I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to | Hacker News Reader

I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to

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222 pointspgl109 comments

All these market places are finding new ways to extract money from the market. There is no incentive to stop until it only makes just enough sense for the content creators to not stop making content. As they are monopolies (mostly), there is no moving. All extra profits, efficiently, to them.

This is happening with Airbnb, Amazon, Shopify, and now Spotify? We pay a cut to be in the platform, then we pay for marketing on the platform. It's obvious who holds the cards.

Our feudal lords now have catchy names.

None of this money goes to Spotify.

The point still stands. Spotify is providing a platform to further enhance the grip of capital.

They provide a platform that lets users share playlists.

and pay artists for letting them play their songs (or whenever a song is actually played, or some combination). which has a huge impact when they're one of few music hosting platforms people use

But it’s not clear the activity is not net beneficial to them.

Everything can always be better, but this is the best it's ever been for content creators.

Why is this excuse always dragged out? History and precedent is orthogonal to objective and sufficient quality and fairness.

So? The only reason it's "the best it has ever been" is because people in the past didn't accept that argument as a good reason to stop improving things.

I don't disagree with you, but are you aware of how things were before the vendors you listed existed? it used to be VERY difficult to get anywhere as a musician - at least now with YouTube and Spotify you can roll the "going viral" dice and better your chances with something good.

I will also say that the issue is mainly human nature - any platform that gets critical mass will likely see people interested in money bubble to the top and eventually monetize.

Going viral is thanks to the internet, not big tech monopolies. These rent-seeking monopolies deliberately make it more difficult to go viral by prioritizing paid placement.

I don't disagree but the virality you speak of is heightened because of the centralization.

In content, as in pandemics, exponential growth requires large populations. The ease of going viral is absolutely because of big tech companies. Nobody goes viral on a BBS.

>I don't disagree with you, but are you aware of how things were before the vendors you listed existed? it used to be VERY difficult to get anywhere as a musician

If you were any good, I'd say it was the opposite.

You could get signed and live off of 50-100K records sold per year (from Indie labels where you got a bigger share of your sales revenue) globally. You didn't have to compete with anybody in the world that had a guitar or some synth and an audio recorder, only comitted musicians with deals.

The "company screwed me" stories of that era come mainly from suckers that got signed as starry eyed 17 year olds or something into major labels with crappy deals. And even those stories were somewhat overblown when it came to big bands (the company did made millions, but they did get plenty in advances too, enough to buy cars, houses, and support constant parties and a few drug addictions).

Any small indie band/musician in the 80s to 00s has found the mp3/streaming era much worse with regards to industry income.

you may be right, but the point is that it's much more accessible and more music is ultimately produced as a result by a larger amount of artists under the current system versus the previous one. the previous system simply didn't allow those who were not good enough, as you say, to participate at all.

Survivorship bias. You don’t know how many good people were completely missed and were left with nothing in that super inefficient discovery system.

I do however, and they weren't that many.

Of ~20 decent bands I knew of at creation, 1 signed a independent record deal and personally they where far from the best.

5% seems better than the 0.01% number that you see a lot with regards to “making a living in music”

Oh, they don’t cross the “making a living in music” threshold. I didn’t get exact details but it sounded more like the part time minimum wage job threshold.

That is a laughable claim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=152&v=M2RpseaDw_o

I miss when you could add timestamps to end YouTube links as well as start them, since I only want the first 3 seconds of that clip. Ah well, it's never a bad time to rewatch old Family Guy.

>That is a laughable claim.

You just needed to hang around or be aware of your local scene (basically knowing all the bands in the city), and see how many good bands actually didn't sign. I'm far from a concern animal, but even I was well aware of every local band doing gigs within a ~8-10 year period in a several million strong city...

I don't know how you could possibly know all the bands in a city of millions, unless those bands are already well known. I grew up in a city of millions in the US. I'd estimate more than 100 new bands were formed every year. Most of them never got gigs, but that's because they never got a chance. Admittedly not all of them cared, but most did.

