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The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

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Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#21

Post by thewebcount »

This seems like a huge problem with online ad supported services in general. I wonder if this sort of thing happens on Apple Music and other for-pay-only services since you'd have to pay to have an account for your bot?

But this is more troubling than it seemed at first to me. Couldn't something like this also happen: So I could put my song on Spotify (or YouTube or any other ad-supported service) and some business can come along and set up a bot to open Spotify and play my tune and several others. Spotify will also play ads and probably show ads on the page during playback because it's not a paid-for account. Now Spotify determines that this stream was sent to a bot. They remove the play counts from my tracks and any others played. Do they return the ad revenue from those ad impressions? If not, what's stopping Spotify from just making up numbers, charging the advertisers and discounting my revenue without there really being a bot stream? How can any of these ad-supported businesses be held accountable? This seems insane.

I'm not saying they're actually doing the above. I assume they are not, but it makes me wonder about how you would even know? It could even happen accidentally due to some error in their software. That seems less than ideal.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#22

Post by fallingfrog »

AlexandrB wrote: post #18
ada1981 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, a kid in a basement with a laptop can for $20 via distrokid be listed on Spotify and be discovered within non-geographic communities. It’s not all bad, but these are cool ideas.

I don't have hard data, but from listening to interviews with musicians it seems to me like the difference is that the power distribution has become even more skewed. For every star discovered on Spotify you used to have 10 bands that could at least eke out a middle class living in their city/state touring and selling albums.

I suppose, economically this might be an example of an externality? Seems like a lot of industries are piling up externalities right now in terms of their effects on society, wages, political discourse, the environment, etc..

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#23

Post by entropicdrifter »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #14
pud wrote: post #2

Hope you find my Medium post thought provoking. Incentives in the music industry are setup such that any company offering promotional services to artists (ad agency, PR firm, promoter, radio promo, marketing department, etc) can quietly go to fiverr.com, buy 100,000 bot streams for $20, then take credit for their client’s rise in popularity—-getting the artist to pay again. Which, because of how streaming services pa…

I'd like fixed price per play to get replaced by something closer to splitting a users subscription fees based on the time they spent listening to a particular song/artist.

I might be wrong but I think Youtube Premium uses that pricing model. At least their FAQ seems to imply that's what's going on: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#24

Post by zapataband1 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #15
fallingfrog wrote: post #12

The whole premise of the way streaming music is marketed and sold is all wrong. In the long term if you want good music to be created you have to put a little thought into how you’re nurturing the community of musicians on the local level who are doing the hard work of creating the product that Spotify and iTunes are selling. From the point of view of a streaming service, it looks like this: 1) music is generated fro…

As with food delivery and "ghost kitchens" the next step for streaming services seems to be "ghost bands"[1] that produce unobjectionable music meant to fill playlists for smaller royalties than a "normal" band. Both of these trends put traditionally local restaurants and small bands under increased pressure to compete with the likes of VC-funded Spotify or DoorDash. The pessimist in me sees a future where these loca…

Spotify is already starting a promotion service where artists get boosted by giving spotify a cut of the already minuscule royalties. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/03/spotify-a...

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#25

Post by dyeje »

motohagiography wrote: post #8
nchase wrote: post #3

Similar problem, different platform: every time I post music on Soundcloud I get likes and comments from bots that want me to pay for reposts. They seem to have a huge problem at SC and it’s not clear to me that they have any reason to try to stop it. I have been reporting this behavior for years and from my perspective it hasn’t gotten any better. I have no evidence for this but it feels like Soundcloud is on life s…

I chose bandcamp over soundcloud because I don't have face tattoos, but that kind of judginess really just covers for risk aversion and perfectionistic failure chasing. I may switch based on the rationale that a product is only as good as it needs to be and crapiness that persists can be a leading indicator of growth. While bandcamp is earnest and comfortable for the kind of stuff I do (just a place to share with fri…

They are entirely different products. Bandcamp is a digital storefront and SoundCloud is audio social media.

On a related note, their business models are completely different. Bandcamp is bootstrapped and profitable, while SoundCloud is dependent on investment money and almost went bankrupt a few years ago.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#26

Post by slothtrop »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #14
pud wrote: post #2

Hope you find my Medium post thought provoking. Incentives in the music industry are setup such that any company offering promotional services to artists (ad agency, PR firm, promoter, radio promo, marketing department, etc) can quietly go to fiverr.com, buy 100,000 bot streams for $20, then take credit for their client’s rise in popularity—-getting the artist to pay again. Which, because of how streaming services pa…

I'd like fixed price per play to get replaced by something closer to splitting a users subscription fees based on the time they spent listening to a particular song/artist.

https://resonate.is/ has a stream-to-own model

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#27

Post by motohagiography »

dyeje wrote: post #25
motohagiography wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose bandcamp over soundcloud because I don't have face tattoos, but that kind of judginess really just covers for risk aversion and perfectionistic failure chasing. I may switch based on the rationale that a product is only as good as it needs to be and crapiness that persists can be a leading indicator of growth. While bandcamp is earnest and comfortable for the kind of stuff I do (just a place to share with fri…

They are entirely different products. Bandcamp is a digital storefront and SoundCloud is audio social media. On a related note, their business models are completely different. Bandcamp is bootstrapped and profitable, while SoundCloud is dependent on investment money and almost went bankrupt a few years ago.

> They are entirely different products.

Well, if you have to say it...

Was going through both of them again, and curation-wise, they're both landfills. At least on bandcamp I can search for genre/city, but for say, electronic music, you have to sift through stuff that is literally disgusting to find the gems. It's when they mix things that aren't meant to be mixed, they create that kind of dread. Good for bandcamp being profitable though, that's very good news. I'm probably just not their target market.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#30

Post by bjelkeman-again »

fallingfrog wrote: post #12

The whole premise of the way streaming music is marketed and sold is all wrong. In the long term if you want good music to be created you have to put a little thought into how you’re nurturing the community of musicians on the local level who are doing the hard work of creating the product that Spotify and iTunes are selling. From the point of view of a streaming service, it looks like this: 1) music is generated fro…

I agree. For a small artist, With streaming coming in with tens of thousands of songs per day [1] but the proceeds go not from me who is paying to the artist I play songs from, but to some average calculated where the money goes to the big artists, I don’t see this being much better than the piracy that went before it.

[1] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/nearly-40000-tracks-a...

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