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Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

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Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#161

Post by yedava »

devalgo wrote: post #28
smeeth wrote: post #20

With great power comes great responsibility, Spotify Data Scientists. If discover weekly is truly that impactful a decision made by a model to include or not include a song could determine whether or not an indie artist can pay their rent that month. Not quite iris dataset classification. Edit: I should clarify that I only mean that this impact raises interesting questions and DSs (I am one) should pay close attentio…

It's not Spotify's responsibility to make sure indie artists are getting paid.

Spotify's responsibility is to cater to its users' preferences. But preferences don't exist in a vacuum. They are a consequence of a society's values. If a society cares only about a few winners taking it all, then yes, indie artists should have no expectation of getting paid. But if a society cares about cultivating art and not just about profits, it would want to incentivize a wider group of people making a living from creating art.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#162

Post by elliottkember »

mcgreenbeats wrote: post #4

this music is fantastic! Congrats on the success.

I didn't recognize his name but went to listen to "Circles". Turns out it was on my Discover Weekly a few weeks back, I recognized it immediately. Pretty catchy song. Will have to check out some of his others.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#163

Post by Alupis »

volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

Spotify's awful discovery, and shuffle features for playlists are what keeps me firmly with Pandora.

Now that Pandora lets you make your own playlists, or listen to individual songs, and download for offline playback (on airplanes for example), I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Spotify these days.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#164

Post by swiley »

ipnon wrote: post #104
aczerepinski wrote: post #27

If anybody wants to know how to earn $20/decade with Spotify I can throw some of my own experiences into a blog post :)

It's sad to admit but there are enough musicians in the world. The reason wages for musicians is so low is that there are already countless professional musicians making music in every style.

Maybe, but I think it could be better if Spotify paid artists per listen instead of just paying them for being popular.

Also Spotify is definitely missing a lot of obscure music and there definitely aren’t enough live musicians. Otherwise I could afford to have a good band play live in my living room every Sunday morning.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#165

Post by timerol »

3pt14159 wrote: post #45
boplicity wrote: post #21

65,000 listeners a month – $800 in revenue. 1.23 cents per listener per month. That works out to 14.7 cents per year. To earn a modest $50,000, you would need ~360,000 monthly listeners. This doesn't seem sustainable without outside sources of revenue.

I listen to about 200 or 300 songs a day since I need music to get into the zone. It's listens not listeners.

> I get about 177,000 plays / month. Spotify is 96% of those plays.

> I earn around $800 / month from music streaming. Spotify is 93% of that income.

> And every month about 65,000 people listen to my music on Spotify.

The number quoted was for listeners, and is correctly 1.23 cents per listener per month. If you want to go by listens, then it's ($800 * 0.93) / (177,000 * 0.96) = 0.44 cents per listen.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#166

Post by knappe »

faramarz wrote: post #68
volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

LOL! Same shoe; I cannot escape the piano and other instrumentals I played during my wife's pregnancy months. I'm almost at a point of surrender that maybe my time with Deep House and Electronic music has reached an end. The Discovery Weekly was my only way of finding hot indie talent in the electronics world.

Soundcloud is still the place for finding EDM in general. The community sure has slowed down, especially with spotify being such a huge force in the music world, but I still find tons of great content there.

Bonus, you don't have the same recommendation issues that spotify has (I'm in the same boat with non-sensical recommendations, or the same tired songs getting recommended over and over again).

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#167

Post by deminature »

Alupis wrote: post #163
volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

Spotify's awful discovery, and shuffle features for playlists are what keeps me firmly with Pandora. Now that Pandora lets you make your own playlists, or listen to individual songs, and download for offline playback (on airplanes for example), I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Spotify these days.

Anecdotal, but Spotify's Discover Weekly feature has ridiculously good recommendations for me and I usually end up adding half of each week's playlist to my library. The recommended music is fantastic, obscure stuff I would never have known about otherwise. My experience with Spotify recommendations couldn't be more different to yours.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#168

Post by nitrogen »

swiley wrote: post #159
tarsinge wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having absolutely 0 insight or parameter tuning on these recommendations algorithms, from feeds to Spotify playlists, is really a shame. Like imagine you had 0 control on your computer parameters or smartphone, and it was always guessing like “This resolution should suit you”, “I just turned the WiFi off, hope you like it”, or “I just dialed that friend you seem to like to interact with”. It’s not a technical problem…

It’s not just advertising. It gives the organization responsible for curating the feed an incredible amount of power over the consumers of the feed. Currently the most popular way to trade this power for money is via advertising.

I recall some stats from Pandora a few years ago that showed Mumford and Sons were their highest paid artist that year by a decent margin. Also that year, M+S songs would show up in all of my unrelated Pandora stations. How curious.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#169

Post by Kalq »

ipnon wrote: post #104
aczerepinski wrote: post #27

If anybody wants to know how to earn $20/decade with Spotify I can throw some of my own experiences into a blog post :)

It's sad to admit but there are enough musicians in the world. The reason wages for musicians is so low is that there are already countless professional musicians making music in every style.

Musicians might be the most saturated field but I think this is true for most things. How many millions of artists or photographers put out their art for piddling views and even less money. Even genuinely amazing artists can be absolutely unheard of. Authors also fall into this category.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#170

Post by CobrastanJorji »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #135
vannevar wrote: post #103

It's an interesting article, but the essential information is buried in the middle: In my experience, it’s only when I get on an editorial playlist that my songs get heavily featured on algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly. So how do you get on editorial playlists? I sincerely have no clue. I've been on editorial playlists 16 times but I have no idea how to replicate that. I find that this is true of many of th…

Another thing I found interesting is that he earns $800 / month from a total of about 3 million listens. I wonder how this compares to the royalties from a radio play from a popular local radio station? Comparatively, my dad has a moderately successful youtube channel, his most popular video has 18m views, and the next 3m. He has 66k subscribers. In an average month he'd earn ~£300 or so. Though usually quite a lot m…

For the radio, in the US, artists are not paid a cent. Only the songwriters and publishers are paid.
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