Panic Among the Streamers
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honest-broker.com
They listed a $900k position for someone who does machine learning platform planning. Every single recommendation you see on Netflix is powered by machine learning and has for a long long time. It is the core of their business and impacts every single user interaction with the product. And as the linked article itself notes the job isn't about content generation. Tying this into the AI hype is really disingenuous.
edit: And looking at level.fyi Netflix was paying the same last year for ML talent.
As somebody who has worked to create an AI-generated show, and who is also a PM at a big tech company that is using LLMs for non-creative purposes, I can tell you that the “PM” work I do with these LLMs is vastly different than the creative work I do with them. It’s an entirely different frame and discipline.
I’d start to be concerned once we see job listings that explicitly look for creators, with technical backgrounds in generative AI. The creator/creative talent part comes first before everything else.
Huh, I would have thought it was some guy sitting down once a month and picking 5 random things that don't match any of my preferences based on what I get.
I find my Netflix feed to be complete trash so some other approach would be nice.
I've always been someone that reads liner notes and researches a band I like and I really hate when I hear a cool song and want to listen to the rest of the album or more from the same band but Spotify forces me into some bland anonymous algorithmic playlist. I'm happy for the algorithm to show me things but I want to actually know what I'm listening to and listen to a whole album at a time.
What's even more frustrating is that Plexamp is stealing all of Spotify's design cues and has similar algorithmic playlist creation. I do get more control over sticking with the same band but it doesn't always respect this setting and it still tries to give me anonymous playlists I didn't ask for. It is my library and I have a decent familiarity with what's in it, but I use Plexamp specifically to avoid all the things I hate with Spotify instead of just a private Spotify.
I never thought about Spotify's search feature being shitty on purpose but it makes perfect sense. Despite all this and how terribly it treats artists I still pay for premium because of peer pressure, so I can share Spotify links with friends and play Music League.
Every time I've tried to explain my reasons for barely using Spotify to them I always sound like an entitled crazy person. I just hope something better replaces it in the near future, since they will never be profitable, but I'm not optimistic.
What I'm talking about is that I put on a certain album on Spotify, and as soon as that ends it immediately goes to the algorithmic anonymous playlist, if you have the Autoplay setting on.
It really comes down to that I'm against the norm in that I prefer albums as opposed to individual tracks like the vast majority of Spotify listeners do, and the effect of having randomized playlist hurts being able to know what artist you're listening to at any given moment unless you're constantly watching the tracks change (which probably no one does).
I want an algorithm that can slow down slightly and recommend me a series of albums so I can get a good sampling of similar artists, but also have enough time to see who I'm listening to and listen to the work as the artist intended, instead of just a random smattering of faceless "content".
If so, I couldn't be happier I've never paid for it.
Maybe people who came of age in the streaming world don't even know what they're missing, which is sad. But on the other hand, the vast majority of people have never really cared about music. That's why the top 40 has pretty much always been milquetoast trash, all the way back.
Now it's just bland, but at least it let's you browse to an album from the current song, and it does have a little blurb for most artists.
I was under the impression that the labels suck all the money out of Spotify, not leaving much for independents. Spotify doesn't really have the ability to do much else without dissolving.
The labels are more culpable (and have been terrible way before streaming) and Spotify is at their mercy for a lot of things, buy they also hurt artists on their own. There is also the fact that at least for a time the labels owned a decent stake in Spotify and other streaming services, so to a certain degree, financially speaking, they are one and the same.
Part of the bland algorithmic playlists diversion strategy is being able to control what content people are listening to via playlists to be able to sell listener data ("real time mood and activity data") to advertisers, and Spotify being able to strengthen its position by acting as a gatekeeper between artists and listeners. Spotify also uses placement on playlists as a form of payola, to punish even very well-known artists such as Katy Perry that give exclusive releases (even temporary ones) to rival streaming services and hold leverage over labels. When people listen to playlists they'll also be listening to more music, which also helps juice their user count/activity numbers for investors.
