Streaming is changing the sound of music
wsj.com
wsj.com
But this also means that the platforms should have an equal incentive to make listeners listen to longer ones. Spotify seems to pay out about $7 billion / year in music licensing. If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%. That's saving like $35 million / year for each second! Move the average up by 10 seconds, and it's enough to actually make Spotify profitable.
Considering how much of the modern music listening is driven by algorithms either directly or through recommendations, it seems like it'd be incredibly easy for a streaming platform to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the longer songs being what gets listened to. That in turn should make the artists record longer songs. Why isn't that happening?
Or is it happening, and the current state is just the equilibrium we've arrived at when those competing incentives were resolved?
This isn't how music royalties work - rather, Spotify (and most other on demand streaming services) pay out a % of their net revenue to rights holders. This % does not change based on how many streams there are in total, but it IS distributed proportionally based on the number of streams, so it's more profitable for a music rightsholder to have more streams (the topic of the article).
Some high level information: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
Navigating "rain sounds" has become a lot more difficult lately specifically due to record labels complaining, particularly if you want one continuous 8hr stream. Instead all I can find now are playlists with a bunch of things I don't want. If I didn't have my favorites already saved I wouldn't be able to find them at all now.
https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-group-and-dee...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-07/univer...
Interesting. I thought Universal/Warner/Sony were propping up Spotify as leverage for when they need to negotiate with Apple/Google/Amazon.
https://www.engadget.com/spotify-almost-removed-white-noise-....
Way ahead of their time, as usual.
Seriously though, it does suggest that having a "hook" early in a song was always a good idea, commercially speaking.
Some of the iconic classical pieces start with a "hook" too. Or, at least, a very compelling motive.
These longer songs, like Foreplay / Long Time, have a lot more going on. More ideas. More sections. Dramatic crescendos. Extended instrumental parts. They're harder to write.
The standard verse-chorus-bridge structures are popular because it's a really damn good way to write a song.
The core of the song may only be 3 minutes, and that is what you get in radio edits. Half my bought music collection comes from when I DJd, and you can't really throw the full length songs on shuffle else you'd spend all your time listening to minute long intros and outros.
Speaking of classics for the ages, Nickelback's How You Remind Me drops the hook (and title) at about 15s.
Classic (especially 1980s?) rock seems to have lots of chorus first songs from the likes of Guns N' Roses, Cheap Trick, Journey, Stevie Nicks, Bon Jovi, Slade/Quiet Riot, David Bowie, etc.
Many rock songs start with great hooks/riffs though. I am particularly fond of 20 foot tall guitar riff hooks/intros as practiced by classic hard rock and metal bands, often by doubling the riff/hook on lead guitar and bass.
Rock bands seem to excel at intros, and even the lengthy ones can be riveting.
And some song intros are so great that they overshadow the rest of the song.
Squeeze's "Up the Junction" [1] has no chorus and lyrics ends with the title.
Hem's "Not California" [2] closes with the bridge.
An oddity that has become increasingly popular over nearly 20 years (breaking records for stream counts and singles chart tenure) is the Killers' Mr. Brightside, which only has one (repeated) verse. Which probably makes it a good singalong anthem.
It also starts with a nice (if short) guitar riff/hook.
The start of Judas Priest's "Screaming for Vengeance" album does this with "The Hellion" blending in to "Electric Eye". "Electric Eye" also has one of the greatest riff/hooks in metal starting off right at the beginning of the song.
Though I feel very bad writing ^^^. The rest of those pieces are very worth listening to. I listen more often to the first movement of the Ninth.
Is it by design? Was the composer aware that a certain part would end up being that one exceptionally popular one?
The probabiliy that a part not at the beginning is (becomes) popular is higher than for the part at the beginning, because there's more parts not at the beginning than the one at the beginning.
Many early great hip hop albums that rely heavily on sampling are not on streaming services because the sampled record companies can't come to an agreement, and I'm sure today's artists see the hassle and minimise their sampling.
Examples are Frank Ocean's 'Nostalgia, Ultra' and De La Soul's '3 Feet High and Rising'
>De La Soul’s sampling artistry made digitizing the catalog they built over their career a monumental task, as samples previously cleared for use on vinyl, cassettes and CDs had to be redone for streaming.
https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2023/03/03/de-la-souls-music-cata...
My argument is that people would rather avoid doing this kind of thing
In some cases the new hits have multiple levels of sampling; Latto’s Big Energy has a remix with Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, and both sample Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love. Charli XCX interpolates both Hey Mickey and Robyn for her new song from the Barbie movie.
The barbie soundtrack has a massive budget so you can just pay for the samples.
I remember Trevor Horn writing in his book, labels asked him for 12" mixes of singles he produced in the 80's. And it was mostly new wave and pop stuff.
I guess the purpose was the same though, to produce a more danceable version.