I think we're just gonna disagree on this one, as I'm arguing from a theoretical perspective (you can't possibly know how many bands there were) and you are arguing from a pragmatic perspective (anybody in the scene knew everybody).

>I don't know how you could possibly know all the bands in a city of millions, unless those bands are already well known.

There are not that many bands playing gigs "in a city of millions".

In my city (and several others I'm aware of) there are like 5-10 rock/electronic venues for example, and the usual 200 or so suspects play, with 20-30 of them being more well known.

If you're limiting yourself to 5-10 venues for a popular genre in a city of millions, you either live in a city without much live music or you are missing out on a lot of smaller venues and bands.

College parties, public events (the kind nobody goes to), store openings, hell even coffee shops. How many of the bands playing those venues did you know?

I wouldn't expect you to know most bands because, well, I don't think it's possible. About a dozen bands came out of my high school class, not sure any of them ever did more than parties. They wanted to, but they never did (or at least I never heard about it). You'd never have known any of them if you didn't graduate with me or go to the same parties they played.

You are straight out writing your bias but unable to see it. The point is exactly that lots of bands never even got the chance to play those gigs at all.

> If you were any good, I'd say it was the opposite.

I dont know, i think the systems of yester-year selected more for "image" and "attractiveness" than musical talent.

Monkees Menudo Back Street Boys 98 Degrees

When the record label has open auiditions/ casting calls it very much is a image and attractiveness industry and not a talent industry

Musician here. I don’t think it’s easier to get recognition now. Not at all.

The barrier to entry is too low. The competition, outside of mega pop and hip hop acts and the like, is functionally infinite.

Before, there were all these hurdles and gatekeepers sure, but this meant if you were stubborn and lucky and talented you had a halfway decent shot at getting somewhere.

Now it is closer to absolute random.

How is Amazon in that list? Seriously, there are tons of other viable options to sell online and in stores. You even listed an alternative!

Last I checked for a vacation, VRBO still was a viable alternative for renting people’s homes. Then there are tons of other location specific real estate companies specializing in renting vacation homes.

If you think there is no alternative to these big tech companies, you haven’t looked very hard.

Marketing is always a necessary part of any endeavor that requires people to know about your product.

Sometimes you get free marketing without any effort.

But most times you need to put the work into to be noticed. This includes paying for services that help get the word out.

If no platforms exist there is no means of distribution and there is less motivation to create. You can talk about feudal lords all you want, but the simple fact is without a marketplace no one is exchanging anything except in very ad-hoc manner. Here is a clip of what it might have been like in pre-agricultural revolution era [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHjYt6Jm5j8

I don't really care tbh. Spotify is a non essential and easily replaceable service. If paid spots in playlists start to degrade my experience I can move to an alternate platform. If they don't degrade my experience, then thats great for the platform at no cost to me.

This was very interesting, I had no idea these services existed. I really enjoyed reading it. It wouldn’t hurt to provide more context about the artist, genre, and scene the artist is operating in. Is it a band getting some hype that listeners might recognize by name or someone totally unknown to listeners?

Related to that, what about the playlists themselves? Did the author of this blog post feel that they were grouped with artists of a similar enough genre the audience would appreciate them? Were those playlists all new/upcoming artists sourced from services like this, primarily popular/established artists with a few select artists mixed in, or a mix of both?

The psychology of what music people choose to pursue is fascinating and brutally frustrating. Details like the ones above could tell some very different stories about the author’s experience. It’s possible that a different artist would have a vastly different experience on these services.

Of course, having said that, I would have been blown away if this experiment yielded any significantly positive results. This is the newest face of pay to play events and compilation CDs run by labels and marketing companies. There are no shortage of people eager to exploit the enthusiasm of artists.

At the end of the day, attention is a resource, and resources have monetary value.

There will always be things like this.

Yep, and always have been. See payola scandals of the 1950’s radio era for an early example, though probably not the earliest.

This suddenly all makes sense. I’ve been listening to a “mamma Mia 1+2” playlist as I couldn’t see the albums immediately.

The all of a sudden some awful explicit song starts playing, nothing to do with ABBA, not even in the same genre.

