Live data from Hacker News

How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

stevebenjamins.com

51–60 of 162 posts

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

#51
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…

My issue with streaming is I don't want to have to pay for more mobile data (primary use for me is in the car - can any of these services cache 2 hours worth of stuff for offline use?) and a lot of what I listen to isn't going to be on a streaming service like spotify - fandom music, soundcloud remixes, video game soundtracks (probably some on those services but not all), vaporwaves from youtube. I also still find FM radio a decent experience.

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

#52

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.

Not true, it's actually the exact opposite. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19503994

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

#53
This is a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify.

One thing that stuck out to me:

> Because you can only submit one song, it’s best to space out releases. That way you can have ten singles considered by Spotify editors— rather than one single from an album for an entire year.

I've wondered why so many artists were releasing a ton of singles on Spotify. This seems like a gameable system.

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

#54

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.

Luckily, the author outlines the fact that many of Spotify's playlists are curated by humans and when you submit an album to Spotify, you highlight a single track for a human to listen to. It is very possible to catch the ear of a human at Spotify and be placed on playlists, which is a spark that ignites more listenership.

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

#55
post #27
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…

Exactly this. And this is exactly the reason why we'll probably all end up pirating movies again. Pretty much everything mainstream (with the exception of a few artists) is on Spotify. Netflix, Amazon, etc etc. get more fractured every day. Every studio wants their own streaming service. How many will you pay for? 2? 1? 0? Everybody loses.

oh theres places to get all the shows streamed for free, and getting even the pirating the most obscure music is easier than ever

piracy is currently the most convenient way to consume content now that all the streaming services/labels want to fragment their libraries

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

#56

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.

Not true, it's actually the exact opposite. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19503994

No, that is simply research they've done. They haven't implemented it AFAIK. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-spotify-discover-weekly-...

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

#57

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.

I've had songs with less than 7000 listens recommended to me on my discover weekly

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

#58
I used to love the Discover Weekly, but now that I use Spotify most days when going to the gym any of my auto generated playlists like discover weekly kinda suck. I usually put on random gym playlists like the popular "Beast Mode" one. While I like this music for working out, I definitely don't normally enjoy listening to rap, hip hop, and EDM music however this is what most workout music consists of.

I wish I could have playlists that get ignored from Spotify's recommendation engine. Because I totally get it, Spotify thinks I'm into that kind of stuff so it's what I use Spotify for the majority of the time, however I have such a hard time finding new music to listen to on there :(.

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

#59

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'm curious to know how you use tone.js in a creative way, as I have seen it as a framework for developing musical apps, not a creative tool in itself. Also, do you sync the hardware devices with js stuff, if so how?

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

#60

I also use Discover Weekly (DW) as a listener fairly consistently and have had some success with it. I believe Spotify mentioned in their S-1 how transformative DW has been to music discovery at large. Side note: Spotify keeps making small UI changes that don’t really seem to improve my UI usage. The changes don’t even make it worse. They just keep moving everything slightly. I’ve run into this a few times while tryi…

You can just add Discover Weekly to your list of play lists if that is helpful for you. I do that for DW and my Release Radar.
Post reply on HN