Step 1: create a music service and get on-board as many musicians as possible with attractive rates and the promise of a future with big audiences and less intermediaries
Step 2: the business grows because you have many famous/good artists in your catalogue
Step 3: Congrats, you are now the #1 musical service in the world! Many people associate "music streaming" with your brand. You get a lot of "musical normies" as customers in the process.
Step 4: start lowering royalties you give to musicians. They will stay anyway because you are the #1 brand and bring listeners
Step 5: add your own music to places where normies just listen to music, without caring who the hell the author is. So, you have to pay less revenue to the rest of artists, because they are now getting less listenings, even if the royalty per listening stays exactly the same.
People can listen to whatever they want- artists that are not being listened to aren’t being stolen from if the money is instead going to other artists that are being listened to. If people don’t care who the artist is but like what they hear, that seems great.
That's why (I assume, I'm not in the music biz) labels stay relevant for now, because they act or sell themselves to artists as some kind of union to protect them from draconian streaming services. But I might be totally wrong on this.
Some really do function like unions: groups of artists sharing the functional/procedural/admin burden that comes with keeping their publishing as Saint Francis of Zappa advocated, or paying someone who cares (perhaps a small indie record shop owner) to do that for them as a side gig.
Some are little more than asset classes for private equity at this point.
that's very likely not the case. hence the issue.
Even if it was, keep in mind these are focused in Sweden. This model may only get worse if an american "label" tries this.
That isn't disintermediating recordlabels. That is just serving customers worse music. Heck, it is disintermediating artists from their audience.
There is no music monopoly and customers have a choice in which music they listen to and what service they use (Spotify, Apple, Google/Youtube, Amazon, Bandcamp, buying CDs).
Surely if users get served worse music, they will dislike it, and move to another service or another way to listen to music.
Changing to another streaming service requires learning a new app, moving over all playlists, and likely means still a pretty bad music suggestion service. Because spotify has a pretty good recommendation engine.
it's not for me. YT was. SoundCloud too. (Now SoundCloud also wants folks to sign in aggressively. I think you can't fast-forward otherwise, but at least listening works without signing in.)
Also ... you can upload to YT and SoundCloud, but not to Spotify. So their catalog is just meh. (So even if their recommendations are great in some genres, in general they are not for everyone.)
for now. Spotify is a market leader with 32%, though.
>if users get served worse music, they will dislike it
how many more twitters, facebooks, and youtubes do we need to show that this is not historically the case?
Ok stop it. This is too much.
the confidence made in this statement is jarring
nah, they will cut out the artist when they figure out how to AI generate this process. It's just begging to be automated.
> artists that are not being listened to aren’t being stolen from if the money is instead going to other artists that are being listened to
you see no conflict of interest with Spofity potentially paying specific "studios" to mass produce slop? The platform that has control over algoithms of what to listen to?
And honestly I don't want anyone making cheaper music directly for spotify. I want an even playing field where everyone gets the same rates. (But preferably with a way to kick out spammers.)
So no freedom for artists that want to market themselves with higher or lower rates? Should the Taylor Swifts of the world not be free to negotiate higher rates? Should not the upstart be able to accept a lower rate in hopes that doing so will get their music more recommended/played by the service?
The unknown upstart's stuff is not being searched for and played. Is that not already the lower rate that they accept? Does the revenue also have to be lower from those few plays they got?
Practically, the big names are not going to accept less than the maximum they can get. Just like almost all people would if they were negotiating multiple equivalent job offers.
If they did it proportionally per subscriber you’d suddenly find money being distributed in a much fairer way.
Instead they divvy it up on a global aggregate basis so even if I were to pay the subscription and just listen to indie artists, my money goes towards pop megastars and artificial slop.
I would hope that the money I paid, after the Spotify cut, went to the artists/labels that own the music I actually listen to, proportionally.
The fact that it goes to some Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga annoys me more than Spotify adding their own slop to slop playlists.
