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Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

stevebenjamins.com

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

#231

Post by bazeblackwood »

haywirez wrote: post #119

Note that this is all applies only to easy listening music suitable for the background (I checked the author's playlist at the end). Not something emotionally intense or overly energetic that demands your full attention. Spotify is optimizing for muzak, and artists who thrive in this ecosystem are muzak. I could (and soon will) go deeper to prove my point, but Liz Pelly already did a lion-hearted job covering the pro…

I think this is a pretty valid point—in fact the effect of Spotify's approach to promoting music with this hegemonic quality has been documented pretty well, even resulting in something people call "The Spotify Sound":

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/06/how-the-spotify-soun...

Not to mention they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar a number of times, promoting their own fake artists "algorithmically", and it was such a good game that Sony got in on it as well.

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

#232

Post by dri_ft »

daxelrod wrote: post #98
jdminhbg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy with just a simple Incognito mode. Not so much that I'm embarrassed about listening to some things, as I am "I wonder what that sounds like" but don't want my recommendations poisoned.

This exists. It's called "Private listening". https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/how-to...

Shoulda been called 'guilty pleasures'.

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

#233

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

Last.fm's recommender system continues to be the only worthwhile music recommendation service.

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

#234

Post by bombastry »

jedberg wrote: post #191
sevencolors wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you had a family subscription, you could use one of the accounts just for shared devices. Then you wouldn't have to worry about music played on your Alexa devices messing up your account's recommendations (although it wouldn't count any music played by Alexa devices that you liked either).

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

#235

Post by eminence32 »

drcongo wrote: post #108

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=...

I am not hearing this -- I'm hearing 1 to 2 seconds of silence as one song ends and the next song starts.

In my spotify preferences I have "Crossfade" disabled, but there is now a new setting that I haven't seen before: "Automix -- Allow smooth transitions between songs in a playlist". This is enabled.

I wonder if "crossfade" also needs to be enabled

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

#236

Post by strbean »

wolco wrote: post #143
NoodleIncident wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing the source of the recommendation from your history works a lot more reliably. Sometimes the "Not interested" button will allow you to say "I don't want recommendations based on videos", but they're in denial about how that's the only thing their recommendation engine does, so the option isn't always there.

Browsing in private mode always works.

You mean like incognito mode on Chrome? Unfortunately I like most of the bubble I've built for myself of Youtube. It sucks when my recommendation stream of mostly educational videos from smart, quality-driven DIYers and educators gets overwhelmed with 5 Minute Crafts type garbage because I put on one "oddly satisfying compilation" to run in the background while playing boardgames with friends or something.

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

#237

Post by sireat »

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…

300 pounds for 66k subscribers seems low by the standards of the yesterday. Presumably this income is solely through Youtube ads nothings else.

By the old media standards (newspaper/TV/radio) reach of 66k would be good for a medium sized city.

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

#238

Post by rewgs »

zdragnar wrote: post #220
rewgs wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by the term “indie” here? Are the stations themselves not affiliated with larger corporations? Or are they mainly playing independent artists? Or both?

I’m a professional musician and categorically reject the “but at least it is possible to be heard at all” angle. No. That is bullshit. Spotify is replacing BOTH album sales and radio play, and yet it pays multiple orders of magnitude worse than either.

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

#239

Post by saaaaaam »

larodi wrote: post #126

You can imagine my astonishment when someone I know, a deejay and producer, came to me several months ago, at a club, with the very unexpected answer of 'how to run more Ubuntus on one box' ?! Because... he wanted to have them subscribe and then click and play a list of alter-ego-monikers of himself, who release to unknown probably ghost-audience in Spotify Making money in the way - without releases, without gigs. An…

Bots have been an issue on Spotify for years. Spotify is pretty good at sorting them and removing fake streams.

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

#240

Post by VBprogrammer »

sireat wrote: post #237
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…

300 pounds for 66k subscribers seems low by the standards of the yesterday. Presumably this income is solely through Youtube ads nothings else. By the old media standards (newspaper/TV/radio) reach of 66k would be good for a medium sized city.

You are probably right, he could probably make more from it if he put in more effort but it's mostly something he does for fun.

I remember the days when people would go full-time on YouTube with less subscribers than that.

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