Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Krukowski’s podcast “Ways Of Hearing” about sound and music was really good and I suspect he made far more from it than he’s ever made from Spotify

Laws are useful. For example, the songwriting portion of royalties is controlled by laws, so it can't be changed (and wouldn't be in this proposal). If the recording portion of royalties were set by law, the same way, they couldn't be changed like this either. Or maybe laws could even streamline the whole insane system by which recording, mechanical and publishing royalties are all now paid and managed separately. Tower Records didn't have to pay three different ways for every CD they sold...

FWIW, the "rate" Damon describes as a "MAX" is an average, and the user-centric model he advocates would have the exact opposite effect from what he claims. Also: if you spend your time relentlessly tell your audience that Spotify is evil, it maybe shouldn't be shocking that your streaming numbers are low.

what are you saying glenn? it's not spotify's fault, it's the lack of laws that is forcing them to screw over the artists?

For years I’ve been saying that Spotify’s streaming model would work if they adopted a tiered payout system, but one that is the opposite of that they have adopted— smaller artists get paid more per-stream, bigger artists get paid less. I’d say it’s unsurprising that they’ve done the opposite, but I still find myself surprised at the brazenness of it all

Pretty hard to make professional sports owners look like altruistic saints in comparison but somehow they've done it

Also: if you spend your time relentlessly tell your audience that Spotify is evil, it maybe shouldn't be shocking that your streaming numbers are low.

I don't think that's the point, and I don't think people like Krukowski are upset about their streaming numbers as much as the payouts those numbers represent. Which, as of January, will be zero for the majority of working artists.

this point comes up constantly ott without being addressed in any seriousness by the one man PR team

I'm sorry i know I'm not supposed to say things like that about people's friends but the constant dissembling and derailing on this particular point is very hard to ignore

Something else that comes up constantly is that Spotify negotiates with the labels, not those labels’ artists. The labels choose how the pot of money gets divvied up. Something I’ve never understood though is how self-funded and boutique labels work in this system. If you run your own label, and that label has one artist: your band, how do payments work?

It is not my job, nor hobby, to make or defend Spotify business policy, but I've been on ILM for longer than I've worked at Spotify, and I've worked at Spotify for almost 10 years, so I do at least have useful information sometimes. "Spotify should pay artists more" is not in itself a substantive assertion. Prices and royalty rates are all negotiated. If you want to make a serious proposal for how they could change, you'd have to understand whose power controls how they currently get decided, and have ideas about how to change that power-structure.

My point above was that laws are a way to change the structure. This is particularly relevant to Damon's op-ed because a) he has been advocating for legal regulation of streaming (although he doesn't mention it in this piece, perhaps because it would clash with his complaints in it about laws preventing his "Union" from being a union), and b) the existing laws about publishing royalties prevented them from being affected by this proposal (which he misrepresents in the piece by claiming Spotify "will stop paying anything at all", his italics, which is literally wrong).

To answer the question about labels, the business deals are actually done between distributors and streaming services. In the case of the major labels, they're both label-groups and distributors, so they deal individually. Indie labels are represented by collectives like Merlin.

(I've also been on ILM long enough to know that there's a limit to how seriously any complicated question can be addressed in this format, but if you want to read me taking on the broad topic of fears about streaming at the scale of about half of a book, hang on until June...)

What I want to know is why my Wrapped (which my daughter made me check out) included songs in my top played list that I have never intentionally played, and listed as my top song a song that I'm sure I have played, but nowhere near as much as some other songs. Is it based exclusively on streaming numbers, as such, or does it include plays of songs I have downloaded to my device?

If by "songs I have downloaded to my device" you mean offline streaming, then yes, those count. If you mean local files, then no.

Either way, Wrapped isn't conjectural, it's just counting. Your account played those songs the most. You might have fallen asleep or left your phone playing in your pocket, so whether you appreciated them or not, the data doesn't know.

how about API plays?

(which my daughter made me check out)

hehe

Yes, API plays are plays.

It sort of waters down the significance of the Wrapped data. I mean "Red Clay" starts auto-playing every time I finish listening to a Jazz album, but if "Red Clay" ends up as my top track then what value is that info?

you can turn off autoplay for the pure wrapped experience

It's super weird. For example, it says I listened to the Cure more than any other single artist, putting me in the top 3% of Cure listeners. I did listen to them a bunch this year, because the band was touring, but I'm kind of surprised they were the top act I listened to all year. Likewise, toward the top of my songs of the year, there's a track by Justin Townes Earle that I've literally never played on purpose (afaik). So sure, it's possible the automatic player played it multiple times throughout the year, but you'd think there would be songs I played on purpose that I heard more, asleep or no, than songs picked for me.

3108 different songs played this year, the majority of them probably only once or twice, but out of that number surely songs I've played on purpose would place higher than songs I accidentally heard. Right? The most played songs list doesn't say how many times I listen to each song, does it? I assume the vast majority of them are tied at one listen.

I will say that I've spent the last two days investigating Wrapped complaints, of which "my top x is wrong" is a common form, and the data is always what it says it is. The real-world explanations are various, including one person who concluded their phone was left playing Spotify in the purse of their bridesmaid during their wedding.

