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Comment by srrr | Hacker News Reader

15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason, in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists were classified as ¨radio¨ and thus a performance of the radio station but an album was the performance of the original artist.

Our interface was optimized for low royalties, not the end user. Maybe it is the same situation now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization)

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Thanks for highlighting this!

I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier. Not just Spotify, but also in other places like Google, Facebook and DuckDuckGo. Search for anything and you'll get something "pausibly deniability" close to what you typed, but optimized for metrics that are way beyond the user's comprehension.

I feel like singling out Facebook, the worst offender: Their search is optimized for "engagement", i.e., distracting you from what you originally looked for, without you immediately realizing it.

Hah, I searched “cam” in the windows search bar the other day looking to open the camera app, but windows decided I was actually looking for “Calculator” or a handful of other things that didn’t have a single “M” in it listed ahead of the actual camera app.

Getting a bit off-topic here but YES, this drives me bonkers.

Worse yet is that if I pause there for a moment, the search results continue to reorganize themselves, so that by the time I'm ready with a screenshot, the wrong answer has vanished. I can only catch it on video.

How did search turn so terrible?

This has been the absolute biggest surprise from me switching to MacOS after years in windows land. I can hit enter on my spotlight search results before they’re rendered and be confident. I don’t event need cmd+tab anymore. MS on the other hand STILL doesn’t have a search right, and they have a search engine. FYI this was a running joke at MS when I worked there, there is no search in any MS product that is functional. If you’re lucky you’ll get exact string matching, sometimes not even that?

How did search turn so terrible?

Not enough people complained, and/or voted with their dollars and/or attention.

The few people who do complain are inevitably answered with the ever-present refrain of the Windows fan club ("You just don't like change!"), which effectively cuts off any avenues for argument in favor of the perfectly-good status quo. The only way forward from that point is down.

A related issue is when autocorrect “corrects” things that I’ve spelled correctly, which drives me absolutely nuts. The other day I was texting someone about music and I wrote “melodies” which was “corrected” to “Melodie’s”. In fact on iOS this is still happening as I write this!

YouTube not even try to hide fact it presents search reasults that are completly not relevant to user query.

> I was getting the feeling that search has become increasingly crappier.

Whether that is a consequence of it becoming harder, or by design is the important question. I can think of a few reasons an uninformed or misinformed general public would benefit some people.

AFAIK royalties are paid out for every stream over 30 seconds long. The 'context' (album, playlist, single play) doesn't matter. "royalties [are] based on an artist’s share of overall streams across the platform" [1]

My guess is that playlists lead to more engagement than albums. Users listen longer, and discover new music, which leads to more listening in the future.

[1] https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/?question=per-stream-rate

It would be great to be able to buy an album, pay the upfront cost, and then stream it for free.

This is how Bandcamp works. I greatly prefer it to Spotify, but only because I'm not generally interested in mainstream bands.

Same, I love Bandcamp, and I am truly worried that Epic will find a way to ruin it. It is one of the last places on the internet I know of where you can easily buy music for download (i.e. you actually own it).

You can buy and download DRM-free music from Apple and Amazon.

Also Qobuz - I like the 'hi res' availability and various format choices

One of the few services that seems to give Linux users like myself a decent experience

As lossless files?

Not that it matters since you can’t hear the difference, but yes.

Can you tell me where is the "download lossless file" button on Apple Music?

Unfortunately for the Apple case the new lossless option is only available for Apple Music subscriptions.

With Apple Music here is the info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183

I use Bandcamp. I started because many of the artists I listen too, put their music on Bandcamp. I briefly considered paying for Spotify, but at every turn they make it difficult to get to the music I want to play. Why would I pay for that?

On Spotify the reason is similar but structurally different. With algorithmic playlists they can tinker with the mix of songs - they can choose what the average royalty payout should be as a target variable for the song mix, so that both more expensive and cheaper songs are used.

I’ve long suspected this for Amazon Music

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