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Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

stevebenjamins.com

191–200 of 288 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. My whole family uses my account, and now that I have kids, all I get are Disney music and Baby Shark knockoffs.

They have a "family" mode where you can get six subs account. Unless you really like baby shark ;) https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

It costs extra though. Also, the Alexa devices can only connect to one account, which would mean one of us would screw up the recs of the other depending on whose account was tied to the Alexa.

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

#192
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 has the feature of a Private Session, most of the time I need this random songs I activate it so they don't get picked up by the algorithm

The private session feature is a double-edged sword as well, as I describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655005

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

#193

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

Based on other accounts, this might be the common outcome of publishing on Spotify. While this article sums up the artist's experience very well, it could feed into aspiring artists' survivorship bias.

On a lighter note, I think The Onion captured the reality of incomes on Spotify very well by this captioned picture: https://local.theonion.com/band-blows-entire-spotify-royalty...

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

#194
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…

Split them in different playlists - only the playlist with the rain sound will suggest those if you use the playlist suggestions.

I have a playlist for each genre and regularly discover new songs withing those.

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

#195
post #104

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.

> It's sad to admit but there are enough musicians in the world.

There was a time when you had to have two mediocre gifts to make it: talent and beauty. Or just have one of those gifts, but in spades. It seems like there's a lot more mediocre talent now, since we've evolved to devalue beauty.

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

#196

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…

I’ve noticed this too. The title has an air of “this is how you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps” feeling that turns into a “just takeover your dads company” when you read the article

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

#197
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll absolutely agree with this. The Discover Weekly playlist seems to know my musical preferences better than I do myself, and i'm certainly not sticking to just a couple of specific genres that I listen to

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

#198

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.

Correct, this is why bands tour and sell shirts and other merch, and for most, work second jobs. As an anecdote, friend of mine is in two or three bands at any given time and bartends most nights he’s not playing shows. Spotify makes it easier than ever for an artist to get their work out there, which is great, but it’s similar to the publishing world, where most authors who self publish do so into the void.

> friend of mine is in two or three bands at any given time and bartends most nights he’s not playing shows

What and how has he been doing during lockdown?

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

#199
post #59

The author is the same guy behind a $40k/month website builder review site. Big fan of his interview on Indie Hackers[1] It's interesting to see him use SEO to describe algorithmic playlists. He would know, SEO is a huge part of his other business. [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/besting-the-competiti...

There is even a shout out to HN in that article!

> I worried that readers would not trust this arrangement [affiliate links] when I first started. But in practice it hasn't been a big issue. In fact, readers ask me which links to click to ensure I get my commission. Honestly, negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community like Hacker News than it is from my readers.

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

#200

I made a surprising find on Spotify not so long ago. One of their curated playlists - Techno Bunker [1] - algorithmically mixes from track to track, like a fairly competent DJ, and it does it even if you turn on shuffle. There may be others, but this is the only one I've found so far. [1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX6J5NfMJS675?si=...

This is amazing, and I'm surprised this isn't noted down in the playlist description, nor anywhere else. It doesn't simply crossfade, it matches beats up much like a human would. This is insanely neat and such a nice find.
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