I listened to one of the playlists, Bossa Nova Dinner. Non-offensive is certainly the key word here. It mostly feels like ambiance tracks from an A-list film if that makes sense. Some of the...
I listened to one of the playlists, Bossa Nova Dinner. Non-offensive is certainly the key word here. It mostly feels like ambiance tracks from an A-list film if that makes sense. Some of the tracks were nicer than others, but they're largely interchangeable.
Some key quotes from the article:
PFC eventually began to be handled by a small team called Strategic Programming, or StraP for short, which in 2023 had ten members. Though Spotify denies that it is trying to increase PFC’s streamshare, internal Slack messages show members of the StraP team analyzing quarter-by-quarter growth and discussing how to increase the number of PFC streams.
This just sounds like a normal big business environment to me. Every individual team is generally trying to grow their margins and influence. That's how you get promoted and prove business impact.
This wasn’t a scam artist with a master plan to steal prime playlist real estate. He was just someone who, like other working musicians today, was trying to cobble together a living. “There are so many things in music that you treat as grunt work,” he said. “This kind of felt like the same category as wedding gigs or corporate gigs. It’s made very explicit on Spotify that these are background playlists, so it didn’t necessarily strike me as any different from that. . . . You’re just a piece of the furniture.”
The jazz musician asked me not to identify the name of the company he worked for; he didn’t want to risk losing the gig.
For the artists, it's another gig. My understanding is passionate artists are a dime a dozen, and the value of their work is whatever people are willing to pay. The volume of music produced by humanity is absolutely massive, and they're also competing with all that.
“You are then to compose however many tracks you and Epidemic agree on, drawing ‘inspiration’ from said playlist,” he told me. “Ninety-eight percent of the time, these playlists had very little to do with my own artistic vision and vibe but, rather, focused on what Epidemic felt its subscribers were after. So essentially, I was composing bespoke music. This annoyed the fuck out of me.”
But at the end of the day, he said, it was still a paycheck: “I did it because I needed a job real bad and the money was better than any money I could make from even successful indie labels, many of which I worked with,” he told me. “Honestly, I had no idea which tracks I made would end up doing well. . . . Every track I made for Epidemic was based on their curated playlist.”
Artists want to feel like artists and producers want more produced. Listeners aren't that picky as the algorithms show. Good luck convincing people to go back to paying more for individual tracks. I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay more to make my background Bossa Nova Dinner playlist a little more impactful when it's just supposed to be background.
I understand the point is that artists want to be paid for being artists. It's hard to see how that plays out here though. Spotify is still an improvement over piracy, and listeners don't seem to be complaining about the Muzak. If it was a problem, they could pick another playlist.
Edit: I personally listen to more stuff like Denpa Kei (電波系) which is niche enough that I highly doubt Spotify is creating mass music to reduce their costs. When I listen to jazz, it's usually directly from an artist page like The Consouls or a playlist I've made. I guess I'm not the target audience?
I'm not so confident that Spotify is an improvement over piracy. I pirate some media so I can sample lots of different artists for a reasonable price, but I feel guilty. So I'm much more liable to...
I'm not so confident that Spotify is an improvement over piracy. I pirate some media so I can sample lots of different artists for a reasonable price, but I feel guilty. So I'm much more liable to attend concerts, and buy merch, and I buy vinyl to maintain a physical library of my very favourite artists. For some artists, I even buy digital downloads on Bandcamp, though I prefer buying vinyl.
I do the same for books -- most, I pirate. Those that I love and respect, I buy physical copies of, so I can read a physical version next time. Some prolific authors that I love, I buy physical DRM-free ebooks from, if possible. But DRM-free ebooks are quite rare.
