Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business?

[vurt]

but folk?

[ghettosynth]

but folk?

It's more like adult contemporary/country-pop, but it sounds artsier if you call it folk.

[osiris]

People make the money off that. I saw a news story about a guy who does like pretty much elevator music with a piano and he rakes it in every month.

[osiris]

"One of the things that frustrates me is that I can't find all of my old (DJ) vinyl on Spotify. Is there a service with almost every record from the 90s? " n- Thank God I was around for Napster. I got all my old DJ vinyls in digital that way.

soulseek still exists. youtube is full of old vinyl too. monkey audio rewind is your friend.

So how is pirating music a solution to the complaining in this thread? I'm willing to pay for a valid service, I'm not asking to be able to download the music without the artist receiving whatever compensation they've been able to negotiate with any particular platform.

This also misses the point with respect to the value that I think modern services provide. I don't just want my music in digital form, I want subsets of it in playlists so that the algorithms can find similar music that's available today.

most of my dj vinyl is white label stuff, that never saw release.
good luck searching for any of it mind you, no titles, no artist name, occasionally they might put a catalogue number.

Mine also. A lot of DJ Only Promo stuff. I did meet this old DJ on Napster and he had almost everything I did. He was such a nice guy. Who else would have a copy of the White label of Divine - Native Love?
And if it weren't for Fanning and Napster, Netflix probably wouldn't exist. Google Shawn Fanning algorithm.

[vurt]

not me! before my time sorry

[osiris]

I'm sure it's before anyone's time on here so I'm sure they know exactly what they speak of.

[ghettosynth]

People make the money off that. I saw a news story about a guy who does like pretty much elevator music with a piano and he rakes it in every month.

Right? I think the basic algorithm is "don't be obnoxious." Which, obviously, the "multiracial, gender-integrated, bilingual rock band from Providence", their words not mine, has no clue how to do. Interestingly, they have 17k+ followers as compared to Ryan's 16k+. So I guess being up your own ass about your activism gets you followers that don't care enough about you to actually listen to your work. I mean I get it, I'm not willing to do them any favors.

Compare and contrast, I listen to Eliana Radigue's Trilogie De La Mort pretty much every single night. It's hard to get less obnoxious than that.

[vurt]

you just hate punk! you hippy!

[ghettosynth]

you just hate punk! you hippy!

You're not wrong in that I'm not a fan of punk, per se. That said, I do think that there's better punk, just punk, and shit punk. I like the diy ethos, but that doesn't mean be shit at what you do. The expression has to be worth the price of admission. So to be clear, I definitely hate that punk. Definitely shit. At the same time, I really like some pop tinged punk, e.g., Social Distortion and quite a bit of post punk, especially with true punk ethos of not playing by the rules, e.g., using a drum machine, e.g., The Three Johns.

[vurt]

you just hate punk! you hippy!

You're not wrong in that I'm not a fan of punk, per se. That said, I do think that there's better punk, just punk, and shit punk. I like the diy ethos, but that doesn't mean be shit at what you do. The expression has to be worth the price of admission. So to be clear, I definitely hate that punk. Definitely shit. At the same time, I really like some pop tinged punk, e.g., Social Distortion and quite a bit of post punk, especially with true punk ethos of not playing by the rules, e.g., using a drum machine, e.g., The Three Johns.

ill see your drum machine, and raise you...

[ghettosynth]

you just hate punk! you hippy!

You're not wrong in that I'm not a fan of punk, per se. That said, I do think that there's better punk, just punk, and shit punk. I like the diy ethos, but that doesn't mean be shit at what you do. The expression has to be worth the price of admission. So to be clear, I definitely hate that punk. Definitely shit. At the same time, I really like some pop tinged punk, e.g., Social Distortion and quite a bit of post punk, especially with true punk ethos of not playing by the rules, e.g., using a drum machine, e.g., The Three Johns.

ill see your drum machine, and raise you...

I hate that with the fire of 10,000 suns. There's a point at which all agro metal and punk just merges into one genre...buttrock. I despise buttrock. I would rather listen to Melanie Oesch, yes all 10 hours of it.

