven't already spent some time pondering the details of this graph, you should:

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

(switch it from "Revenue" to "Revenue (Adusted for Inflation)", but keep in mind that this is all in retail terms, so it overweights physical sales (~55% cut) a lot, and downloads (~35% cut) a little, relative to streaming (~30% cut))

What this tells us is that the recorded-music business in 2013 was worth about a third of what it was worth in 1999, and after several years of regrowth is still only back to half its CD-peak size. And meanwhile the number of artists releasing globally-accessible music has grown enormously. So that's a pretty difficult combination, long before you get to talking about fairness.

Can streaming get the music business back to (or beyond) its CD peak? Maybe. I think it's not yet clear either way. But it does seem possible.

Meanwhile, the "per-stream rate" is a statistical artifact, calculated after the fact as an average. It's now how payments are determined, so demanding that it be changed just shows you don't understand the business. And even as a diagnostic metric, talking about rates instead of actual money is totally useless. Whether any per-stream number is enough obviously depends entirely on how many streams there are, both for evaluating artist livability and comparing services.

E.g., it's true that Tidal ends up with a higher average rate when you divide their royalty money by their streams, but that's because their only distinguishing feature (for now) is their $20/mo lossless option, which has a trivially small number of takers compared to all the competing $10/mo or ad-supported options. Similarly, Apple Music has no ad-supported plan, so their effective per-stream "rate", averaging over just their normal $10/mo plans and their family and bundle discounts, is higher than Spotify's averaged over premium/family/ad-supported, but Apple's number of users and number of streams and total money are all far lower. As prime UMAW contributor Damon Krukowski once pointed out, himself, Galaxie 500 gets more streams from Spotify in 2 days than they do from Apple Music in a month. He then ironically tries to turn this around and demand that Spotify pay the same "rate" as Apple. But Spotify and Apple already pay essentially the same actual rates, which are calcuated as ~70% of revenue, not per-stream. All the streaming services pay basically this same amount and method. The difference in per-stream averages is a result, not an independent variable.

Thus the real economic questions have very little to do with these rates, and yes, are more in the spirit of "how big is the pie?" Like: Are streaming services fairly priced? What would get more people to pay (or generate) money for music? Is streaming exposure fairly distributed? What does "fair" mean in the context of 8m+ artists, algorithmic recommendations, royalty-allocation methods, etc. How many artists can streaming support at a this-is-my-real-job level, and what determines which ones?

A+++ great post Glenn

I should say again, for people just joining us, that I work at Spotify, but am not in charge of any element of Spotify business policy. And while I do definitely defend Spotify, and streaming in general, as being a cultural good for music-listening and not obviously immoral as an overall business proposition, I think the whole streaming proposition is still at what we will look back on as an early state, and that neither Spotify nor the rest of the industry have good-enough answers to all of those hard questions yet.

And, in particular, the lack of transparency is not only one of the most obvious current weaknesses of the whole system, but arguably a material factor in all the other real and perceived issues.

I should say again, for people just joining us, that I work at Spotify, but am not in charge of any element of Spotify business policy.

You're just in charge of giving things silly genre names like "Escape Room".

Not just that, but yes.

It's now how payments are determined

did you mean "it's not" instead of "it's now"? not sure if im confused or if it's a typo

Yes, ugh. Proofreading failure! None of the main current streaming services set a per-stream rate, all of them actually pay by taking ~70% of revenue for a payment period and splitting it up according to stream-shares from that period. In Spotify's case (and I assume the others), this is actually done for each payment-option in each country, so the money from US full-price premium accounts is split up according to the stream-shares from just those account-holders for that period, same for the Canadian family-plan accounts, the Belgian ad-supported accounts, etc. So this is why the actual effective rates an individual artist sees will vary both across plans and countries and over time.

This is why it makes no sense to demand a change to the per-stream rate. It isn't a thing that is controlled directly. One can easily speculate that any given service's effective rate would probably go up if they raised their prices, but if, say, Apple Music unilaterally raised its rates from $10/mo to $20/mo, presumably many of its current subscribers would immediately cancel and switch to a $10/mo competitor. So it seems likely that the amount of money paid in royalties would actually go down even as the effective rate per-stream went up.

i appreciate you taking the time to discuss

Do you think the current pay-sharing system is sustainable from the artist side as the big companies try to get anywhere near 2000 numbers? It seems like 95% of current recording artists on your service don't see any meaningful direct financial benefit from being on there except that, as it's the dominant service, they either have to be on there or risk being ignored by audiences an industry alike? Is the argument that Spotify functions as "paid radio" and not as record "sales" at all? Or that it's most beneficial as a house for and long tail income stream for label catalogue?

Like: Are streaming services fairly priced?

I think the answer to this is "No", indisputably, for the artist. Compare it to a reasonable suite of streaming video services (Cable, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) and the price should, fairly, be substantially higher than it is ($30/mo would seem a minimum, to pick a number out of a hat). Whether a significant enough portion of users would continue the service, or whether Spotify itself (not streaming) would survive on reduced numbers are another question.

*continue the service at $30 or higher

I don't know how you can ask the question about fair pricing without also asking, how much profit does Spotify "deserve" to make? You might also ask, why is famously Swedish company Spotify legally registered in Luxembourg? And so on.

Spotify has never made a profit, iirc, so "deserve's got nothing to do with it."

For sure there are late-stage capitalism issues tied up in all of this.

you do not recall correctly

but yeah my larger point was that if we follow glenn in asking "the real economic questions" then they need to be broader than just consumer pricing and market forces