Personally, I think it's a fair way to compensate my favorite artists. They get a few hundred dollars from me. I get memories (from concerts) and physical keepsakes (vinyl or merch) while giving them a hopefully-healthy profit margin. And most importantly, I don't kid myself into thinking I'm contributing anything to them by paying for a streaming middleman service. Remember: even if you're a devout fan who listens to a ten thousand tracks by a single artist in a year (an unlikely proposition, based on my last.fm stats from the last decade), you're only paying that artist... $30 (based on the $0.03 rate). Literally attending one concert or buying one vinyl beats that. And trust me, you're not listening to your fav artist 10k times in a year -- more like 1-2k, even if you're an obsessed 16 year old with lots of free time listening constantly! At $3-6 a year, you're better off attending one concert for your favorite artist every decade.
You may feel guilty and contribute, but I don't think that's typical for piracy. I frequently pirate anime because streaming quality is so much worse, and I also buy merch which I know is where...
You may feel guilty and contribute, but I don't think that's typical for piracy. I frequently pirate anime because streaming quality is so much worse, and I also buy merch which I know is where the real money is. I'd be surprised if we're the norm.
Media like vinyl is a strangely resurgent revenue stream, but streaming is a huge cash cow as the article points out. I think artists would make less money if we went back to Napster.
I do contribute to things like artist Patreons with exclusive concerts for one band. I wouldn't do that for every artist I like one track from though.
@dynamosunshirt on a micro level, no, but if we're talking the ol' "piracy is a service problem", and that "spotify won by being convinient". Then we can easily conclude that those taking the...
You may feel guilty and contribute, but I don't think that's typical for piracy.
on a micro level, no, but if we're talking the ol' "piracy is a service problem", and that "spotify won by being convinient". Then we can easily conclude that those taking the effort to pirate are statistically putting more effort and awareness into what they are listening to. Awareness of the industry, or a specific kind of genre or artist, and then taking that inconvinient time to find a proper site and search for that specific kind of song.
Nearly objectively speaking, pirates are less likely to be passive listeners if they are taking those steps to begin with (even if the steps aren't "hard". But we gotta realize how few people ever leave the bastions of the top 20 websites to begin with). Therefore, more likely to partipate in buying merch, concerts, participate in social media for that artist, etc.
It's probably not even anything close to a majority, but 1% these days is pretty big engagement when thinking on the scale of tens of millions of potential listeners. Companies would pay billions if they could guarantee 1% engagement artificially.
sadly enough, people don't wanna pay for media anymore. Tangent, but that's why I cynically believe that AI will more or less win the current "war" we're in. People gotta put their money where...
nd the value of their work is whatever people are willing to pay... Listeners aren't that picky as the algorithms show. Good luck convincing people to go back to paying more for individual tracks.
sadly enough, people don't wanna pay for media anymore. Tangent, but that's why I cynically believe that AI will more or less win the current "war" we're in. People gotta put their money where their mouths are, and if coporate can instead just target the casual consumers who just see/hear "good enough", then we see the endgame right there
I'm not saying any subjects in this article are using AI, just expanding on this mentality. This merely feels like a stopgap until they can take out the middleman for this bespoke music. The pipeline described here is simply the blueprints on how they will start to automate this process. Producers producing for passive listeners without a need for a pesky artist, arguably by stealing centuries of media and condensing it through its own algorithm.
EDIT: just an observation from reading the rest of the article:
They called it payola in the 1950s. The public learned that radio deejays picked songs for airplay based on cash kickbacks, not musical merit.
Music fans got angry and demanded action. In 1959, both the US Senate and House launched investigations. Famous deejay Alan Freed got fired from WABC after refusing to sign a statement claiming that he had never taken bribes.
I forget how big a deal Payola was. It's so funny how we have access to more information than ever and can find muckracking in real time, but from that we turned more passive than ever whenever we see these trends repeat.
At least in my mind, Spotify's ambiance playlists containing, essentially, royalty free music seems like less of a problem when I can still create my own playlists and give my listens to whoever I...
At least in my mind, Spotify's ambiance playlists containing, essentially, royalty free music seems like less of a problem when I can still create my own playlists and give my listens to whoever I want. The ambiance playlist algorithms may not contain recognizable tracks, but all of the core features to let me pick my own music work just as well as they did 6 years ago which keeps me using Spotify. Payola, with the practical oligopoly radio stations had, feels different to me.
