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Spotify is pulling select advertising privileges for white noise podcasts in a bid to boost the audio streaming company's annual profits
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/4/23858268/spotify-ambient-white-noise-podcasts-ad-revenue-crackdown
So Spotify wants to put obnoxious ads in the middle of my white noise quiet listening? No thanks. That kills the whole point of the experience.
Since you seem to be a listener, what's actually the purpose of these white noise podcasts?
They're just so many of them doing the same thing, couldn't you just install a white noise app and control the sound and shape it to your tastes instead of listening to a recording?
I see so many white noise / field sounds podcasts and albums that I would even encourage Spotify to crack down on them a bit. It mostly clutters the platform.
I use the 12 Hour Sound Machine podcast as my "white noise" app for sleep just about every night (though sometimes I have weird technical issues with it through Spotify). Personally, I find the episodes on the app have a better sound quality than white noise specific apps. That may sound odd given that it's literally just noise, but I prefer the lower frequency sounds of brown noise, fan sounds, etc, and it feels like free apps cut off the lower range of frequencies. I also like to stream to my Google Home speaker, which I can do easily via Spotify but not random third-party apps. The 12-Hour Sound Machine podcast in particular provides exactly what they promise: zero ads, fades, or loops during the 12 hours. Plus there's just a huge catalog of sounds beyond what I've found in any app.
It sounds like people are in need of a high quality local generator or at least a player with good samples—but not Spotify.
The only thing I don't understand about their action is why they waited so long—this use case appears antithetical to what they are, and it appears to con other clients and users.
Well, I should note that A) I pay for Spotify premium anyway, so Spotify is getting their money and I'm getting a product I want without having to buy an additional single-use device. B) The 12-Hour podcast technically does play an ad (or at least it did; not sure now with this update) but it's one ad at the very beginning of the podcast, so it doesn't interrupt my sleep.
This arrangement (with 12-Hour Sound Machine specifically) seems like a win for everyone involved. I get exactly what I want, Spotify gets my subscription, 12-Hour gets their ad revenue, and the company paying for the ad gets listeners on a "podcast" with 100 million listeners at the timestamp people are most likely to hear it. This situation probably doesn't apply to other white noise podcasts, but it seems like a solid arrangement in this case at least.
What about mynoise.net ?
Is there a difference between white noise podcasts and white noise songs/records?
As someone who does use background noise, I couldn't tell you. Rain sounds, sure. Fireplace, sure. White noise engages my brain. It distracts me. Maybe that's the point, but it feels super weird to me, i might as as well listen to metal with lyrics then where I subconsciously start to sing along.
Back in 2010, I used to use a site that let you mix various white noise types and environmental samples. You could create some really nice tracks, save the configuration and share them. I wonder what happened to it. You could even fade in and out samples. It would then play forever locally.
Isn’t it the opposite? They’re removing “white noise podcasts” from their program where Spotify will pay you to have an ad read inside the podcast.
Seems fair to me. It’s not exactly a podcast to begin with. I doubt Spotify was getting good ROI paying these “podcasts” to read an ad.
Notably, it also costs more to stream white noise than audio with actual content. Compression algorithms and random noise are basically opposite concepts, so there is little to no compression down from a raw WAV. Which means people are streaming a large amount of data for hours on end.
There's an additional issue with noise albums (as opposed to podcasts): they reduce royalty payouts to artists, so musicians and labels would like to see them removed. The majority of revenue from users (subscriptions plus ad money) is essentially put into a big pot and divided amongst artists based on their proportional share of plays. Noise tracks are essentially a con on this system, racking up hours and hours of repeat plays for something that's essentially a random number generator piped to a speaker. They get a disproportionate amount of plays, so they get a payout for little effort and recording artists get less.
I can take a synth like Vital, turn on the noise generator, maybe add a low-pass filter to soften it, and hold down a key for the same effect. Set that MIDI note to a few minutes and you have a white noise track made in less time than it would take to listen to it.
Coming from someone that has no skin in this game (no music streaming service subscription, don't listen to white noise tracks) I think you have a bit of a weird take here. You seem to be suggesting that the amount of effort put into a track should be more of a deciding factor on the amount of money it is worth than the number of time units that are played.
While I would like to see that be part of the equation, it isn't like effort inherently translates to value anywhere else in the free market. Starbucks makes more than my local coffee shop even though Starbucks has drink making distilled down to a couple of button presses. People want white noise, apparently. It just so happens that white noise is comparatively easy to make.
I was primarily stating a handful of facts that lead to peoples' opinions on the matter, and the actions Spotify is taking, not entirely forming an opinion. (Though if pressed, I'd simply say that it's up to Spotify, whether they want to deal in them or not, but that there will be implications in terms of how musicians are compensated.) The podcasts are actually part of a separate incentive than music licensing...but it's likely that further action will be taken at the behest of record labels and independent distributors, due to the other concerns.