Excessive copyright terms go from incentivizing creating art to incentivizing rent seeking. Society also spends a ton more resources litigating disputes and avoiding them.
> music streaming services have to spend most of their money on artists that performed many decades ago, otherwise no one will buy it
Music streaming services should spend their money on artists their customers are listening to, however old that music happens to be.
Eh, I don't think there's a very convincing argument that the world is better off paying artists for things that were made more than 50 years ago.
(Yes I know the person above said 10, I think 10 is too aggressive.)
For negotiating a lower rate... I wouldn't try to make it illegal, but I still don't like it. I have no particular reason to think it will be an upstart or an entity that you could say 'deserves' more attention. And taking less money for more exposure doesn't sound like something I want to encourage.
If you don't want the royalties from Spotify, you can do something like donate them to charity.
Giving Spotify a discount is something I'm not fond of, because you're either hoping they give you better placement which is basically payola, or you're getting nothing back so you're making a donation to a giant corporation.
If this is a metaphor to "I want to work for free", then no. You technically can, but the company will get into trouble for allowing that. Same deal here. Personal projects on your own free time is different from a billion dollar company hiring interns "for exposure".
like how it currently is if you're not some 7+ figure earner? Sure, why not? There was no marketing to Spotify to begin with.
> Should the Taylor Swifts of the world not be free to negotiate higher rates?
Debtable, but given that Taylor swift gets millions times more listens than the average artist, I'm not going to pretend she's somehow being ripped off here. Those kinds of people do indeed have the power to jump to another platform, or make their own.
>Should not the upstart be able to accept a lower rate in hopes that doing so will get their music more recommended/played by the service?
to be frank, no. Just like how some deperate would-be employee should not be able to accept below minimum wage to "kickstart their career". We made these laws precisely because "work for exposure" has failed spectacularly and only hurts the working class.
The owners of Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift’s music are not going to agree to this deal.
Does it actually happen?
I presume those playlists based on mood and Genre is what these songs have been added to.
If the time-horizon is the next listen, it's terrible, as it doesn't care if it revolts the user so badly that they leave the platform immediately. This is bad for the platform, too, so they won't do it for long.
If it's very long term, then it's not as bad because it takes into account users listening more often and over a longer period of time. One way of getting additional longer term listens is including signals like tastes of similar users and other things many of us music-lovers would consider "good". And the profit part means including signals like cost-per-stream of each song. A very long time-horizon requires finding good tradeoffs between all these signals.
My guess is the time-horizon is monthly to quarterly. This is because of market pressures (public markets demand quarterly results) and the practicality of measuring the results. You can't measure/improve infinite time-horizon optimization.
This will still have the effect of selecting for users that aren't as sensitive to what they are hearing. They will not leave as quickly. These are the users the platform wants, as these users afford the platform more leeway in shifting the tradeoff from quality signals to cost-per-stream. Eventually, this will push out many of us music-lovers and the artists we love. Once this reaches a tipping point, there will be room in the market for another service to cater to music-lovers. But, given market pressures, they will almost certainly walk the same path as Spotify in the long term.
For me, the implication is to own my own music. I always have and always will. I only use streaming platforms for discovery. But as soon as I decide I like something enough, I buy it. I almost always buy albums, not individual songs. That lets me see if I want to follow that artist more deeply. This is expensive and time-consuming relative to streaming. It's dirt cheap relative to what I get out of music.
If they do, what is the issue?
People are fine consuming shit, they always were. Why would I be surprised that they are fine consuming shit music that Spotify add to slop playlists with the purpose of increasing their own profits? This is just a logical consequence of how things always were.
Similarly, this isn't an active choice of users. And the harm isn't that they are listening to filler, it's that during their random listening, they aren't coming across any new good music. They are prevented from widening their horizons.
They aren't actively choosing this. Spotify deceives them into thinking this is music chosen because it is likely the users will like this music.