I guess that's the part of the issue (I'll skip my rant on government functionality today vs. 80 years ago). We're tamed by choice and convinience even when borderline illegal stuff arises. Radio...
seems like less of a problem when I can still create my own playlists and give my listens to whoever I want.
I guess that's the part of the issue (I'll skip my rant on government functionality today vs. 80 years ago). We're tamed by choice and convinience even when borderline illegal stuff arises. Radio was your only "convinient way" to listen to music if you weren't investing in a record player and vinyls.
The second underlying issue here is how we think of "platforms". a radio station took a bit of effort and regulation to maintain, since the government "owned" (well, not quite. But I don't know the proper term) the radio waves and provided a range for public use. I could theoretically spin up a "platform" tomorrow by making a website and uploading music to listen to. that distinction moved a lot of liability off of companies since "it's just a private server from a private company. Use it or don't".
I understand your perspective, but I think a part of my cynicism comes from the historical network effects of platforms and how common it is to quickly turn that into monopoly effects without calling it a monopoly. Because "it's just an app". As apps become more and more of a cornerstone of society, that old assossiation of "quick thing to play with on the toilet" needs to subside.
These software platforms should be monitored and observered just as much as we would do to any brick and mortar setup which can also be argued as "private companies", from groceries to steel mills. It being digital only means its reach and effects on society are multiplied, not mitigated.
I share your skepticism for platforms developing monopoly power which they can abuse. Spotify though is in a competitive space with a lot of alternatives, and arguably the big record labels (70%...
I share your skepticism for platforms developing monopoly power which they can abuse. Spotify though is in a competitive space with a lot of alternatives, and arguably the big record labels (70% of the market per the article) are the real problem. While I'm not thrilled about the direction of companies paying for algorithmic recommendations (effectively ads), people like me can fairly easily go to an alternative platform or avoid using the algorithmic features.
It feels different from radio where government licensed stations had to follow strict rules and listeners had minimal alternative options. I'm not sure K-pop would've ever taken off via traditional radio for example.
Given the tends I see over the years, "easily" isn't enough for the common person. We could have easily moved off Facebook, reddit, Twitter, and Instagram as well. But instead 2 of those raised a...
people like me can fairly easily go to an alternative platform or avoid using the algorithmic features.
Given the tends I see over the years, "easily" isn't enough for the common person. We could have easily moved off Facebook, reddit, Twitter, and Instagram as well. But instead 2 of those raised a trillion dollar empire, one of them burned all the community goodwill it was founded on to go public, and one is owned by the richest man in the world who decided that rebranding the biggest website in the world was a good call.
People really won't move unless the site itself implodes. And these days companies don't care about imploding as long as they get their billions and jump off the ship in time.
m not sure K-pop would've ever taken off via traditional radio for example.
We're more connected than ever and we didn't need streaming to do That. As long as some form of social media was alive thst fame could spread.
Unsurprising; this is essentially Spotify's equivalent to Amazon Basics. A stronger FTC would have already come out with legislation to control companies that seek to own both the marketplace and...
Unsurprising; this is essentially Spotify's equivalent to Amazon Basics. A stronger FTC would have already come out with legislation to control companies that seek to own both the marketplace and its products. To some extent or another this type of push is happening in every industry it can be applied to because the draw for the would-be monopolists is immense - they want to give their own products pride of place.
I don't think Spotify is trying to replace big ticket artists. I think they're just trying to reduce their costs for the silence-killer background playlists that presumably account for huge...
I don't think Spotify is trying to replace big ticket artists. I think they're just trying to reduce their costs for the silence-killer background playlists that presumably account for huge amounts of streaming hours.
Keeping with the Amazon example, it's a bit more like Amazon's delivery and logistics network than Amazon basics. They're trying to bring down intermediary costs. If Spotify started their own major record label, that might be a bit more like Amazon basics?