Literally everyone's preferred era of music is someone's "todays music is bad rabble rabble." Even classical was considered inferior and simplistic by people who preferred music from the baroque period. Like its original critics literally said that classical was too repetitive.
Ravel's "Bolero", anyone? I hate that composition. Even Emerson Lake Palmer couldn't fix it.
(Incidentally, I do find Classical music quite repetitive — although on the other hand I’ve long enjoyed Boléro. Curious!)
My gripe is the newer recommendations algos seem worse than those from 10 years ago, like there was nothing wrong with simple "people who liked this song also played these songs" I listen to many genres so I think my listening profile is a bit diluted/varied
Now there is a single leading global music streaming service. You don’t just have to deal with the generalities of the medium, you have to deal with Spotify’s specific idiosyncraticies.
I think it’s cool he played with the system, that is art to me, shame “the central committee” deemed it as unorthodox.
Most people would think not. So you should pay by play, rather than per minute.
YouTube is different because number of ads shown is roughly proportional to video length. Variance in video durations is much, much higher than variance in song durations.
And 30 seconds is much longer than most people skipping through songs, and much shorter than most songs, and a nice round number.
But more importantly, for popular music, song length doesn't correlate to work or effort, generally speaking. A 6 minute song doesn't take 50% more effort than a 4 minute one.
(Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.)
Pink Floyd just read your comment and it looks like they’re headed back to the studio! Fingers crossed…
This makes sense. Every time I listen to 4’33” I am moved to tears and the thought of losing even a few seconds of that composition is abhorrent.
The goal was never to pay commensurate to the effort that was put in.
The company became Apple Music Classical, so I guess it worked well?
> Before the Temptations sing a word, an instrumental introduction featuring organ, guitar, bass, and a hi-hat cymbal ebbs and flows for more than four minutes.
Seems like this should refer to about 2 minutes of instrumental intro based (ironically?) on my listening to the ca. 7 minute version on Spotify. Am I missing something?
And in aggregate pop music has always been objectively terrible.
I prefer to think of it as that streaming liberated music from those restrictions.
That said, some files on a Spotify server do feel a bit empty compared to a physical LP with an artful cover.
There are 2 other significant factors at play. The first is that not all streams are created equal. It is relatively well known that the large studios have cut deals on payouts per stream, eg. $0.0029 vs $0.002, depending on the artist's following, age of the album, etc. But, a lesser known fact is that not all streams are created equal in a number of countries. Songs played is sequence on an album, or as part of a playlist, may attract a lesser premium than individual plays, and radio broadcast format pays less still. How it works depends on the jurisdiction/contract. With this in mind, consider how you listen to songs on Spotify. You may search for songs and albums, but a large proportion of the music you hear probably comes from autoplay, where Spotify matches what it 'thinks' you might like to hear.
With the above in mind, Spotify has been acquiring podcast companies and building them into their client for several years. There is undoubtedly an audience for podcasts, but the business case is that they do not have any of the licensing legacy issues that music has, where Spotify gets to keep a bigger piece of the pie.
The point in the article - that 'songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and artists are collaborating across genres' is mostly a result of artists producing to satisfy a recommendation algorithm that balances retaining listeners, whilst minimising licensing costs.
The collaborating across genres is also explainable; several years ago, Spotify bought a company called Echonest (amongst others), which was essentially a large graph database mapping songs and their musical attributes (genres), onto which a recommendation engine was built - it's worth looking up their whitepapers on matrix factorisation at scale if they still exist. The corrolary though, is that similar listening habits could be used to cross-recommend songs with a good degree of accuracy.
There are also a smattering of other considerations to take into account - a lot of the large playlists not operated by Spotify are pay to play - if you're a new artist, you can pay to feature on playlists for a given genre. There is no official channel for doing this, but the practice is widespread. These playlists make more money if they have 50 x 3 minute songs, than 30 x 5 minute songs.
I'm sure you can see where this is going - a cost/engagement optimisation engine, along with a recommendation engine where artist remuneration is more or less directly proportional to the number of people that are happy to listen to it if it is played for them.
The artist is rewarded if they produce a larger number of songs, suitably homogenised to appeal to the mass market and sound familiar to what they already listen to, and to hit as many of the genres possible to maximise inclusion in recommendations. Unless you are one of the few exceptional artists, you are going to be punished for creativity vs. playing it safe.
There's no easy fix for this, assuming it needs fixing. All media streaming platforms in the long run chase the marginal user, who by and large wants average content almost by definition.
Tweaking the remuneration model would be a good starting point, where instead of Spotify taking eg. 30% of the subscription, and paying $0.0018-0.0032 per stream depending on artist, if instead the model worked as Spotify taking 30%, and each artist payout for a user's streams was calculated as ($10 * 0.7) * (number of plays by user of artist songs / total plays in given period), one would likely see artists serving niches or esoteric music to be better remunerated, albeit at the expense of the studios managing household name artists.