What I buy in the supermarket is very much an active decision. I pay a premium on the bottles of milk because the ones I pick taste better than the supermarket branded ones. I do buy some things that are supermarket branded when I perceive the quality to be similar (or sometimes even better).
This might be different from consumers that due to budget limitations have to buy the cheapest things available, which is why food regulations are very important.
> And the harm isn't that they are listening to filler, it's that during their random listening, they aren't coming across any new good music. They are prevented from widening their horizons.
I presume that people that are actively listening to filler are not appreciating music in their cozy living room while sipping on a glass of fine whiskey.
They just want background noise while they drive, work, study. Something to make their hours more tolerable, or to improve their focus. Apparently the issue is that generic slop from Spotify serves that purpose just as well.
> They aren't actively choosing this.
If the music was bad for them, they would stop listening to it. They don't.
That feels like a false dichotomy. Certainly for myself I can put on a generated playlist hoping to find new stuff I like, whilst still putting on the music as background. As filler.
If spotify has been serving me slop, then they have likely reduced the amount of new music I have added to my collection of things I like. That harms me, and it harms real artists whose music I might like.
In other words, I don't always actively choose the music I listen to. But serving me slop when I don't harms me.
Instead of blaming the company that provided the turds, you should perhaps reconsider your habit of eating feces.
Why do you willingly give a company such as Spotify power over what music you listen to? There are better ways to discover new music if that's what you are after.
Try finding communities of people with similar tastes, sometimes they share their own curated playlists.
Spotify suits my needs perfectly. Even if they do this fake music, it still works well enough. I doubt my half apathy is uncommon. The assumption of prevalence of this attitude is why this change by spotify is so damaging. It will harm my experience a little, and harms artists quite a bit.
I learn about new music the old school way, opening and supporting acts at concerts and recommendations by friends. Sometimes I read a music magazine.
I think I never even clicked on anything on the app front page. I only ever go to library or playlist tab.
They are being given what they are promised.
But I don’t really get the part about “someone should tell Congress”—sir, this is an IKEA.
And I think that's the core of the "problem" here - one group of rentseekers being angry at another because they don't get enough of their cut.
The term “slop” is deliberate—music that sounds bad. Now, if Spotify manages to make music that is better than the music that they can get from the Music Industry? Good for them. I’m a music listener. I just want good music.
Not the worst idea for a business that has lost money every year for 20 years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
This enshittification of the streaming industry comes after decades of enshittification of radio (all clear channel owned in the U.S. now) and the total collapse of any revenue opportunities for making an album for a new artist.
It’s no wonder that the arts are dominated by nepo babies today. People who can treat creativity as an unpaid hobby, taking all risks with no consequences, and short cutting the path to popularity thanks to having family connections and wealth.
Taylor Swift had a rich daddy buy a record label for her. For everyone else, why bother?
Is this actually happening, or is this just a baseless claim?
Taylor Swift (an insanely hard-working artist) started gigging when she was like 12 or 13, and her dad invested in (didn't buy) a startup record label, that built up a roster of artists and did very well on its own terms. (Despite being attached to Toby Keith)
Record labels, publishing companies etc., do not cost much money to start up, actually. His investment was likely small, and also likely comparable to the cost of seeing a child through a college education. Less, perhaps.
A quick google suggests he got 3% ownership for perhaps as little as $130K, which indeed is comparable to the total cost of getting a child through higher education in the USA.
And of course her parents were helping her: she was 13. Did her dad make a pretty smart decision to ensure some influence over the people responsible for his daughter? Of course he did. You would.
More generally: hang around your local (proper) music scene sometimes, and pay attention to which young starter bands have helicopter parents, and which do not. And then try to correlate that with success. Pushy helicopter parents are very often an active disadvantage, because promoters hate working with them. And they are inherently uncool. Even -- perhaps especially -- when they used to be cool.