How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month • Hacker News Board

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#41

Post by jdietrich » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #29

mfoy_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first. Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was hard . Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer. Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated convenience . And Convenience i…

I’ve given up trying to understand this. For me, buying a physical disc, transferring the files to my computer, and either putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices is so easy. Amazon music downloads & Bandcamp downloads are even easier. What’s not easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices, and either manage caching music local to the device (and f…

>personally I do not understand how anyone thinks streaming services are more convenient. I cannot empathize with any use case where streaming would be more convenient.

This mindset is the reason why all software is terrible.

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#42

Post by carpo » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

I bet you'll get some new interest from this being on the front page of HN too. I just listened to a bunch of your songs and really liked them :)

I love Discover Weekly and get excited every Monday morning when I start work and remember there's a new playlist with music I'll probably like. I created a separate playlist called "Discover Favourites" and when I hear a song I like I put it in there, and it's got hundreds now. I've found so many artists I never would have heard of.

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#43

Post by lozaning » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

ozzyman700 wrote: post #36

The insight to upload a single every 4 weeks is quite valuable. My songs are all done with pocket operators/an op-1/tone.js, theres a small soundcloud community that follows this type of dawless production but possible longer form ambient tracks would do well on spotify.

I've got spotify premium but end up listening to tons of Red Means Recording style videos on youtube almost as much as I use Spotify.

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#44

Post by mbrameld » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #29

mfoy_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first. Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was hard . Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer. Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated convenience . And Convenience i…

I’ve given up trying to understand this. For me, buying a physical disc, transferring the files to my computer, and either putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices is so easy. Amazon music downloads & Bandcamp downloads are even easier. What’s not easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices, and either manage caching music local to the device (and f…

> What’s not easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices

Yet you seem to do it with Dropbox just fine... You make it sound onerous. The reality is it's a one-time effort of about 20 seconds for each device. Drop the hyperbole, it just makes you look silly.

> and either manage caching music local to the device (and frequently needing to clear items out of the cache to switch with other items)

How is "putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices" materially different from "manage caching music local to the device (and frequently needing to clear items out of the cache to switch with other items)"? If you want to put music on a device that's already full, don't you have to delete something first whether you're transferring files manually or downloading them through Spotify?

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#45

Post by saaaaaam » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

xrisk wrote: post #28

Anybody have stats on $ per stream? How does that number vary between premium/non-premium and on the region you’re streaming from?

Varies depending on how much of your audience is ad supported vs premium and other variables (family plan, bulk deal through mobile operator, student deal) but blended it’s safe to work on the assumption of ~$5 per thousand for Spotify.

Higher for Apple Music as they don’t have a freemium audience.

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#46

Post by BozeWolf » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

toastking wrote: post #9

They bring up something interesting which is how streaming has changed how music is made. Albums are now shorter with more songs, that nets more plays and more money. They also focus on singles instead of full albums, which gives more opportunity for "playlisting". It's an interesting, albeit concerning, effect that technology is having on art.

“Don’t bore us get to the chorus.”

Is the new way music made.

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#47

Post by Orphis » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

steve-benjamins wrote: post #7

css wrote: post #6

This is pretty awesome to read, and the charts are really telling. > For an indie artist like me, the major difference between Apple Music and Spotify is Discover Weekly. Apple Music has no equivalent. This is just not true, Apple Music sends you 3 different personalized weekly playlists, two of which from Music you do not already have in your library. I have discovered tons of indie artists (many with < 100 follower…

Thanks for pointing that out— I just updated the post with a note about that!

As for programmatic plays, there's Discovery Weekly, that eclectic and weekly. And you also have the Daily Mixes which are clustered by artist and genres.

They easy enough to find on Android, all are in "Library > Made for you"

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#48

Post by nemothekid » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #29

mfoy_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first. Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was hard . Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer. Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated convenience . And Convenience i…

I’ve given up trying to understand this. For me, buying a physical disc, transferring the files to my computer, and either putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices is so easy. Amazon music downloads & Bandcamp downloads are even easier. What’s not easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices, and either manage caching music local to the device (and f…

>What’s not easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices, and either manage caching music local to the device (and frequently needing to clear items out of the cache to switch with other items) or always use cellular data services to stream music.

Somehow doing this with Dropbox is easy, but not with Spotify?

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#49

Post by drexlspivey » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

For the machine learning enthusiasts, here is an old article on how Spotify classifies songs into genres based on what they actually sound like (input is a spectrogram) https://outline.com/C3PVuU.

Most conventional methods used to recommend based on what other artists people with the same taste as you like. This method is biased against newer artists as there is no easy way to bootstrap them into the process. Their new technique circumvents this problem and as a result new artists get more exposure.

Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

#50

Post by Miner49er » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

From my understanding, Spotify's recommendations have a major flaw - they're based off other users' listening data. What this means is that if a song isn't listened to by very many people it'll never be recommended, and many songs on Spotify don't even have a single stream, let alone however many it takes to get the data to make it a recommendation.