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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

#241

Post by mosdave »

jasonv wrote: post #69
aeturnum wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Spotify would do well to allow users to set a label of some sort on their listening. Like, there are times when you listen to your music for yourself in the car, and there are times when your phone is being used to power the speakers at a gathering. I don't know what the internals of the system looks like, but it seems like allowing users to maintain different profiles would be simple.

Things I've wanted from Spotify, or from another platform: * Album playlists, with "shuffle by album/entry" * Disable song in album * Tags for albums/tracks, sort by tags * Genre block lists (they have artist block lists, let's go one step forward) * Download n-minutes of a playlist (for when they're 16 hours long) * Block tracks over n minutes on shuffle

> * Disable song in album

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

#242

Post by Mindwipe »

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.

This is the exact opposite of everywhere else in the world tbf.

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

#243

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#244

Post by kleer001 »

OzzyB wrote: post #120
kleer001 wrote: post #81

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.

YouTube however lets you create multiple (sub)accounts that you can easily switch to. Just create one for "sleeping", one for "animals", "news" etc. This is what's perhaps missing from Spotify, an easy way to namespace your account activity.

Whaaaa?! This I did not know. I will have to look into it. Thank you so much.

Still, I think the future is in human hand crafted recommendations like Stephenson sketched out in "Fall: or Dodge in Hell".

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

#245

Post by noizejoy »

rewgs wrote: post #209
crispyporkbites wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ... just how much effort and money is required to produce the art you personally care about.

I wholeheartedly agree with the “effort” part and I also think, the comparison of music to code is very apt.

However, wouldn’t it be fair to say that the money investment for creating the music (i.e. a mastered WAV or whatever format) can be incredibly low these days? And even distribution is incredibly low cost.

So barrier to entry for recorded music has been lowered to almost zero (for music as well as coding) compared to the days of vinyl and mainframe computers.

Also, since it’s so incredibly difficult to make a living making music, I find that many professional calibre musicians are indistinguishable from amateur musicians if you go by music income.

I honestly expect these days I could listen to very good music for a month by people who aren’t making a living from music (i.e. amateurs). But I’d argue that actually is the problem.

Unfortunately I don’t know how to tell those musicians from the one’s who are making a living with music (professionals) on the major streaming platforms, so I can’t put this to a test.

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

#246

Post by steve-benjamins »

elliottkember wrote: post #162
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.

That's amazing!! Very serendipitous :)

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

#248

Post by minkzilla »

bilekas wrote: post #113
tlbsofware wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An incognito mode sounds like a pretty easy idea, have a switch that turns it on and none of your listening gets added to your personal data

I havent' checked but does Private Listening mode do that? Or is that just for other users not to see what you're listening to ?

Both. Wheat you listen to in private listening does not effect your recommendations.

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

#249

Post by leonardteo »

Speaking of carving out a niche on Spotify.... If your kid ever asks Siri/Google/Alexa to play the poop song a few cents of royalties goes to Matt Farley aka the Toiletbowl Cleaners. It’s quite fascinating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Farley

> According to Farley, one song that contains only the word "poop" repeated over and over generates $500 in streaming revenue every month as of 2018, likely in part because children request it from Alexa or other devices.[4][5][6] Farley earned over $23,000 in 2013 from his song catalog.

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