[BertKoor]

Here you go, guy made $2.4k/month off of Spotify, some time back, with about 220k monthly listeners.
[...]
Downtown Boys has some 6k monthly listeners.

My analysis: it boils down to getting a spot in a much-shared playlist, and thus getting many plays by that, and thus becoming "popular" (whatever that means)

No unfairness in principle here. You just get lucky or not. Same as it ever was with being played on the radio

[ghettosynth]

Here you go, guy made $2.4k/month off of Spotify, some time back, with about 220k monthly listeners.
[...]
Downtown Boys has some 6k monthly listeners.

My analysis: it boils down to getting a spot in a much-shared playlist, and thus getting many plays by that, and thus becoming "popular" (whatever that means)

No unfairness in principle here. You just get lucky or not. Same as it ever was with being played on the radio

Sure, so your ability to market yourself matters here. Is it pure luck getting on that playlist, or are people reaching out to others, maybe some social engineering? Also, you can't reduce that to pure luck, I don't think Downtown Boys has the same chances of getting on such a playlist.

One thing that I observed with Ryan Harris after listening to his radio station for a bit is that there are many artists in that genre with the kind of monthly listeners that he gets. I don't think that this is pure luck either. I listen to music all day on Spotify when I'm working at home. I need to listen to music that doesn't interfere with me getting work done. That's not aggressive music. I don't think that I'm abnormal here.

[ghettosynth]

https://amt-lab.org/blog/2022/4/spotify ... or-hurting

1. Death of the Album, Rise of the Single

Christoffer Hylander, known as Killigrew in the music world, created a genre of music known as ‘chillstep’, and he’s made a fulltime living on Spotify doing so. On the podcast, “Music, Money, and Life,” he had some advice for listeners. His first piece of advice was to focus on singles rather than albums: the way the Spotify algorithm works, new songs are often put on playlists like “Discover Weekly” and “Release Radar” to determine how users will like them. Whole albums are therefore less likely to get promoted. In another podcast, vocal editor Alex Krotz details Spotify’s strategy of “boosting” songs. If you opt into Spotify’s boosting program as an artist, you will receive less revenue per song, but Spotify is more likely to include your songs on different playlist recommendations for users. Albeit a risky strategy, it focuses on single songs rather than albums. Therefore, for artists looking to use Spotify as their primary means of distribution, rapidly releasing songs (for example, one a week), it more advantageous than releasing an entire album every couple of months.

2. Find your niche

In this piece of advice, Hylander and Krotz differ. Hylander believes that part of his success was finding and focusing on a niche portion of the music market. By creating chillstep, he was able to focus on a specific audience and tailor his music to what that audience wanted to hear. Krotz points out that because of Spotify’s algorithm, it is better to create songs like what people are listening to already in order to get “picked up” by the algorithm. Looking at the Global Music Report for 2021, the Top 10 Global Songs seem to be of a similar vein: artists like The Weekend, Drake, and Billie Eilish appear multiple times. Ultimately, artists must decide for themselves what risks they are willing to take in terms of their style and targeted audience.

[dayjob]

make what you want of this. hopefully more details will arrive sooner or later. for his sake and his listeners i hope it's just a mistake by someone in the middle man chain of glad handers.

Ben Jordan's albums, 23 of them, were all deleted from spotify due to an internal investigation that revealed some "fraudulent activity".

here's his twitter post about it but i expect he'll make a video about it eventually.

https://x.com/bennjordan/status/1756870 ... 46722?s=20





he's made videos about various aspects of spotify's business model, fraud, how money laundering works there etc. he's also praised spotify at times... some of those videos are in this thread already somewhere but just in case... kind of sucks to be at the mercy of them. anyway.. a few of those videos for context.





edit: so after taking a look around the internet it appears this happens to artists often enough. There’s some scam where people use bots in conjunction with playlists to generate “fake” streams or plays. So even though the artist has no idea theirs songs are part of the playlist they get flagged if/when tunecore/spotify/distrokid take a look at things. I don’t know the details of how this scam works but it appears to be one of many types of scams. There’s some chatter on Benn Jordan’s social media from other artists with similar experiences.