One weird thing--my kid has been playing a Spotify playlist of Dan Bull minecraft raps over and over for months through the Alexa device. I was certain those would be my top songs, but they weren't. Thank god. Still, odd.

re: The most played songs list doesn't say how many times I listen to each song, does it?

it does if you pay attention to your Spotify Wrapped promo results, only for Number 1 though

x number of plays starting on X date

xpost That's the sort of thing I wonder about, too. There are a few songs I'm pretty sure I played a bunch this year as a joke/punchline, like Uptown Funk. (I actually still like that song a lot, but I find it funny to interrupt/disrupt my daughter's Taylor Swift listening with it.)

I wonder if anything is thrown off by the fact that I mostly listen to albums? If I listen to two albums by one band, and each of those albums has 20 songs, and listen to three other albums by a second band, and each of those albums only have 10 songs, will the data say I listened to the first band more than the second?

many clients send songs to other users playing songs you've recently heard, right? I wonder if sometimes there's a glitch counting those transmissions as plays.

my top 5 songs are from Jessy Lanza's new record. It's great and all but I must've fallen asleep with it on repeat. Top .05% fans! <3

I'm no longer using spotify, but back when I did wrapped was never particularly interesting to me mostly because the top tracks were inevitably always whatever songs my kids were obsessed with + a bunch tracks kept being being pushed by auto-play. I don't tend to listen to some track or album obsessively so my own personal favorites can't ever really compete.

"What Is Love (7" mix)" by Haddaway made my top 20 thanks to my partner's habit of asking the smart speaker in the kitchen (linked to my account, not hers) for that tune as a recurring joke. (I think she actually loves Haddaway). Slips in nicely next to Harold Budd, Pye Corner Audio and Christina Vantzou.

Wait. People actually complain to Spotify that their Wrapped top songs are wrong?! xps

And to ILM!

My Wrapped is always skewed by ambient/drone artists as intend to listen to them every night to fall asleep and sometimes forget to set a sleep timer.

That said, Selfish Soul & 18 and Over made my top 5 which feels right as they've been two of the constants on my 'current' playlist the entire year

ILM seems perfectly valid, like you might discuss/bitch about them to your mates too xp

But actually emailing Spotify to complain seems sheesh. Assume it's people wanting to share their exemplary music taste.on social media being ruined by Baby Shark or whatever appearing in their Top 5

I wonder if people think someone's hacked their account. I had to change my password after I noticed all this Latin Trap music in my recently played songs.

People complain about everything. Just, in general.

Automatic plays are a form of marketing, and Spotify Wrapped is a form of marketing. You are being advertised to. It's not a scientific study of anything. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the data from Wrapped Top Tracks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Autoplay as a marketing tool.

Really don't need you giving "them" more ideas.

this is an interesting idea from Amelia Fletcher:

In a user-centric model, “each subscriber’s payment would be shared proportionally between the tracks that individual listens to,” explains Fletcher. “So if you have someone who’s really enthusiastic about indie music, that money would get shared out among the artists that they listen to. More would be allocated per track if they listen carefully to fewer tracks than if they just have music playing all the time in the background.”

seems fair!

How would you measure that, though?

"Spotify should pay artists more" is not in itself a substantive assertion.

yeah it is actually

just admit that the company you work for has a business model of exploiting the artists who provide the majority of the value of the service. really simple and obvious point irrespective of how we might differ in terms of a solution.

i work for an evil company too, okay? it's okay.

otm, just because the laws "as written" let the company rip their content creators off doesn't mean it's the right thing for the company to be doing.

I know several small-scale musicians who are just so bummed out about the streaming model, just more chipping away at the revenue for people who are on the bottom of the food chain while the revenue moves up to the top ever increasingly.

i can't wait for the worldwide smash by the artist who refuses to record anything and the only time anyone can hear the song is when the artist performs it.

take that, spotify business model.

(but honestly you can't fight it at this point, it's too big. the only way to remedy the situation is for more huge legacy acts like neil and joni to remove their catalogue... but like, from everywhere not just spotify)

budo jero, whoever you are and whatever evil company you work for, do you have a helpful contrasting example of a company that is not ripping off artists?

Really don't need you giving "them" more ideas.

― glenn mcdonald, Friday, December 1, 2023 bookmarkflaglink

haha fair.

I don’t know the intricacies of Tidal’s contract but my understanding is that they at least pay significantly more per stream (still a small amount) and aren’t getting rid of payments to smaller artists. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong! It’s probably still a rip-off run by unsavory people, I just prefer to use them bc I have less of a sense that their business model regards musicians as an unfortunate byproduct of the content delivery game.

I like this idea that the corporate music industry has always been a noble endeavor that cared deeply about the artists until Spotify came along and wrecked everything.

that user centric model needs a lil work imo - somebody who "carefully" listens to one track per month gives $10 to the label that distributed it, and somebody else who listens to 100 different tracks all on different labels gives each label 1 cent

xp I own a copy of Hit Men, that is not what I was implying, but my point was that saying "well it's legal" is a copout