>"It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof," Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl told Music Business Worldwide earlier this year.
Why not?
Why not?
The easy fix would be to cap track time weight, although that is susceptible to an attack of splitting the white noise in many parts and publishing a playlist.
I guess a possibility could be to somehow compute "song variety" (i.e. entropy in a model where the decoder can generate noise/randomness) and weight by that, but not sure if the available lossy codecs are good enough to do that.
This is not a $38m-in-costs crisis for Spotify, this is a revenue opportunity!
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60 seconds of web seaching later... Sigh. Apparently this sort of marketer manipulation started over three years ago unfortunately: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a36719140/sleep-... and https://www.science.org/content/article/are-advertisers-comi...
... things that make you say: "There oughta be a law..."
I would take the opposite approach and figure out how to maximize the return on the white noise without changing anything for the users; that is, focus on reducing the cost to deliver white noise, work on guidelines for the white noise presenters on how you're going to monetize this without disrupting the fad, etc.
From my perspective, I just can't see how trying to do something special with this fad does anything but immediately kill the fad. There are even FOSS white noise apps, and it won't take long for users to find a free alternative if Spotify messes with the recipe here. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to get Spotify exclusively for the white noise nor that white noise will somehow be a gateway into further Spotify use; I just don't see that the persons who want white noise would use that as an entry point into the service, it's the other way around, with current satisfied users finding out they can also use Spotify to get white noise.
Basically I see this as a happy accident for Spotify that will break if they try to press on it too much. They should treat this like a beneficial fad, and just figure out how to deliver it with the least resource cost, and just enjoy the extra revenue. I don't think it's really going to draw people in except if they play the "yeah, this is legit, we're just gonna get out of your way as much as possible here. enjoy our ads", and ride that money until it dries up.
One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify white noise, then they can dedup, i.e. serve the same sample for every request for white-noise track.
What I find annoying is that people are wasting bandwidth uploading and downloading an undifferentiated hiss. White noise is trivial to generate locally, without consuming any bandwidth.
[Edit] Real white noise has the same energy at every frequency; the total energy in white noise is effectively infinite. Practical "white noise" is low-pass-filtered, which means it's no longer real white noise.
I wonder if these samples are really pink noise, and Spotify is talking nonsense?
Taken to the extreme, you're looping a single datum: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png
Probably not the CEO's point though.
So I think it is reasonable to say that pop music is worth more. Let alone the fact that it takes tons more work to create.
Some people value sleep, others value sounds of nature, others value pop music, and others value money. The take on anything or anyone's value or worth usually tells us more about the appraiser than the subject.
Probably.
I will also point out that, again to the best of my knowledge, extremely little money is made by the music industry on sleeping pills, sleeping hardware (beds, mattresses, pillows) and necessities (covers, duvets), nor on specialised sleeping gear (masks, blinders, apneu machines).
Also: most people try to or need to sleep every night, but can go without a concert for multiple days. If you can sell something on a recurring basis, you don't need to make a ton of profit on each sale to get a nice income stream.
Finally: I think it is harder to improve the sleep of someone struggling with that, than to create entertaining music.
The honestly pretty obvious answer to "why can't Ed Sheerhan's song be worth exactly the same as rain" is that the market demonstrates that there are lots of other places to get free rain noises or white noise or what have you while far fewer non-ad-or-subscription-supported on-demand song playment options.
you know, I've been making this argument to point out monopoly pricing for a long time: how come when I go to a theater, all the movie tickets are the same price? films cost a different amount to make, and some of them are good while others are stinkers. In any other business with a range of products like that, sellers compete on price. Movies are price-fixing-ed.
Edit: this article has some discussion https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/why-do-...
They suffer from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is a feature not a product. Apple, Google and Amazon don’t need to sustain their business based on streaming music. It’s a gesture to make their hardware more attractive.
I'm sure WMG also thinks WMG's contribution to Ed Sheeran's music on the platform is worth the millions they get paid as middlemen. At least the rain is contributing something by making a noise.
white noise content is the best example of "user most likely doesn't active listen" so an ad on it isn't worth much
for other podcasts you would assume people listen (through yes they might not, but Spotify has no practical way of knowing that), so ads are worth more
Additionally the ad industry values that their ad is associated with "premium content" (whatever that means) and while white noise is "highly valuable for the consumer needing it" it's not "premium content" as it doesn't has much content. I mean it's literally noise, well fine tuned noise you could call art, but still noise. So highly valuable but not premium.
This is frankly very very obvious.