They are replacing artists, though. You state correctly that it's a huge number of hours involved, but it's not as though silence-killer playlists were drawn from the ether prior to this; they...
They are replacing artists, though. You state correctly that it's a huge number of hours involved, but it's not as though silence-killer playlists were drawn from the ether prior to this; they were all artists, large and small. The money that would have gone to (admittedly not mindfully-selected) artists now goes directly to Spotify; big-ticket or not, artists are being replaced here.
From the perspective of marketplace control, Amazon owns Amazon, and also has product offerings on their own marketplace. They create base-quality products for very low cost and ensure that those products receive good placement on the marketplace rankings (that, again, they control) so that they can make more money per sale than the standard seller fee. They are likewise not replacing big-ticket offerings (i.e. quality name-brand products), they are replacing the tranche of products where the consumer merely has a space to fill and doesn't care what goes in it.
As with Spotify, Amazon has a distinct advantage because it can monitor demand real-time and select only products it knows will be a net benefit; it copies products and ranks them ahead of the stuff it's knocking off. Being in control of both the marketplace and the products gives them an advantage that is best described as anti-competitive, which is the point when government should intercede with antitrust laws.
Also, given that Spotify is commissioning and curating this music, I don't see how this is functionally distinct from them starting a record label.
This seems like a great time to point out that Pandora is still alive and pretty unchanged from 24 years ago, for better or for worse. I personally use it far more than I use Spotify for genre and...
This seems like a great time to point out that Pandora is still alive and pretty unchanged from 24 years ago, for better or for worse. I personally use it far more than I use Spotify for genre and "idle" listening tasks. I have personally relegated Spotify for listening to large playlists on shuffle, or checking out new music that I can't listen to on other platforms (like Bandcamp). I know this doesn't help anyone who is using Spotify Premium in lieu of a personal music collection, though. I personally use Plexamp and still rip CDs from time to time, but I don't know if that's a remnant of my upbringing before Spotify existed, or if I just love the act of curating my collection more.
Spotify just seems like trash to me from a user perspective.
It looks like this is largely based on another article (The Ghosts in the Machine).
I listened to one of the playlists, Bossa Nova Dinner. Non-offensive is certainly the key word here. It mostly feels like ambiance tracks from an A-list film if that makes sense. Some of the tracks were nicer than others, but they're largely interchangeable.
Some key quotes from the article:
This just sounds like a normal big business environment to me. Every individual team is generally trying to grow their margins and influence. That's how you get promoted and prove business impact.
For the artists, it's another gig. My understanding is passionate artists are a dime a dozen, and the value of their work is whatever people are willing to pay. The volume of music produced by humanity is absolutely massive, and they're also competing with all that.
Artists want to feel like artists and producers want more produced. Listeners aren't that picky as the algorithms show. Good luck convincing people to go back to paying more for individual tracks. I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay more to make my background Bossa Nova Dinner playlist a little more impactful when it's just supposed to be background.
I understand the point is that artists want to be paid for being artists. It's hard to see how that plays out here though. Spotify is still an improvement over piracy, and listeners don't seem to be complaining about the Muzak. If it was a problem, they could pick another playlist.
Edit: I personally listen to more stuff like Denpa Kei (電波系) which is niche enough that I highly doubt Spotify is creating mass music to reduce their costs. When I listen to jazz, it's usually directly from an artist page like The Consouls or a playlist I've made. I guess I'm not the target audience?
I'm not so confident that Spotify is an improvement over piracy. I pirate some media so I can sample lots of different artists for a reasonable price, but I feel guilty. So I'm much more liable to attend concerts, and buy merch, and I buy vinyl to maintain a physical library of my very favourite artists. For some artists, I even buy digital downloads on Bandcamp, though I prefer buying vinyl.
I do the same for books -- most, I pirate. Those that I love and respect, I buy physical copies of, so I can read a physical version next time. Some prolific authors that I love, I buy physical DRM-free ebooks from, if possible. But DRM-free ebooks are quite rare.