When people don't care what artist they're listening to and just want playlists, they become more loyal to Spotify's algorithms than any particular artist. A lot of the most successful playlist "artists" come from music content mills (similar to the way advertisers can commission a knockoff song when they can't license an original) that churn out large amounts of music to game the algorithms, and Spotify then pays them a lower royalty rate than they do major labels and artificially promotes it to increase its margins. They can then use that leverage to force actual artists to accept lower royalty rates to get access to the same promotion.
Spotify is definitely at the labels' mercy, but its "success" (if you can define being unprofitable but monopolizing a market as that) directly comes at the expense of artists. It can't negotiate better rates with labels but it does have the ability to stop engaging in payola and prioritizing fake content mill playlist "artists" over real artists.
There's also the fact that royalty payments are zero sum game where a huge artist can reduce payments to smaller ones. In fact, it's a huge problem on Spotify that people upload fake "music" (faker than the content mill playlist artists) that they then stream with phone farms and steal money from real artists via fraud. Spotify is well aware but don't really care.
1) They are legally required to list the pay range for anyone they could possibly hire. If they are hiring a PM intern in Chicago, they will not be making $900k. If they are hiring a Google Fellow away from Google in San Francisco, then the $900k might be on the table.
2) Yeah, it's tech. No doubt there is someone at Netflix who runs their batch job scheduling system or some inane detail that nobody outside of tech even knows exists that makes $900k, and nobody freaks out about that. ("Efficient job scheduling is is going to kill CPU designers! Won't someone please think of their children!") It's more common than people outside of FAANG think. When I was a lowly Senior Software Engineer at Google over 5 years ago, my W2 comp was around $300k. Are there some people that are 3x more productive than me 5 years ago? It is a certainty. Money well spent if you find them!
The price increase is unwelcome, but when you get interested in a musician who made many albums, it’s a lot cheaper than buying them all.
And thus the artists get screwed.
Let's face it, the real reason Spotify is popular is because folks see music as a commodity and fairly compensating artists as unaffordable.
And so Spotify lives on despite its many many flaws.
Now there is no doubt Spotify gets a paying user a lot more music than they would get by buying albums.
But there just isn't that much entertainment money out there either. Most people have what they have and they spend it each month. It takes something unusual to get people to spend more and when they do it comes from savings, or they don't do some other activity involving a financial transaction.
This idea of a fan buying all the albums if it were not for Spotify does not pan out. The money just is not there.
We learned all this during the piracy wars, and as iTunes settled on a buck a track.
The other thing we learned is artists can get known when people have access to a lot of music. Before the Internet, radio was about the only way and the broadcast people were the gatekeepers.
When people could share music directly, a lot changed! Artists could get known by working social media, and by selling directly to fans, etc...
Spotify is popular because it does compensate artists (and those artists deserve more of what Spotify collects), and it adds real value to listeners able to share play lists, seek any music they want and to do so without having to worry about infringement and other painful possibilities associated with tormenting and piracy in general.
Folks do see music as a commodity as they should. Music production has been made easy. Tons of music is produced each day.
That doesn't mean it is good music. And there is real value right there. Just finding good music is hard without Spotify and friends.
The idea of there being billions more dollars for movies and music is not reality.
It is all about people hearing a lot less music, seeing fewer movies.
Say we have a perfect pay for play system. When new artists want to get into the scene, what will they do?
Damn near give the tunes away!
And that little detail is why a buck a track made sense when it happened.
Well, I easily found $2.7 billion, and I'm sure there's a lot more if you look harder:
https://www.forbes.com/profile/daniel-ek/?sh=5f021fbf46ab
Now, you can argue that he's doing some esoteric thing that's valuable to society, and I disagree, but let's not circle that drain. What you can't argue is that most of that $2.7 billion came from people willing to pay for music, and if we were more efficiently giving musicians money for their music, that $2.7 billion could have gone to musicians.
So I don't buy this idea that there isn't more money. There is, we're just giving it to people like Daniel Ek instead of musicians.
I was there, have lived both times.
Spotify scooped up all those ad-hoc buys and got people a lot more music for the money.
