Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is very good at negotiating sweetheart deals. I am convinced that they negotiated something similar with Sony, because on the PS4, Spotify is the only app I have found that can play overlay audio while you're playing a game to replace the background music.

View on HN

Does anyone know the social mechanisms behind the scenes that allow them to negotiate such effective deals?

Spotify is deeply in bed with the traditional labels/music industry and that industry seems to be able to "move" stuff easily from what I've seen. I always have a hard time visualizing all the components at play here though.

I think it is because spotify's biggest competitor is Apple. And both Google and Sony really doesn't want Apple to control the music streaming industry as it could affect their device sales.

It's interesting because Google has their own competing music streaming platform, but they still seem to give preferential treatment to Spotify. For example Spotify was the only service that worked with the Android clock app when they added the ability to use music with alarms. YouTube Music support didn't land until a year later.

Because they know that their service sucks and will probably get shut down. I'm speaking as a customer of both

> And both Google and Sony really doesn't want Apple to control the music streaming industry as it could affect their device sales.

Is that true? My Alexa and Sonos devices work great with Apple Music.

Becuase there is competetion now so Apple has to play well. In cases where Apple doesn't have any competetion or is significantly ahead like iMessage or FaceTime or satellite message, Apple has a history of creating ecosystem.

when a company that produces hardware that plays music has control over the industry that delivers music to that hardware they might be tempted to make their hardware handle that music better.

Apple might not even do that, but given Google's documented behaviors about making their sites work better with Chrome they might expect that Apple would if they could.

> when a company that produces hardware that plays music has control over the industry that delivers music to that hardware…

FWIW, Apple doesn't control the music industry. Spotify has more than twice the marketshare of Apple Music, so I'd imagine that (for now) Spotify has commensurate influence over the music industry.

> …they might be tempted to make their hardware handle that music better.

Maybe Google would, but (to my original point) Apple doesn't tie their media services to their devices.¹ I think it's worth keeping in mind that you really can't equate Google's evil tendencies to Apple's (and vice-versa) because their business models are completely different.

¹ https://www.apple.com/ae/apple-tv-app/devices/

>FWIW, Apple doesn't control the music industry.

ok but your previous comment was in response to

>>And both Google and Sony really doesn't want Apple to control the music streaming industry as it could affect their device sales.

>Is that true? My Alexa and Sonos devices work great with Apple Music.

so when I replied

> when a company that produces hardware that plays music has control over the industry that delivers music to that hardware…

it is meant to imply that I am answering

>is that true?

with - Yes, that is true BECAUSE...

and my statement

> …they might be tempted to make their hardware handle that music better.

followed by

>Apple might not even do that, but given Google's documented behaviors

should be interpreted as me saying

Apple doesn't tie their media services to their devices (although that might change if they found it very beneficial). But Google is evil and would tie their media services to their devices therefore they might expect that other companies would do the same.

The music industry is, indeed, notoriously litigious / negotiation-heavy.

Pure speculation: by necessity, Spotify has probably gotten pretty good at those things too. I would bet they've got some pretty heavy hitters in the dealmaking department.

A big portion of Spotify's ownership is held by the big music companies, including Sony. I learned this from watching The Playlist on Netflix. (It's way over-dramatized but you can learn a thing or two)

Spotify started the EU antitrust case on Apple:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23618264/eu-antitrust-cas...

Also of course, Spotify is somewhat of a monopoly of its own, or a chosen 'winner' by the music industry at large colluding.

> Also of course, Spotify is somewhat of a monopoly of its own, or a chosen 'winner' by the music industry at large colluding.

Spotify has ~30% of the market, Apple Music, Tencent, and Amazon have each ~13%, YouTube Music another ~9%.

That's far from a monopoly...

I would guess Google needed Spotify to prioritize the Android App.

And as far as I can tell, the music labels (Warner/Sony/Universal) need Spotify to be able to negotiate with Apple/Google/Amazon.