Personally, I think it's a fair way to compensate my favorite artists. They get a few hundred dollars from me. I get memories (from concerts) and physical keepsakes (vinyl or merch) while giving them a hopefully-healthy profit margin. And most importantly, I don't kid myself into thinking I'm contributing anything to them by paying for a streaming middleman service. Remember: even if you're a devout fan who listens to a ten thousand tracks by a single artist in a year (an unlikely proposition, based on my last.fm stats from the last decade), you're only paying that artist... $30 (based on the $0.03 rate). Literally attending one concert or buying one vinyl beats that. And trust me, you're not listening to your fav artist 10k times in a year -- more like 1-2k, even if you're an obsessed 16 year old with lots of free time listening constantly! At $3-6 a year, you're better off attending one concert for your favorite artist every decade.
You may feel guilty and contribute, but I don't think that's typical for piracy. I frequently pirate anime because streaming quality is so much worse, and I also buy merch which I know is where the real money is. I'd be surprised if we're the norm.
Media like vinyl is a strangely resurgent revenue stream, but streaming is a huge cash cow as the article points out. I think artists would make less money if we went back to Napster.
I do contribute to things like artist Patreons with exclusive concerts for one band. I wouldn't do that for every artist I like one track from though.
@dynamosunshirt
on a micro level, no, but if we're talking the ol' "piracy is a service problem", and that "spotify won by being convinient". Then we can easily conclude that those taking the effort to pirate are statistically putting more effort and awareness into what they are listening to. Awareness of the industry, or a specific kind of genre or artist, and then taking that inconvinient time to find a proper site and search for that specific kind of song.
Nearly objectively speaking, pirates are less likely to be passive listeners if they are taking those steps to begin with (even if the steps aren't "hard". But we gotta realize how few people ever leave the bastions of the top 20 websites to begin with). Therefore, more likely to partipate in buying merch, concerts, participate in social media for that artist, etc.
It's probably not even anything close to a majority, but 1% these days is pretty big engagement when thinking on the scale of tens of millions of potential listeners. Companies would pay billions if they could guarantee 1% engagement artificially.
sadly enough, people don't wanna pay for media anymore. Tangent, but that's why I cynically believe that AI will more or less win the current "war" we're in. People gotta put their money where their mouths are, and if coporate can instead just target the casual consumers who just see/hear "good enough", then we see the endgame right there
I'm not saying any subjects in this article are using AI, just expanding on this mentality. This merely feels like a stopgap until they can take out the middleman for this bespoke music. The pipeline described here is simply the blueprints on how they will start to automate this process. Producers producing for passive listeners without a need for a pesky artist, arguably by stealing centuries of media and condensing it through its own algorithm.
EDIT: just an observation from reading the rest of the article:
I forget how big a deal Payola was. It's so funny how we have access to more information than ever and can find muckracking in real time, but from that we turned more passive than ever whenever we see these trends repeat.
At least in my mind, Spotify's ambiance playlists containing, essentially, royalty free music seems like less of a problem when I can still create my own playlists and give my listens to whoever I want. The ambiance playlist algorithms may not contain recognizable tracks, but all of the core features to let me pick my own music work just as well as they did 6 years ago which keeps me using Spotify. Payola, with the practical oligopoly radio stations had, feels different to me.
I guess that's the part of the issue (I'll skip my rant on government functionality today vs. 80 years ago). We're tamed by choice and convinience even when borderline illegal stuff arises. Radio was your only "convinient way" to listen to music if you weren't investing in a record player and vinyls.
The second underlying issue here is how we think of "platforms". a radio station took a bit of effort and regulation to maintain, since the government "owned" (well, not quite. But I don't know the proper term) the radio waves and provided a range for public use. I could theoretically spin up a "platform" tomorrow by making a website and uploading music to listen to. that distinction moved a lot of liability off of companies since "it's just a private server from a private company. Use it or don't".
