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Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

stevebenjamins.com

211–220 of 288 posts

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

oooooh I thought Spotify just had a schizophrenic A/B test started every other quarter, I didn't realize the UI changes are contingent on what kind of song list you were listening to.

They do have schizophrenic A/B testing though.

Just recently they started playing the exact same ads but sometimes they have a few syllables messed up. I think I now have first-hand experience in being gaslit, it really makes you doubt your sanity if you heard the "same" ad but "wrong".

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube suffers from the same bias in their algorithm. I bet it's just a bias setting or a single falloff that would help things. It reminds me of Cronenberg's "The Fly" where Brundle had to teach his teleporting pod to reproduce living tissue rather than interpret it.

This is why YouTube for me, despite containing billions of hours of content, has become just a glorified vehicle for ASMR and Norm Macdonald clips

You need to counter-train the algorithm to get useful results out of it basically. Keep ignoring those videos, mark them as boring, refresh the page, etc. do content discovery the old-timey way.

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

#214
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…

Youtube suffers from the same bias in their algorithm. I bet it's just a bias setting or a single falloff that would help things. It reminds me of Cronenberg's "The Fly" where Brundle had to teach his teleporting pod to reproduce living tissue rather than interpret it.

With the music playlists I just really really want a button that would mark certain songs as "I like them, but not so often". Disliking makes certain artists and styles fall totally out of my playlists, not disliking makes it repeat like a broken record.

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

#215
post #8

I feel Spotify makes it hard to listen to albums. I can queue up a song to play and it’ll then get back to my playlist, but if I play and album eventually it’ll reach the end and quit playing anything. Then I will have to stop what I’m doing and find something else to play. I feel the UX could be improved and it might change listening habits similar to Discover Weekly

On free version, it also adds somewhat random "recommended songs" to an album playlist.

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

#216
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#217
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…

heh I had this problem with the inane music my kids listen to. Those plays poisoned my recommendations and I only noticed when my annual retrospective playlist popped up full of disney garbage.

Solution: use separate streaming service for the kids! I still use Spotify for everything, but kids music happens on Amazon Music.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My mistake, thanks for the correction. I agree this is unsustainable if the average person only listens to three songs a day, which seems extremely, extremely low to me unless there is a distribution issue going on where certain songs are more likely to be listened to frequently or if the majority of listens are people searching for new music until they find one they can loop for a while.

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

#219
It may be that causality on this works backwards, but I’ve also noticed that artists that perform concerts together (Spotify does keep track of concerts and who performs at them) tend to be very algorithmically associated. At the very least, I think it’s a huge factor in “Related Artists”.

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

#220
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it is different in other areas of the country, but even in the nearby metro area, there are at most two or three "indie" stations (that is being generous, since I can only think of one) not counting the university stations that have virtually zero physical reach.

Streaming might not pay much, but at least it is possible to be heard at all I suppose.

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