The white noise demand is artificial. The situation is more like if DoorDash took a single monthly payment and divided it among every restaurant its subscribers ordered from every month. Then Starbucks set up a service that let you automatically order coffee six times an hour, with most of it going straight to the trash, so you'd have hot coffee on the off chance that you want it at a given time. The net result is a hilarious amount of waste and a compensation scheme being gamed against its intended purpose.
Additionally, music licensing is not about demand or markets. It's a complicated beast that is primarily legal, based on labels' agreements and actual law requiring certain levels of compensation for the distribution of recorded music. If major industry players find that the overall compensation drops below a certain minimum standard (which is legal, set by judges in the US Copyright Royalty Board, I believe) then the terms may be renegotiated and it will be a Very Big Deal.
I could easily see requirements that streams contain "melodic content" to be on the platforms, or a court ruling that white noise is ineligible for royalties or copyright protection. (And there are plenty of good arguments for why it's not under existing legal tests for copyright.) Or maybe indie musicians will get screwed more than they already are in some way.
In reality, no. I understand you there. But despite this being an issue for years, it's interesting that this is coming up in an age where people are rebelling and striking against the age of AI, which is peak "low effort for big money". So it's an interesting angle to consider.
But in reality, I think it comes down to 1) not wanting to upset record labels and 2) that as explained above, white noise is ironically more expensive for Spotify to stream out than a normal song. Apparently to the point where it's not worth current efforts without price hiking (and ofc, there's the obvious ad issue).
As someone who could not be further from art if they tried, I very much feel that if I spend 2x as much time coding something up, I want to be paid 2x as much. So it sounds like a solid logic to me.
The problem with that idea is that if you then turn it into an incentive structure, people will spend more time for the sake of spending more time, rather than making the best thing they can for the sake of making the best thing they can.
It’s sort of a question about whether you want to incentivise quality over quantity. Would you prefer your favourite band to work on an album for two years and release an amazingly polished masterpiece, or would you prefer they hop in the recording booth every weekend and just release whatever they were jamming, with no quality control or mastering?
(Note: in no part of my comment do I mean “you” to literally mean yourself, I’m talking in generalisations which apply more broadly)
Of course, but any key metric can be gamed this way.
For example, if I am paid by the hour, I am incentivised to spend time, not actually produce output. If a band is paid by the album they put out (they are) then they are incentivised to release as many albums as they can do (they are). If a book author, let's call him Sandon Branderson in this example, is paid with each book sale and new books sell better, then he might be incentivised to release as many books as he can viably manage to write.
And so on. If you reward time spent, time spent will be optimized. If you reward output, output will be optimized. If you reward individual piece quality, that quality will be optimized (although how to measure this in the case of music or, worse, white noise, is another topic altogether). And only that. You need a mixed incentive structure for it to work, and keep in mind that what I describe above basically has that: While I said I want to be paid 2x as much, I still need to produce the output at all to be paid in the first place. And it needs to be accepted as the solution.
I'm with you that it wouldn't make sense to distinguish between them that way. If there's an argument to be made that white noise can't be copyrighted, or a specific arrangement of white noise can't be copyrighted, then maybe you can draw on that to distinguish between recording artists and white noise. I don't know, but I would suspect that specific arrangements of white noise could be copyrighted.
An ad read by the same person who controls the rest of the audio mix will blend in much better. The reading can be done in a calm voice, at a similar volume, etc. There's no guarantee with some random ad.
Exactly this.
It's probably because the engagement and hence the money poured into it by advertisers is lower, so they are cutting it out as that increases the profitibility of the actual ads on the actual podcasts.
Reading the article it sounds like this is just one type of optional ad they no longer have access to?
I could be completely mistaken but it sounds like receiving any ads would still be up to the creator of the podcast to enable or not if they want to make revenue off of it. I'm not sure how/if that splits between paid or free spotify users but overall I can fully understand wanting to limit paying out any additional ad revenue to low effort content that is unlikely to have any active listeners hearing the sponsor reads.
Question. Why use Spotify for this anyway? Why not download white noise or at least use YouTube?
It can be nice to have a different service provide different experiences. My YouTube recommended music is different from my Pandora is different from my Spotify. They can be bad about offering you stuff well outside the genre they've pigeonholed you into, so having separate accounts gets me different experiences.
Right, but I'm talking about white noise. Unless I'm mistaken, and as nice as it is, it's not quite a genre of music and more a sort of commodity. Why pay for a subscription just for it?
Does the algorithm know that? Can the algorithms distinguish between songs I listen to that’s melodic versus “songs” I listen to that are white noise?
I’ve recently been using the DJ feature on Spotify and it definitely hasn’t recognised that there’s one playlist that I never listen to unless I’m at work, but it still tries to play me songs from that playlist every so often.
I think there’s value in silo-ing different things into different places, especially where so many services are pushing algorithms and try to be the one-stop-shop for everything in one place.