I understand your perspective, but I think a part of my cynicism comes from the historical network effects of platforms and how common it is to quickly turn that into monopoly effects without calling it a monopoly. Because "it's just an app". As apps become more and more of a cornerstone of society, that old assossiation of "quick thing to play with on the toilet" needs to subside.
These software platforms should be monitored and observered just as much as we would do to any brick and mortar setup which can also be argued as "private companies", from groceries to steel mills. It being digital only means its reach and effects on society are multiplied, not mitigated.
I share your skepticism for platforms developing monopoly power which they can abuse. Spotify though is in a competitive space with a lot of alternatives, and arguably the big record labels (70% of the market per the article) are the real problem. While I'm not thrilled about the direction of companies paying for algorithmic recommendations (effectively ads), people like me can fairly easily go to an alternative platform or avoid using the algorithmic features.
It feels different from radio where government licensed stations had to follow strict rules and listeners had minimal alternative options. I'm not sure K-pop would've ever taken off via traditional radio for example.
Given the tends I see over the years, "easily" isn't enough for the common person. We could have easily moved off Facebook, reddit, Twitter, and Instagram as well. But instead 2 of those raised a trillion dollar empire, one of them burned all the community goodwill it was founded on to go public, and one is owned by the richest man in the world who decided that rebranding the biggest website in the world was a good call.
People really won't move unless the site itself implodes. And these days companies don't care about imploding as long as they get their billions and jump off the ship in time.
We're more connected than ever and we didn't need streaming to do That. As long as some form of social media was alive thst fame could spread.
Unsurprising; this is essentially Spotify's equivalent to Amazon Basics. A stronger FTC would have already come out with legislation to control companies that seek to own both the marketplace and its products. To some extent or another this type of push is happening in every industry it can be applied to because the draw for the would-be monopolists is immense - they want to give their own products pride of place.
I don't think Spotify is trying to replace big ticket artists. I think they're just trying to reduce their costs for the silence-killer background playlists that presumably account for huge amounts of streaming hours.
Keeping with the Amazon example, it's a bit more like Amazon's delivery and logistics network than Amazon basics. They're trying to bring down intermediary costs. If Spotify started their own major record label, that might be a bit more like Amazon basics?
They are replacing artists, though. You state correctly that it's a huge number of hours involved, but it's not as though silence-killer playlists were drawn from the ether prior to this; they were all artists, large and small. The money that would have gone to (admittedly not mindfully-selected) artists now goes directly to Spotify; big-ticket or not, artists are being replaced here.
From the perspective of marketplace control, Amazon owns Amazon, and also has product offerings on their own marketplace. They create base-quality products for very low cost and ensure that those products receive good placement on the marketplace rankings (that, again, they control) so that they can make more money per sale than the standard seller fee. They are likewise not replacing big-ticket offerings (i.e. quality name-brand products), they are replacing the tranche of products where the consumer merely has a space to fill and doesn't care what goes in it.
As with Spotify, Amazon has a distinct advantage because it can monitor demand real-time and select only products it knows will be a net benefit; it copies products and ranks them ahead of the stuff it's knocking off. Being in control of both the marketplace and the products gives them an advantage that is best described as anti-competitive, which is the point when government should intercede with antitrust laws.
Also, given that Spotify is commissioning and curating this music, I don't see how this is functionally distinct from them starting a record label.
This seems like a great time to point out that Pandora is still alive and pretty unchanged from 24 years ago, for better or for worse. I personally use it far more than I use Spotify for genre and "idle" listening tasks. I have personally relegated Spotify for listening to large playlists on shuffle, or checking out new music that I can't listen to on other platforms (like Bandcamp). I know this doesn't help anyone who is using Spotify Premium in lieu of a personal music collection, though. I personally use Plexamp and still rip CDs from time to time, but I don't know if that's a remnant of my upbringing before Spotify existed, or if I just love the act of curating my collection more.
Spotify just seems like trash to me from a user perspective.