This made me think of GTA Vice City I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) where one of the radio stations played local audio files, loved that.

I have a feeling the original '97 GTA could kinda do that. Or maybe GTA2. You could find the directories on disk where the radio music was stored and just copy in your own stuff.

I recall TrackMania Sunrise was like this. That game was made to be modded, so it kinda made sense they made replacing audio easy.

Side note: After watching The Stig's laps while listening to dull audio on Top Gear, I tried replacing TrackMania's music with very soothing music. My times got better.

Original GTA they were CD tracks on the disk unless this changed in a later release.

I vaguely recall that '97 GTA allowed you to eject the disc after the game started and load an audio CD that would play when you selected the custom radio station.

This feature is in euro truck simulator.

Depends on which version of Vice City you played. The original PS2 version would not have had access to a hard drive.

GTA: San Andreas on the XBOX did allow you to use such a feature, provided that you had used the XBOX's disc drive to rip the audio CDs yourself. I recall letting the XBOX rip all of my System of a Down CDs circa 2005 for expressly this purpose.

PC ports, IDK. Probably.

Oh yeah I distinctly remember playing Deftones over and over and over from local files on the PC version, to the point that all I can think about when I see GTA or hear Minerva is the other one.

Fun fact: Vib-Ribbon (for the PS1) allowed you to swap out the game disc for a music CD to play to your favorite songs.

So did Ridge Racer.

After loading, the entire game (from opening screen to ending scene) fit completely into the PSX's tiny RAM.

And the in-game background music was just regular CD audio tracks on the game disk, which was easy since the drive wasn't used for anything else anyway.

Open the drive, swap disks for your choice of audio CD, and it was happy to play those tracks instead.

(Or, alternatively: Put the Ridge Racer game disk into a regular CD player and enjoy the synthwave soundtrack all on its own.)

A lot of original Xbox games had that feature. It was super unique at the time

They later extended it on the Xbox 360 to allow you to link in your Windows Vista machine to stream your MP3's straight to it

Playing Halo 3's campaign to Queen was a great experience back in 2007

> They later extended it on the Xbox 360 to allow you to link in your Windows Vista machine to stream your MP3's straight to it

The Xbox 360 expanded on the feature in some neat ways -- if you had an iPod or other portable player, you could plug that in via USB, it supported generic DLNA shares (so you could play music from Kodi/XBMC running on a PC), and some (most?) games would flag cutscene audio vs. in-game audio, which would allow the system to pause the user-provided audio and fall back to the game's soundtrack for cutscenes.

That's fantastic, I'll have to try it out next time I get my 360 plugged in.

It also had global settings for controller vibration, inverted camera.. perhaps some others? I really miss those in future generations and on PC.

What's crazy is those 360 profile settings still apply to 360 games on modern Xboxes. I was really surprised to see it remembered something I set on my old 360 like 10 years back.

> PC ports, IDK. Probably

Yes. Source:

https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Custom_Radio_Stations

I remember this on GTA III, played on Windows XP. I think the radio station was called "MP3 Player", and there was an empty folder in the game's application folder to which you could add MP3s.

GTA 3 certainly did. I remember because I basically spent a few weeks listening to Weezer's Green album (that came out a few months prior) over and over while playing the game.

Excite Truck on the Wii also had that feature. You could load mp3s onto the SD card. It was a launch title, so I was expecting most Wii games to support that feature, but I think only a couple ended up with it.

Correction, it works with Apple Music as well[0], and with local music files[1].

As for why, it seems like those were just the only two that bothered to integrate their apps with Playstation. Which kind of makes sense, as Spotify and Apple Music are the two largest streaming services currently (by user numbers[2]). Youtube could arguably claim to be more popular, but their YT music app feels half-baked even on the primary platforms (iOS and Android). And the other ones right behind are Tencent Music and Amazon Music, which are rather unpopular, at least in the US.

0. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/subscriptions/how-...

1. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/play-vide...

2. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/music-streaming-stats

Weird framing of those linked numbers: Spotify (30%) is way out in front and Apple (13.7%), Tencent (13.4%), and Amazon (13.3%) all have similar market share.

Sony was a major investor in Spotify, reportedly worth $1.5B at IPO[1]. I'm not sure how much stock they've held since then.

[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sonys-stake-in-spotif...

Related question. Why don't any games allow you to replace the in game music with something else? Is this patent encumbered or something? I figured by now, I'd be able to simply go into settings, choose an audio provider (e.g. YT Music, spotify, local, etc) and have a custom BGM soundtrack play.

It’s not necessarily that game devs“don’t allow it,” and more like “didn’t bother to implement that feature and integrate with those services.”

Which is a really fair point. Because why waste time on this, when a user who cares about playing their own music can just open a browser tab or spotify/apple music/local/etc. app, and it will work literally in any game anywhere. And Playstation supports Spotify/Apple Music/local music playback during games natively, without any hacks or workarounds (like using the built-in web browser) as well. I assume Xbox has similar functionality, but I don’t have much experience with it.

The only games i’ve seen that allow (limited) in-game audio provider choice are those that have an in-game radio feature (older GTA games, Forza, etc.), so that the custom user music kinda works “in-universe” in those games.

Smiling thinking back to Quake 1, which only took up a small fraction of the CD for the installer and would play any audio CD that was in your drive for you :D

Lots of discussion in the replies to this comment about games which do permit that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38366126

On PC you can just mute the music and play anything you want in the background. So there's no need for a special support.

That's not the same. Most in game music changes volume during gameplay.

The OG Xbox used to allow you to rip music locally to the device and then playback the music in games which supported it. It was a pretty nice feature for its day.

Apple Music can do the same on PS5.

True, but in case of Sony, Spotify replaced "PlayStation Music", a competing service of Sony which simply didn't scale, and the only service able to overlay music over any game

> the only service able to overlay music over any game

Able to? Or allowed to?

those are the same thing in this context. obviously it’s not that spotify is the only company capable of figuring it out. what’s left? sony blessing spotify.

It could also be there is only enough profit for one, so the game theory equilibrium is zero. So Spotify could be the only player large enough for Sony to profitably encourage. Although that theory doesn’t account for them not giving the option of free music players written by hobbyists who don’t care about profit or labels but only serve indy content

PlayStation Music (or actually "Music unlimited" as it was called) was the only music application able/allowed to run in background while a game was running. Other (hobbyist) music players are not allowed, likely because it would make the available resources to a game less predictable, so harder to optimizer for the console...

As many others, Sony found later that it's not worth it to operate a own streaming service, and probably made a deal with Spotify where Sony provided the initial application, Spotify provided the service and potentially pays some additional revenue share to Sony.

It's a story from a moment in time where every distributor/company thought they could do a better/more profitable music streaming service than Spotify...

Apple Music and local playback supports background play while a game is running. I doubt it's any of this "allowed to" nonsense and simply those other apps just didn't add support for the PlayStation.

Game console is strict about background process usage than a phone.

Okay, and?

Also many cellular providers (esp developing countries) have sweetheart deals for serving Spotify data without it counting towards your data limits.

Facebook has/had that too in many markets.

It helps that Sony is also a big player in the music rights business so it was probably in Sony’s interest to make it easy.

Spotify is also the only app apart from YouTube Music that works in Google Home devices (at least in my region).

> Spotify is very good at negotiating sweetheart deals.

Indeed, and that skillset has given them an advantage in the market. Things working as expected. Does it suck for their competitors? Absolutely. Is it illegal? I don't think so.

Anyone is free to fork android and make their own app store. A luxury thanks to open source. The network effect is real but the market isn't intended to be "fair", it's brutal.

If they were “very good at it”, why haven’t they turned a profit…ever?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com