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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

#201

Post by LoathsLights »

dawnerd wrote: post #139
njovin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself. Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.

Spotify needs to enable dislike on any song playing, not just in discovery playlists.

I wish we could just "ban" a song from ever playing, that way I won't have to make a new playlist from an existing one just because i don't want to listen to these one or two songs I find super annoying.

I have playlists that work as filters for me, if I'm mass copying a playlist I first put it into the filter playlist, then I press "skip duplicates" now all the songs that are not on my shit list (fiilter list) will end up at the bottom labeled "now" on "date added" then I copy those to the playlist I want to and erase them from the filter.

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

#202

Post by Alupis »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #188
Spivak wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are random! It's just that what is random in a mathematical sense isn't random to a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_clumping The best song randomizer I've seen described generates a permutation of songs, then "plots" them in n dimensional space with closeness being closeness being a weighted distance of closeness in the playlist and whatever metadata…

And they wrote a blog about it in 2014: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-... Interesting stuff!

That is an interested blog post!

However, I've used Spotify since 2014 and still experienced the same Shuffle behavior. Strange, perhaps I'm looking for it now, and introducing some sort of bias.

It is interesting, however, that a music playlist company took so long to realize people wouldn't like their original Shuffle implementation. I don't think any device or software I used before Spotify had such a remarkably bad Shuffle experience - including the original iPods and other, much older software and devices.

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

#203

Post by JavaOffScript »

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…

> I've been on editorial playlists 16 times but I have no idea how to replicate that.

I do. Track down whoever at spotify controls those playlists and offer them money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

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

#204

Post by rewgs »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #170
VBprogrammer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but an indie artist is nearly always the songwriter and publisher (no one else owns the publishing rights, hence “independent”). So it’s a fair comparison, and unfortunately, all else being equal, streaming woefully underperforms to radio to the point of tears.

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

#205

Post by seph-reed »

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…

I have an open feature request for adding this type of functionality to Pandora:

https://community.pandora.com/t5/Feature-Requests/User-contr...

Seriously, I REALLY want a music service which gives me control over the discovery algorithms parameters.

Just in general, I'm sooooo worn out from living in a world where nothing revolves around "super users" and everything revolves around... average decent 21st century people.

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

#206

Post by rorykoehler »

hammock wrote: post #116
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…

Great point. And speaking from insider knowledge, I can tell you that there are consultants you can pay anywhere from a little bit up to thousands per month who will get you tested/placed on different editorial playlists. The more you can get on, and the longer you can stay on them (there is no guarantee of staying on, they only keep you on if you gain traction), the more success you will have.

Tom Misch used those for sure. I was only talking about it with my wife the other day. Lost in Paris seems to play evry time I open Spotify. I wish you could blacklist songs on Spotify.

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

#207

Post by wallawe »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #152

Its cool that what looks like your hobby generates income. What do you do to pay the bills otherwise?

He's actually got a really cool story, I happened to recognize him from this Indie Hackers interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/site-builder-report-f...

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

#208

Post by rewgs »

devalgo wrote: post #73
_eht wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a rumour once that artists did not actually need to eat. /s

Imagine saying this about a CD store a few decades ago. It would be ridiculous to say that a store was responsible for promoting indie artist CDs. If you want to get listens or sales make good music, it's pretty simple.

On the other hand, money earned from streaming vs money earned from CD sales (especially a few decades ago) is completely incomparable.

If selling CDs through a store could earn you (using simple but realistic numbers here) $100k per year, and Spotify streams to the same audience size earn $1k per year, it’s not unreasonable to expect that Spotify should add a hell of a lot more value on its end, perhaps in the form of driving listeners to artists — especially if Spotify possesses the means to.

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

#209

Post by rewgs »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #50
devalgo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not anyones responsibility to ensure indie artists, or any kind of art for that matter, exists It would be nice if people cared about things beyond $$$ and worked on art for the sake of art

It would be nice if you cared about things beyond $$$ and worked on code for the sake of code.

Try listening to only amateur musicians for a month while you work. You might come back with an appreciation for just how much effort and money is required to produce the art you personally care about.

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

#210

Post by gxqoz »

dawnerd wrote: post #139
njovin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself. Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.

Spotify needs to enable dislike on any song playing, not just in discovery playlists.

My impression is that Spotify only pays royalties to songs that get streamed for over 30 seconds. Presumably if you skip a song early this is a feature used in its recommendation algorithms. Not as strong as an explicit dislike but I would guess if you keep skipping songs you don't like they'll get penalized.
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