Reported the playlist for being deceptive. I note today it has a different song in there now.

Spotify need a setting to avoid this stuff otherwise they’ll start losing passive customers like myself who pay £15pcm to listen to music that we want to listen to without thinking about it.

Give me a setting to avoid all “social” things like public playlists or watch as your revenue goes to Apple or amazon.

Just don't use public playlists. You can already disable explicit. Disable "autoplay similar songs when your music ends". This is Spotify itself selling playlist placement though, not public playlists being manipulated for payola. No one can stop payola on a public list, just don't use public lists.

Unfortunately there's a long history of Spotify re-toggling this setting. It's quite frustrating.

I've been a paying user of Spotify for years and I think that happened maybe once. It is not a pervasive problem.

I believe this option is controlled at the app level, not the account level, and is enabled by default in the app. So you have to disable it when you first install the app but after that it isn't re-enabled.

Without public playlists I have no reason to use Spotify haha, literally any other service would do.

That's interesting, I thought public playlist listeners would just use YouTube. If not to have access to your own musical choices, what is the point of Spotify?

It plays in the background and is a couple quid cheaper than YouTube's play in background "feature" that totally worked before but was nerfed when they introduced YouTube Premium

Integration with Alexa etc is useful too now that I'm already in the system but I could easily use Amazon's thing there, or Apple's if I fancied swapping Alexa out for Siri

From my brief experience with YouTube Music, the problem seemed to be even worse there. It wasn't just poorly curated public playlists, it seemed that much of the time it was playing poorly edited unauthorised YouTube uploads of songs.

In the past I’ve copied playlists, but the UI on the iPhone doesn’t seem to make it obvious. Search favours playlists over albums too.

It means I have to use my decision making part of my brain, which is not what I want to do when listening to music, and as that’s the part of my brain which will decide to cancel, it’s not something Spotify want me to do either.

If I find a playlist I like (curated by someone else) I copy it to my own playlist where no one can mess with it.

This is the way to deal with it. As always, if you find anything on the internet that you like and don't want it to change underneath you, you need to make a copy into a space where it cannot change. In the case of Spotify, you need to duplicate the playlist or if you really want it to be permanent, pull down the mp3s from somewhere and have locally, as it can still be pulled from Spotify once their agreements run out.

I thought we all learned this when people started to have 50% of the bookmarks from the 2000s dead by now, but seems we still have generations that need to learn from the precariousness of content on the internet.

Spotify doesn't have something as basic as a "clone playlist" feature, so not really an option for any non-trivial playlists.

I have long ago stopped using Spotify for similar reasons. Apple Music is the best service IMO on iOS, though the way Apple favors it in its ecosystem leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The weird thing is that some people really love those playlists. I moved to apple music and my partner gets annoyed because he misses exactly that. He likes that they change regularly - it's a feature rather than a bug.

I listen to albums and don't as much care, but that really is their product differentiation.

You can also block explicit songs on Spotify in your settings. It is about 75% effective.

Irritatingly, there's no opposite setting. Why does no music service offer a "prefer album version" or similar setting? Shuffle any hip-hop artist, get jarred by periodic bleeps even if you don't have "block explicit" set.

I don’t want to block explicit songs - if I want to listen to Eminem or something I don’t want a radio edit of Stan. I just don’t want it popping up in the middle of an easy listening playlist on a Sunday afternoon.

I've noticed this with playlists on Youtube, an entire album I wanted to hear + some unrelated tune or advert for a pack of samples (for music production) stuck on the end.

Payola laws should be extended to include Spotify pay-to-play IMO

Extended? Why do we want them at all?

How is it better for a radio station to monetize by airing commercials than to monetize by airing music?

The music probably ends up being better when it's not just highest bidder first.

Maybe? But I am not sure if that is a priori true.

I would imagine record labels would pay to promote the artists they think are the best, and most likely to generate good returns for their advertising investment. That might end up with better music on the radio.

Or it might end up with worse. I would be curious how you could test this.

I had to look that up:

Payola, in the music industry, is the illegal practice of paying a commercial radio station to play a song without the station disclosing this information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

I'm not a big fan of how tech companies have and continue to ignore existing regulations and legislation simply because "on the internet" or "it's an app" is somehow perceived by them as different.