Take a larger view, and a big gain on one form, takes from another. Gaming takes a small hit when a ton of great movies hit the theaters, for example.
And it flexes a little. I am not saying it is a hard wall.
But I am saying for most people, suddenly doubling their entertainment spends is not an option. They just don't have it.
Spotify is going down the same path as the ride sharing companies: burning private and public monies to subsidize consumer habits, then jacking prices up to maintain cashflow. I fully expect Spotify pricing to increase fairly regularly at this point forward, especially if they continue to grow their subscriber base despite higher prices.
The problem is, the hole is so deep your non-major label artist won't be in a good position to negotiate a better deal - the lion's share will go to major labels licensing their massive catalogue to Spotify.
The money for the artist is in touring and licensing in media / commercials / movies. Album sales are for enriching record labels.
My impression is that modern record labels are only relevant because they control payola for radio, and handshake relations with aging executives in other media companies, and probably have lots of inertia from rights and exploitative contracts.
But I've been waiting for the label implosion for the last two decades.
I think this is a dishonest comparison. This is a very high end position, one of the best in the world. It would be like saying “Netflix is paying the Rock $50M for a movie, so actors definitely have the upper hand.”
There’s way fewer actors and writers than programmers so it’s hard to compare, but I don’t think cherry picking salaries and then generalizing very useful (for more than blog views).
And I don't mean things that took a risk that failed to pay off. I mean things that you could take to a Writing 101 class after eight weeks and the students could savage based on what they were taught... and there's no excuse like "the authors understand the rules enough to transcend them", the writing is bad on the standard measures and also had no other redeeming values either.
It's actually sort of weird that they see this as some sort of cost center to be managed. They already don't seem to care about it at all. From that point of view, using AI makes sense; they don't seem to care how bad the writing is, so why pay for it at all?
Though it seems to me the effort put into AI would cover an awful lot of writing no matter how you slice it. That one $900K job won't be the only one. Will a team of super highly paid AI specialists absolutely be cheaper than actual writers?
It would be super ironic to start an "AI writing startup" and then do what a lot of the AI startups have done behind the hood and hire humans to do the initial work. Why invest in risky tech? Just AI-wash the writing! Everybody wins!
I would note the writer vs ML product manager roles aren’t related. If you click through there’s nothing about generative AI or LLM or SD or anything related to content generation. Looks like run of the mill ML role, likely associated with recommendation engines or some other engagement generation role.
N.b., I don’t think they would pay $900k for a writer unless the writer is some heavy hitter star power writer. Rather than a salary my understanding is these roles draw down royalties, which as a variable annuity can be worth far more or far less, but encompass a lot more risk. Also amongst the creative talent they often make the least afaik.
Maybe it's relevant because it's yet another example showing that leaving wages up to the market isn't creating good results.
There's no doubt in my mind that a society which paid teachers more than lawyers would be a better society than the one we have.
We need far more teachers than lawyers and the skills required to, say, teach second graders, are not as advanced as those required to pass the bar exam. I’m all for public support of teachers, but it’s easy to say you don’t value a lawyer until you need one. Having fewer and worse lawyers means we will have worse laws and more injustice.
To wit, public defenders make on average slightly less than a teacher. Given the quality of justice you can expect from a public defender, and the severe lack of them, is this a positive outcome? If you were accused of something falsely would you voluntarily use the public defender vs hiring the best you can afford?
Why do you assume suddenly that I'm proposing dictatorship? This is a straw man.
Laws regulating the ability of corporations to bust unions, along with rules on fair distribution of profits including limits on highest-to-lowest compensation ratios, would go a long way to ensure people who are integral to companies aren't always getting shafted because people higher up oh-so-surprisingly decide to compensate themselves instead of their workers.
> We need far more teachers than lawyers and the skills required to, say, teach second graders, are not as advanced as those required to pass the bar exam.
No one will pass the bar exam if they haven't mastered the skills taught to second graders. Lawyers can't exist without teachers.