Absolutely. That's what YouTube Content ID does, and how it tags covers and remixes: it's able to detect melodic content and match it to fingerprints of those elements. It'll happily pick out samples in the middle of a song, even if there are other instruments playing over it.
Melodyne is also an ubiquitous tool in music production: it detects the pitches and timing of someone singing and quantizes it into a format that can be expressed on a MIDI-style piano roll, then letting the operator adjust the pitch and time of the recording to correct errors.
Chord detection (polyphony/harmony) is also something software can do now, which is significantly more difficult.
Noise, by definition has no melody or harmony. White noise, especially, is a random signal with equal intensity across the frequency spectrum.
If Spotify wanted to catch and remove white noise, they could surely write something to do that. Or they could just look for the most horribly compressed files they're hosting, since noise doesn't compress well...
Seems completely reasonable to me. I don’t see why low effort generated background noise should be paid the same as actual music people are actively listening to.
I’d rather not see streaming platforms sink to the level of just spamming the lowest effort audio files.
Spotify pays a pittance to artists and spends their profits on AI warfare technology. I have zero sympathy for that company.
What profits? They have never turned a profit from what I can see
It's a nonsense meme that won't die. Streaming royalties, like radio royalties, are federally regulated and Spotify likely pays significantly over the required amount due to their revenue sharing model (basically a percentage of subscriptions and ad money is distributed evenly based on play counts). The vast majority of recording artists have never made shit on recordings, whether in radio plays or record sales.
Also, Spotify doesn't pay artists. They pay music distributors (usually record labels, unless you're an indie using a service like DistroKid). Labels pay artists, and it's usually pennies on the dollar from what they take in. Minus the advance they probably got; smaller artists now often get a single, small payout and never see a cent in royalties. Just like the golden age of record labels, where they paid early rock musicians $50 to record a song and got exclusive rights.
Exactly this.
I don't know about other countries but here in Germany if people want to be angry at someone "eating up" the artist's money, they ought to take it up with the GEMA. They are supposed to represent the music industry, collect fees for streaming/playing/performing/etc then pay out to artists, and yet over the decades they've created a fun machine of taking more from those who cannot fight back legally and paying out as little as possible so they can buy more cocaine and hookers for themselves.
The "rights associations" are the real cockroaches in the music industry, tbh. They're a decent idea, but their current iteration needs to be dismantled completely.
I never trusted Spotify and thus never jumped on the streaming music bandwagon and just kept building my real library as I had for ~10 years prior. To me, the whole business model never sounded viable without degrading the service, screwing over artists, or both.
Their ongoing enshittification has me feeling vindicated after people made fun of me for continuing to buy whole albums instead of using the subscription.
This is about playing less ads though. It makes the service better for us customers.
(sorry it doesn't fit your narrative)
This is about Spotify using it's advertising program to discourage content that might be less profitable for them than other content. That totally falls under "degrading the service" since it means it will be harder for certain content people like to thrive there.
I find that argument a bit weird though. Content naturally is promoted differently, that's entirely normal. It also varies in length, which in syndicated play means it naturally has more or less space for ads. The specific content here also actively suffers from having ads placed in it, meaning as a listener you would not want it, nevermind whether the creator agrees with inserted ads or not.
Plus, I'll be honest: Content creation is also a business. This improves things for me as the consumer. If I were a creator I'd think differently maybe. Sure. But I would also argue as a consumer that if you call yourself a content creator for creating white noise streams, then you really got to step down from the staircase and find an actual job. It's white noise! all the creator did is record 3 hours from any of a myriad of free sites with generators. Or even just tell their phone - either OS! - to generator noise and record that. There's no effort to be worth advertising income at play here, the actual creators don't get the income anyways.
My wife recently discovered that iOS has built in noise. Add the "hearing" control to control center and access it from there. There are a few different types of noise options available.
It’s also on MacOS if you have a Mac, though it’s not as quickly accessible.
Doesn’t keeping her phone playing that noise overnight kill most of its battery?
She generally uses her phone for noise if she's taking a nap, but was using a youtube video for white noise up until this new discovery. I can't imagine the built-in noise would use any more than what youtube would use, though. For bedtime, she uses a box fan. If she needed her phone on overnight, I imagine she'd just plug it in and let it charge overnight.
I occasionally use white noise, but I'm generally a heavy sleeper so really don't need something that will help me sleep even deeper. I already sleep through loud storms without any supplemental noise.
Huh, I would think it'd be more profitable. It's the perfect time for subliminal messages, the ads just need to be quiet enough not to be noticed or wake people up. Imagine your listening to jungle sounds and someone starts whispering about the deal they got on their McDonalds burger. >:)
Anyway, not a huge loss to me if it ends up reducing the white noise content. I'd rather find the actual sound files and use those rather than stream it and end up waking up any time there's a hickup on my connection or spotify decides to do something like suddenly starts playing mariachi band music out of nowhere.
If you're a white noise listener, you should take an ear to https://mynoise.net/