By analogy: like we have analogue drug laws that deem substances prohibited even before they're invented, we should have analogue services law where a fucking taxi company is a fucking taxi company regardless of what technology underlies it, and a radio service is a streaming service etc.

You don't get to ignore broadcasting rules just because the delivery tech is Internet Protocol based rather than radio.

Whether or not one agrees with the existing legislation on either of those particular matters is beside my point here, so let's skip straight past that distrsction please.

There's an important part in that definition: "commercial radio station" - the general premise of telecommunications regulation has been that using a finite resource (radio spectrum) comes with obligations (FCC licensing, content restrictions, etc). That's also why you'll see the giant "THIS IS A PAID PROGRAM" warning on late-night infomercials.

Internet streaming doesn't fit into that "finite resource" model.

Well, internet bandwidth is a finite resource, but it's limited on the consumer side. If the consumer doesn't stream Spotify, his/her bandwidth is not used. By contrast, spectrum is consumed whether a given consumer tunes in or not. In this sense, the spectrum is a shared public resource whereas the consumer's bandwidth is a non-shared private resource.

The finite resource in the Internet model is attention. We could redefine our regulations with that in mind. Perhaps that would helpful for addressing the filter bubble phenomenon.

I think this widely misses my point.

Maybe I can rephrase it?

Interacting with someone comes with obligations.

This, then, allows us to peer deeper in to the problem: some people think it's okay to run roughshod over existing norms because "on a computer".

I'd argue it's not okay to exploit people's weaknesses just because "implemented using new(er) / different technology".

Other people seem to be quite happy to build an empire doing so.

I guess this is why I'm likely to remain relatively poor.

> You don't get to ignore broadcasting rules just because the delivery tech is Internet Protocol based rather than radio.

Of course you do, the whole purpose of the Payola law has jack shit to do with music. It’s about sponsored airtime being transmitted over public frequencies without being identified as such. It’s very specifically a property of how the FCC wants public radio incentives disclosed.

Payola doesn’t apply to MTV and it certainly doesn’t apply to a TCP/IP connection from a browser to a server requesting a song download. Payola doesn’t even apply to Sirius/XM. It’s a property of public broadcast, not music.

For what it’s worth: In this case I don’t think Spotify receives money.

My understanding is that the curators are people with public playlists on Spotify.

We’ve probably all seen that drawing of a kid studying to chill music that everybody seems to get recommended on YouTube. They also have that playlist available on Spotify and Apple Music. My guess (with emphasis on guess) is it’s those kinds of playlists by third parties, that OP was paying a middle man to get onto.

Which is even more interesting imho. I’d get there where money exchanged in order to get on Spotify’s own heavy rotation (just like radio). Either by giving Spotify a discount per play or simply by Spotify having cost of a track as part of the algorithm that decides what to recommend.

But paying for 3rd party playlists one way or another hadn’t struck my mind at all.

the radio station owner's didn't recieve money moat of the time either in the payola days. it was the DJs amd programming managers..cant divvy up a 1/4 kilo of coke as a dividend payment.

Payola laws should apply to everything and everywhere. Anyone receiving payment to promote something should have to disclose it.

I don't know who the audience this article was aimed at, but it would have been nice if it talked a little bit more about what a curator is.

Collecting, selecting and presenting something. Like art in a gallery

To expand on this - a museum is just a pile of stuff without a curator who selects and organizes it to tell a cohesive story - a well curated exhibit is a wonder.

In this case, someone who made a playlist. Reputation of the knowledge and tastes of the playlist maker would normally matter, but since this is purely a numbers game at this point the only thing that matters is the number of followers on the list made. "Curator" makes a list of popular songs, gets a bunch of followers on the playlist, then sells placement on the list. "Curator" has really lost it's meaning here.

A much more effective way to get listeners is to write about it and trend on HN.

if you pay people to listen to your music and they still hate it, maybe writing is what you should be doing anyway

$130 isn't enough to really test most advertising methods, unless you're already really dialed in.