> To wit, public defenders make on average slightly less than a teacher. Given the quality of justice you can expect from a public defender, and the severe lack of them, is this a positive outcome?
The problem you're describing is one of disparity: it's not just that public defenders are paid so little, it's also that prosecutors are paid so much. Public defenders are an outlier: a huge number of lawyers are corporate lawyers who create an environment of caveat emptor which is hugely destructive in our society.
> If you were accused of something falsely would you voluntarily use the public defender vs hiring the best you can afford?
Have you considered that I might not selfishly be thinking only of myself, and that I might want a legal system that is just even for people who are poor? The argument you're making only appeals to rich sociopaths who don't care about the poor.
Prosecutors don’t make more than defenders. They typically make exactly the same. A quick Kagi would confirm this.
I’m not sure how you’re getting to diagnosing me with a psychiatric disorder. I would be thrilled if the public funding model paid public defenders and teachers substantially more. But you would still seek the best lawyer you could afford, and that’s not my fault or a psychiatric condition on my part. That’s human nature. Thus lawyers are paid a lot. When you need a good lawyer, you pay for a good lawyer.
I have no doubt it would be much worse.
> Netflix could buy 10 top quality screenplays per year with the cash they’ll spend on that one job [$900k]. They must have big plans for AI.
Most films Netflix makes have a budget of over $5M. According to the WGA agreement with the studios writers get paid a MINIMUM of $175k for those films. Which means you could buy 5 of the cheapest screenplays on the market for $900k. But if you think paying WGA minimums will get you top quality scripts you're in for a surprise.
[ref]: https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf
Back in the gatefold vinyl days how many people were saying “oh wow my favorite recording engineer worked on this?” Virtually nobody is likely the answer.
I think his real problem is most people aren’t as in ti music as he is, have bad taste, are bland, and content with a normie life full of normie songs and normie shows.
But that’s a big market.
Similarly, if an album had string arrangements, or extra horns or percussion, and the performers were listed in the album art, ordinary listeners did follow up on that and seek out those performers’ own recordings.
Nobody else even knew or cared.
I don't think this is correct. Spotify doesn't pay a fixed rate per stream. Instead, they reserve some part of revenue for artist compensation, and then divide that based on the amount of streams and artist- or label-specific deals.
Straight from the horse's mouth: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
> We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders. To calculate net revenue, we subtract the money we collect but don’t get to keep. This includes payments for things like taxes, credit card processing fees, and billing, along with some other things like sales commissions. From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.
> We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder.
> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.
Though I guess that means that lukewarm users with few streams cause higher per-stream rates, which might be indirectly beneficial to Spotify.
That's not to say that the system is completely fair. Presumably, bigger artists and labels get preferential treatment in share calculations. Also, if I listen to only Ben Prunty's FTL soundtrack for a month, he doesn't get all the net revenue from my subscription; those streams are diluted in the global stream counts.
> It looks like they’re hellbent on replacing creative professionals with bots, and the faster the better.
The linked AI job listing doesn't say that at all.
You can find the listing here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/278437235 It says:
> Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence is powering innovation, from personalization for members, to optimizing our payment processing and other revenue-focused initiatives.
The author has either ignored the facts or imposed their own ideas on to the situation. This take breaks down as soon as you check any of the facts.
I'd say the author is being necessarily and reasonably cynical given what we've seen in just the past year (for example, the SAG and WGA aren't striking for nothing).
> It starts with creating an exciting music interface that celebrates artistry and creativity.
It's a music player. You play/pause and scrub or go next, how are you supposed to make that more exciting? I don't want unnecessary visuals or music lore on my screen, I want a music player. And so do most other people who put music on, minimize the app and do something else.
If you want blah background music, I recommend Radio Coast.[1] This is an amusing exercise in copyright avoidance. Seeburg, the jukebox maker (1900 or so to 1979, bankrupt), had a side business in background music. To avoid paying royalties to record companies, they had their own orchestra and recording studio in Chicago. They'd license the underlying song, which is a compulsory license with a statutory rate. Then Seeburg made their own phonograph records, running at a nonstandard speed, with a nonstandard groove width, and a nonstandard hole size, to be played on a special Seeburg 1000 player. The player played a big stack of records over and over; it wasn't random access, like a jukebox. The records were not copyrighted, because that required a filing back when they were doing this.
