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Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

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Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#151

Post by lobster_johnson »

btschaegg wrote: post #113
andymurd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discover weekly is the reason that I pay for Spotify. I'm an old guy that prefers vinyl to mp3s, misses the local record store terribly and hates radio, so modern music distribution sucks for me. I first tried Spotify many years ago, back when playlists were quite new. At the time, I was living in the UK and a big user of last.fm but, out of curiosity, I spent an afternoon building one playlist out of the few tracks…

Funnily enough, Discover Weekly almost never works for me. I like the overall service Spotify provides, but the discovery features don't really cut it for me. As an example, I usually don't really like most music that goes into the house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions. Most songs I find to be horribly repetitive and lacking in good buildup/melodies. However, there are exceptions I can enjoy very well…

You can right-click on any playlist and select "Create Similar Playlist" to generate a new playlist with similar tracks.

I suspect this uses the same underlying algorithms as Discovery Weekly, except that DW uses the songs you've listened to as the basis.

Discover Weekly does suffer from a pollution problem — listen to one style of music for a while, and the entire tone of your DW playlist will change. Fortunately, the above trick works.

There's also the Release Radar [1] playlist, which seems to be an undocumented feature. It gives you new tracks by artists you follow, as well as related artists based on some mysterious metric.

DW explicitly excludes classical music and also jazz, for some reason. I think I've had Arvo Pärt come up, probably because he's a contemporary artist; same with folks like Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZEVXbtE...

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#152

Post by lobster_johnson »

bergjs wrote: post #59

Spotify is the one service I'm happy to pay for. Their weekly mixes keep blowing my mind because it's such a great way to discover new music tailored to my taste. Plus, Spotify connect is a genius way to play music on loudspeakers. It works incredibly well with my Bose speakers. My impression is that they will continue to innovate in all kinds of areas so I think they have a good chance of winning. I needed to write…

Don't forget about Release Radar [1], their apparently secret feature that tracks new releases by artists you follow and also by related artists that they think you want to track.

It replaces the new-release light bulb dropdown menu that they removed some time ago. Apparently you can still get emails for new releases, if you go into your notification settings.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZEVXbtE...

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#153

Post by lobster_johnson »

StavrosK wrote: post #93
dom96 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?

Same for me. It almost never finds anything I like (and no service does), so I suspect I'm just very particular about what I like? I tend to listen to Spotify's Discover Weekly anyway, though, as the very first song it ever recommended to me was this amazing gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2cGxy-ZHIs

Ólafur Arnalds is great. Make sure you also check out his fellow Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#154

Post by thirdsun »

lucb1e wrote: post #145
thirdsun wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Grooveshark tried to cut out that middle-man and they got sued to hell by the labels. Let's call it what it was: Plain piracy. Grooveshark had no rights and licensing in place for the content they streamed.

Does Youtube? Grooveshark complied with DMCA; the only thing they really shouldn't have done is upload music illegally as a policy (by the company itself). But I'm sure there are people who now work at Youtube that also uploaded music there in the past, it's just not official. So yeah it's a bit more piratey than other upload sites, but that could have been solved with a policy change to not upload music illegally fr…

> but they hated labels for taking a huge cut and didn't make deals up front. I can't say I disagree with them.

I really think you're misguided here. Sure, evil labels are a welcome narrative for Grooveshark's very illegitimate service. I'm sure you're already familiar with these stories, but to get a taste of how Grooveshark used to deal with artists read this: https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/dec/12/groo...

Youtube on the other hand is actually used by artists as a promotional tool. And if it isn't their takedown process actually works. Almost too good judging by the stories about false positives in their ContentID system.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#155

Post by thirdsun »

Eridrus wrote: post #144
thirdsun wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I understand that. Spotify is an excellent and criminally cheap solution for most people. I don't think it's good for artists, but that's another discussion. I just wanted to describe my point of view and as passionate music lover and collector Spotify alone wouldn't work at all for me. It's just too much music missing there, but that includes hard to find, rare stuff, vinyl-only releases and niche genres.

They're great value, but I'm not really convinced that they're bad from a total revenue perspective for artists: http://www.recode.net/2014/3/18/11624668/the-price-of-music And digital has much lower distribution costs than CDs; you don't need to pay for physical CDs to be made, you don't need to pay for shipping, you don't need to deal with retail's huge markup. And on top of that Spotify's paying customers are payi…

Thanks. You might have a point there. I have to admit that I'm surprised to see such low figures for the average yearly spending on purchased music.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#156

Post by mulletbum »

Itsdijital wrote: post #68
quink wrote: post #66

Can't justify Spotify as I'm paying for YouTube Red/Google Play Music as I can stand YouTube ads less than the difference between Spotify and Google Play Music. I bet that'll come up more and more. One important differentiator might be to get the Japanese record labels a bit more aligned, all streaming providers have been faring terribly on that front.

I'm in the same boat. I actually even have a gpm/ytr subscription paid through 2019 already (I bought a ton of $5/mo coupons and redeemed them all). Despite that, I'm thinking about getting a spotify sub anyway. The music discovery and especially the user playlists I find to be far superior. GPM is really lacking hard on the social front.

You can do all that with a free account. In fact, just get Stamp to move your Google content to spotify and you can use it all free without even playing songs in Spotify. Its a little less perfect, but it gets the job done.

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#157

Post by StavrosK »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #153
StavrosK wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me. It almost never finds anything I like (and no service does), so I suspect I'm just very particular about what I like? I tend to listen to Spotify's Discover Weekly anyway, though, as the very first song it ever recommended to me was this amazing gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2cGxy-ZHIs

Ólafur Arnalds is great. Make sure you also check out his fellow Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Thank you, I'll listen to everything!

Re: Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels

#160

Post by generj »

guitarbill wrote: post #115
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Netflix and Spotify, but dislike Steam. I just find it different to rent me content transparently, eg Netflix and Spotify, versus rent-by-pretending-to-sell, eg Steam. If you sell me something, I should be able to use and transfer it at my discretion without your permission. Steam, instead, leases you something on no fixed term and presumably without any guaranteed lifetime.

By the time Steam goes out of business, several things might have happened: * I'll have stopped gaming * Most games need emulating because they won't run on our hardware in the future * The games are dirt cheap to buy on GOG * Someone will release a pirated collection most of them So I'm not too worried about my personal Steam collection. Preservation, that's a different story...

Steam has also promised that they have emergency de-DRM code they can execute if the company ever goes bust.
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