I operate e-commerce businesses, and I'd throw at least $500-$2,000 on testing something new before I call it quits.

You're argument is flawed because someone is going to come along and say "$200 isn't enough to really test most advertising methods...I'd throaw at least $20,000-$100,000 on testing something." Then along comes Procter and Gamble and they say $10m-40m. It's all about scope and market size.

Is the market for music small? Was he testing in some specific genere, geographic region or other targeted group to justify the smaller budget?

There comes a point where you need a minimum amount of money before you can tell if something is working. If you spent 10 cents on advertising, that would be pretty meaningless.

This is different, roi is different. You comparing apples and non apples.

There are a ton of playlists named after songs / albums that are not on Spotify with unrelated songs, pretty deceiving.

Really liked the article and am curious what would happen with some of these numbers if you 10x the budget...

Based on the effort required even after submitting and getting approved on some of these sites (I also didn't know these sites even existed! very cool to learn about that), the author had to do some sifting and understanding of what they were getting into (ex. getting into a playlist of 500 songs and being #500 seems like crap). Sounds like investing more and getting on more lists might help with your odds of getting good placement/good playlists but ultimately requires a linear scale of time invested.

It also seems like the author got exposure to labels for what I think feels like a low price (especially if you aren't well connected in the industry already).

I think it’s also important to keep in mind that the results you get are probably going to be highly influenced by whether or not people actually like your music. We really have no way to control for that in these experiments. I obviously can’t just fart into a microphone and promote it on these platforms and conclude that they don’t work.

I did get that especially given how the author fared in some of the Hot or Not and label outreach pieces.

At the end of the day, crappy music ain't gonna sell no matter how much you pay for streams. A hit will rise to the top and it seems like it is the biggest factor in if influencers/playlist makers will pick it up!

Can we stop calling people influencers or curators if they’re just taking money to promote stuff?

Can you really call someone an influencer if they aren't promoting something? It's in the name, they are influencing people. Just making content people enjoy without trying to change how they behave isn't influencing.

> Can we stop calling people influencers [...] if they’re just taking money to promote stuff?

That is literally my understanding of the term "influencer". What is your definition?

In the older definition, having a following that puts some stock into your opinions or recommendations is what makes you an influencer. (i.e. you don't become an influencer by being paid, being an influencer makes you interesting for companies to pay you to advertise)

An “influencer” is supposed to be someone who has the ability to influence people to do things. Whether they sell that ability or not has little to do with it.

Anyone with a big following of people who want trust them in some way is an influencer.

I mean, we don't call the Pope an influencer but we do Joel Osteen, we don't call Xi Jinping an influencer but we do Donald Trump, we don't call Satya Nadella an influencer but we do Elon Musk. It seems to be the dividing line between influencers is that they're using their influence for financial gain and that it's their primary asset. It doesn't have to be direct monetization but it has to be something where the motivation for them to influence is financial.

Sometimes they aren't actually taking money. They are just shilling products so that other brands think they are paid to promote products and will actually pay them for the promotion.

Tried submithub, it says you have 2 "credits," when I uploaded a song and it takes you through a bunch of commitment steps and then asks you to pay to submit to the reviewers because you don't have enough "credits" to spend.

If you want to try submithub out, be ready to pay with a card, regardless of what the UX seems to imply. It seemed like a good service, but now I don't see myself dealing with them.

Hey, SubmitHub founder here. Sorry for the confusion. You get two types of credits: standard (the 2 you saw) and premium (which you have to buy). Your standard credits refresh every 4 hours (assuming you use them).

When going through the submission process you'll see it prompts you whether you want to use your standard (free) credits or premium credits. If you don't have any premium ones -- and don't want to buy them -- make sure you stick to the 'standard' path.

The core idea behind SubmitHub's "model" is that for decades it's been near-impossible to catch the attention of bloggers/playlisters/curators/whatever. Our system dangles a carrot (~$1) in front of them to guarantee a response+feedback about your song (with the ideal outcome of course being that they share your song - no additional costs involved).