There's always been "music people play to be social" with a line from that to "music people play to make some extra cash at the local shindig" which is the essetial core of commercial music - if you want the money you have to appeal to the crowd.
Anyhow, for what it's worth - back in the day we'd drift into the nearest big town once a month or so and typically have an all night get together | jam session with these people (and others) .. it's classic folk but particular to a specific bit of the world:
I once read something about a famous music producer and/or mastering engineer who said his mixing and mastering goes through two first passes: first on his studio monitors, then - before testing the final master on real-world speakers for final polishing - he would adjust everything in the mix again to sound good one his cheapest Mackie studio monitors.
Can't seem to find the original article, so maybe I mixed up some details.
Instead I found this 2011 forum thread:
https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/720856-mix-engin...
Also, I agree with OP, I hate how mainstream productions nowadays target the lowest common denominator of speakers. Of course they have to, but in this current age of phone speakers it really starts to show annoying effects.
Small BT speakers and even in-ears have become surprisingly OK though, also for music which doesn't participate in the loudness wars as much. Also seems like these might be what most music is consumed on.
I don't know the specs on lower frequency cutoff, dynamics on iPhone etc... I'd still guess the car radio would feel more powerful :)
But I'm not entirely sure anymore tbh.
Back in the day I checked out my nephew's Beats headphones and quite honestly thought they were broken because the bass on them was pumped up so much that it was a muddy mess. The mixer's job is getting harder and harder with the tradeoffs they have to make between phone speakers with no bass and vanity headphones with nothing but bass.
"Radio" played an infinitesimally small amount of the music that was being produced. If you wanted to discover new music, the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio. Spotify is both 'radio' and a music discovery service, and global in nature, so its impact is much greater. And unlike radio stations that tend to specialize in a certain sound (pop, classical, rock, jazz, hiphop), Spotify mixes everything together. A lot of contemporary music is 'genre-less' as a result. That was never the case with radio.
Radio changed music as much as streaming did, and before streaming, MTV did too.
The BBC's John Peel: Peel was one of the first broadcasters to play psychedelic rock and progressive rock records on British radio. He is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of many genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop. Fellow DJ Paul Gambaccini described Peel as "the most important single person in popular music from approximately 1967 through 1978. He broke more important artists than any individual." [wikipedia] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geI2TbD3ihM
Peel ran his show on a state broadcaster network (BBC Radio 1), in a country where the state provided significant arts funding until the 1980s or so. That created a culture where it was possible to record and perform music full-time without living on the street. Many bands met at state-funded, zero-tuition art colleges. Those days are long gone.
Really? What would people do, then?
I grew up in the 70s/80s in a small town. No music store, not even a Walmart until the mid-80s.
Pre-MTV, radio was pretty much the only mechanism for hearing new music, excepting maybe small doses of new stuff via SNLs musical act or someone on the talk shows.
I don’t think much (popular) contemporary music is genre-less. Fair number of crossover songs, maybe, but that’s not new.
- Going to a record store and asking for recommendations
- Subscribing to magazines and fan clubs
- Going to festivals to see Band A and ended up liking Bands B, C and D
- If early 2000s, going to sites like Allmusic.com and Last.fm to find curated lists online
As a bit more background, it was a memo sent to then-CEO of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton by Dave Goldberg[2] who was most recently known as CEO of SurveyMonkey but had been the Director of Marketing Strategy at Capital Records in the early 90s.
I'm not entirely sure when it was sent but according to my notes, it was originally sent in the form of an email, and was released as part of the Sony Pictures hack from 2014.
Anyway, the gist of the memo recommends that back-catalogue becomes the core of the business, as that's where the most streams occur with the new release business being greatly scaled down with a focus on music that will have longevity.
> Music is becoming a purely digital product. A digital-only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs.
> Catalog needs to be defined much more broadly to include all music that hasn¹t been created in the last 2 years
> With catalog providing the base profits, new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money (justified by the long term catalog income stream of those songs)
> This will bias new releases to genres like rock and country that typically have had strong catalog. These also happen to be the genres that don’t have expensive producers so more music can be created for the same A&R dollars
> Artist contracts that have large fixed marketing costs will need to be restructured or sold off as there will no longer be headcount to do the work. New releases will be tested on consumers before added money is spent to ensure that it isn’t wasted.
> Internationally, most local repertoire will probably have to be eliminated. The record company will want to sell off the local repertoire or spin out the local labels and focus on English language repertoire globally, unless there is some country that has managed to be profitable on its local repertoire (i.e.Japan)
Not all of this necessarily came to pass, and some of it sounds a little miserable, but it's an interesting peek at some thinking at the time, at least from a consultant.