So someone got one of these obsolete machines, refurbished it, and collected enough of the special records to set up a free streaming service.
If anything, listening to music on the radio, either while around the house or in a car, feels like it was the primary mode that most people listened to music in until fairly recently. Albums were expensive! These days, you can buy a set of nice headphones for not all that much money, but a solid receiver and speakers and your record or CD player of choice used to be a serious investment only for the dedicated.
Even with all of that, I question your implication that people just want "background music" and have no care or taste in the matter. Most people I know have vastly different choices of what we listen to while working or driving or exercising. I know I specifically keep different music loaded on my phone for walks or drives vs. when I'm at home and working or relaxing. Just because they're not trying to pick up on the finer points of a quality recording doesn't mean they're only "listening" to music with dismissive quotes any more than my parents who used to listen to the radio for hours for that new song they liked to come back around to record it on a cassette were just "listening".
Me. Sure, occasionally other people put on musak and I'm forced to have that distracting background noise to whatever I'm trying to do, but when I listen to music by choice, I'm listening to music and that's it. Maybe if there's someone else there I'll talk about the music while listening to it. I don't generally listen to music while driving because it's distracting, although I'll acquiesce to a passenger who wants to listen to music.
And no, I don't listen to classical music or buy overpriced audio cables (I don't buy audio cables of any kind). Cheap wired headphones are generally adequate to capture all the sound a FLAC file can produce, and I tend to think that people who do more than that aren't audiophiles as much as audio gearheads. Which is fine, but it's not about the music it's about the equipment. Sound canceling might have some value, but I prefer to simply listen to music in a quiet place.
I assumed that this comment was starting with sarcasm, and I had to re-read it to realize that, no, you really think music has become the new hardcover book.
I assure you that humans, on the whole, listen to just as much music as they ever have. I read yesterday that Taylor Swift fans in Seattle created a 2.3 Richter event from sustained, passionate cheering and jumping. That's Beatles level shit.
Vinyl LPs are such a hot commodity that they literally cannot build new pressing plants fast enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNj60awEiM
Don't get me wrong: I'm not judging you nor do I believe that people whose priorities have shifted away from music are less awesome than people who still make mixtapes for their loved ones.
I do think that you are making an unfortunate correlation between "me and my in-group" and "everybody", though.
And this absolutely furthers your point because I hate Spotify and all streaming services for this purpose.
It's just not a thing like streaming tv. I need to know I have the song forever, I need to know that I will not be interrupted.
Meaning, I have a separate mp3 player. For the car, the USB drive is EASILY the best thing that ever happened. Youtube and friends on social media is more than enough for discovery.
As for acquiring, well, don't ask don't tell?
It might not be your thing, but I frequently use 'active listening to music' as a way to relax after a long day. I don't have ultra high end kit either. I'm doing most of my listening on entry level Grado headphones attached to my laptop. I have a hard time believing that I'm unique in this activity.
Completely off topic but was this a typo or has this expression now gained currency outside the subcontinent?
And then there's the end about music and the problem with Spotify losing money and generally sucking. He writes, "There is a fix for this. But it won’t be easy. It starts with creating an exciting music interface that celebrates artistry and creativity. If they do that, then it’s easy to boost the monthly rate." Sure. So Ted Gioia, if you have the vision, then work hard and do it.
There really isn't, not an easy or simple one, anyway. People across the board are forgetting the fundamentals.
You USED to need studios and distributors because it actually did used to cost significant money to make a movie or show (film and cameras etc) , or to record and distribute an album (putting songs on plastic artifacts.)
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE TODAY.
You literally can make a movie or show or song or album FOR FREE and have it go everywhere FOR FREE. This is the internet. That's what it does.
Grammarly can get lost too.
Hell, let's exclude things that were written by a committee's input instead of 1-2 professional writers.