And I appreciate you are matching musicians with audiences, super valuable service. This particular credits ambiguity registered as a pretty grey pattern. My expectation was just say "$10 to put this in front of an audience of x," or "share a song with our network and then buy premium features," instead of breadcrumbing the incremental commitment screens before the hard upsell to complete it. I'm sure your mixpanel or other metrics show your abandoned carts data and if this pattern is working, it's working.

For pro musicians who are committed to your product as a promotion path, perhaps they don't care about that credits ambiguity because they go in with a marketing budget and know what they're going in for. For me, I will stick with making music for fun. I wish your team success at their mission.

SubmitHub is legit. Like it says in the post, it's very competitive. I have used them a few times. The response you get are mostly negative (at least they were for me!) but you do get responses and that in itself is valuable.

There is an interview with the founder on a podcast somewhere that's quite informative. I'll link to it if I can find it.

I had never heard of Soundcampaign though. Will have to check it out.

If you're ready to pay for negative responses, I'm ready to provide it as a service for you.

Was this experiment conducted before, or after the purge from playlisting services botting the streams[0].

Also Spotify should have some way of distinguishing services that have paid playlisting and not - the same way youtubers(or any other influencer) has to disclose if they're doing a sponsored spot. It feels a little scummy that they're doing this.

[0]https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/01/spotify-just-purged-...

I think that purge was related to services that will get you plays. Where by they have a farm of phones that will play the song for 30 seconds (the minimum for it to count as a play)

This is just paying to get added to playlists with high followers. Plays are not guaranteed.

SubmitHub is not paying to get added to playlists. It's paying to guarantee that your song is considered by the playlister - with no promises that it's actually shared. If they do decide to share it, no additional money is required.

You're basically saying: "Hey, if you give me 3 minutes of your time to listen to my song and let me know what you think I'll give you $1."

For reference, roughly 1 in 5 submissions end up getting shared. So if you send to 100 playlisters, 80 of them will say "thanks but no thanks" and roughly 20 of them will add it to their playlist for no additional cost.

The title here is deceiving. The author did not pay for playlist placements. The services they used allow you to submit your song to multiple blogs to be reviewed. If they like the song they may write about it and some may include it on playlists (e.g of songs they’ve reviewed this month).

The money paid is for the convenience of contacting these bloggers, I don’t believe they get a cut of it. Also, it’s mostly a flat rate. You can’t pay an arbitrary amount of money to guarantee anything other than the blogger giving your song a fair listen.

The authors conclusion is "Paying for Spotify playlist promotion does not relate to an increase in followers. Do not use it if this is your goal."

And in the end, the author spent $130 on sketchy marketing and got 10 followers.

But honestly, $130 doesn't really sound like that much money, it doesn't really sound like this was exactly super targeted, and it was super short term (repeated exposure is important in marketing). Maybe the conclusion is that this was just a poorly done marketing campaign, which unsurprisingly got poor results.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3BYSJ9i8xIlXO9ebJO9Yv9?si=2y... I’m going to try submithub with my music starting tomorrow. I currently sit at 3 listeners this month. So we will see what happens.

Hey, SubmitHub founder here. Top tip is to do a bit of research before jumping into it - it will dramatically improve what you get out of it. Here's a really good recent podcast by an artist who managed a 68% approval rate: https://pod.co/bandhive/submithub-success-strategies-steve-m...

Thank you I appreciate the link. I will definitely listen and research before I start submitting music.

This made me consider paying for promotion. Although, I don't see what would be the end goal with a limited budget. Have my ego stroked for 100$? I wonder how much would you need to invest for a decent chance to snowball into breaking even.

You have to go meta and publish a blog post about what getting to the front page of HN does to your plays?

Did you target JP or EN language audience? Or else can you target by geolocation?

What does the music sound like?

Link?

They link the track in the article.

It's actually pretty good. Kind of chill beats for background music.

Just looked it up, not sure what to make of it yet. At the very least it is passable as background music. https://open.spotify.com/artist/4FbZyaSZ5QaZES4I251OQU

I had it playing in the background while reading the article. Was sad when I closed the tab.

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