Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

altpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 200 posts

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#121

Post by oe »

creaghpatr wrote: post #45

This sort of addresses a number of disparate issues related to quality control. I don't know how I feel about it, but they probably had to do it to prevent becoming the next YouTube. As long as they don't allow user ratings or user comments they should be fine. https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si... https://qz.com/1212330/a-bulgarian-scheme-scammed-spotify-fo... https://www.vulture.com/2017/0…

I recently started seeing songs that had 9 famous artists in the artist field, some of which were artists I follow so the song appeared in my recommended playlists.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#123

Post by snowwolf »

beckler wrote: post #68
snowwolf wrote: post #62

I’m not familiar with the process, but could there also have been a fraud aspect (not copyright) to this that wasn’t worth the effort required to prevent? Upload “songs”, generate lots of listens, get paid.

Yes, I hope so, because fraud is a huge issue with Spotify. An older acquaintance of mine is a professional musician living in Nashville doing commissions. He made a track for a trailer of a video game, but chose not to publish it on Spotify (for reasons I don't know). One of the fans ripped the song from the trailer, uploaded it to Spotify, and was collecting all the royalties. Even though Spotify keeps taking it do…

Yeah, the uploading of copyright infringing content is one aspect, but I was also wondering about just uploading rubbish and somehow generating fake listens or tricking real users into listening to your track (game the ranking algorithms to get it into recommended playlists) to get royalties.

Something like the Amazon ebook scams:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/exclusive-inside-a-million-dol...

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/amazon-book-stuffing-author...

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#124

Post by djsumdog »

This is what happens when you rent your music.

I'm glad I never had a Spotify account. I always either buy CDs from shows or get them off Bandcamp. I prefer Bandcamp because they take a smaller cut (15%, as low as 10% if you have a label which high volume) and really hate it when an artist I like only has the option of Apple/Google/Amazon (all which take ~30% or more).

I just went from a 200GB microsd card to a 512gb, and can carry all my music in my phone, ready for offline playback, where ever I go.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#125

Post by pojzon »

dalbasal wrote: post #77
jasode wrote: post #14

The submitted article doesn't mention it but my guess at connecting the dots is that it's related to EU Article 13's stringent requirement of "upload filters"[0]. Yes, Spotify's direct uploading "gave opportunity for small artists to share their talent" -- but that same mechanism also made it too easy to upload copyright infringing content. Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtu…

>>Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtube's ContentID If true, this is worrying. It basically gives a handful of companies a monopoly over a potentially wide range of things. It is unreasonable to require everyone to meet a standard that relies on cutting edge technology.

If Im not mistaken, youtube contentid filtering is not working as good as Google hoped it will. People find more and more backdors or workarounds for it. Google hires like thousends of editors to watch youtube content and filter out stuff. That was one big defeat of Google. The same way they fail to filter kids content.

Im yet to see a filtering mechanism for a platform like ytb that works.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#126

Post by ashelmire »

dalbasal wrote: post #77
jasode wrote: post #14

The submitted article doesn't mention it but my guess at connecting the dots is that it's related to EU Article 13's stringent requirement of "upload filters"[0]. Yes, Spotify's direct uploading "gave opportunity for small artists to share their talent" -- but that same mechanism also made it too easy to upload copyright infringing content. Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtu…

>>Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtube's ContentID If true, this is worrying. It basically gives a handful of companies a monopoly over a potentially wide range of things. It is unreasonable to require everyone to meet a standard that relies on cutting edge technology.

Is it worrying? I see it as an opportunity to create and use a competing service.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#127

Post by jwerle »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #98
jwerle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Spotify and I am very close with several folks there who worked on this initiative. This is almost certainly the fault of the labels.

Could you elaborate a bit? Do you think it's because of copyright issues, or because labels don't want Spotify to become a popular distributor that publishes exclusively to itself?

I doubt copyright issues had an impact here. There is always a much larger perspective the labels have over the industry than what we can talk about here.

Ultimately, it is about control. Every decision from the ads you hear to the choice of music you get in your Discover Weekly playlists (or any made by Spotify) come from the influence of label control over the company (and industry). Songs that appear or can be heard near or in sequence of each other to an end user are not really that random.

We as consumers forget that the entirety of Spotify is a heavily curated experience. This includes the features available to us on various devices which directly impact how and what (pod casts) we can listen to and when (free tier on mobile)

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#128

Post by pedrogpimenta »

djsumdog wrote: post #124

This is what happens when you rent your music. I'm glad I never had a Spotify account. I always either buy CDs from shows or get them off Bandcamp. I prefer Bandcamp because they take a smaller cut (15%, as low as 10% if you have a label which high volume) and really hate it when an artist I like only has the option of Apple/Google/Amazon (all which take ~30% or more). I just went from a 200GB microsd card to a 512gb…

I agree with you. I did Spotify for some months and one of the reasons I quit is because I noticed I had stopped listening to music that was not on Spotify. Which is unnacceptable, of course.

Since then I had the music on an SD on my phone. But I'm afraid of losing it and losing all my music, also don't want to have to manually backup the music.

Now I have a Raspberry Pi as a Music Server and it works flawlessly :)

(One SD Cards with the system and music and another one as an automatic system backup so I don't lose any music and can just swap the cards if one fails)

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#129

Post by sylk »

djsumdog wrote: post #124

This is what happens when you rent your music. I'm glad I never had a Spotify account. I always either buy CDs from shows or get them off Bandcamp. I prefer Bandcamp because they take a smaller cut (15%, as low as 10% if you have a label which high volume) and really hate it when an artist I like only has the option of Apple/Google/Amazon (all which take ~30% or more). I just went from a 200GB microsd card to a 512gb…

I love all kinds of music and it'd be unrealistic for me to have it all purchased. I listen to easily 20 artists in a day, and those rotate very quickly.

Re: Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists

#130

Post by 4mitkumar »

djsumdog wrote: post #124

This is what happens when you rent your music. I'm glad I never had a Spotify account. I always either buy CDs from shows or get them off Bandcamp. I prefer Bandcamp because they take a smaller cut (15%, as low as 10% if you have a label which high volume) and really hate it when an artist I like only has the option of Apple/Google/Amazon (all which take ~30% or more). I just went from a 200GB microsd card to a 512gb…

A streaming service is _not_ just a collection of your favourite songs. Content discovery and auto-playlist are some of the not so easily irreplaceable featured offered by the likes of Spotify.

And anyway, the diss about ownership Vs rental is far too broad a swipe for the topic at hand.

Post reply on HN