The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services • Hacker News Board

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#31

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

zapataband1 wrote: post #24

AlexandrB wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Spotify also has a relationship with Sony's Flow Machines AI music project.

Shall we try to guess why?

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#32

Post by snthd » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

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.

Exactly this - https://www.deezer.com/ucps ("User-Centric Payment System"). To my knowledge Deezer hasn't (yet?) implemented this model.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#33

Post by majormajor » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

thewebcount wrote: post #21

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 c…

I haven't worked in the adtech space in years, but third party counts were a thing from the advertiser side for basically this reason. Nobody trusted the network to say "yep, we showed your ad this many times, pay up."

I'm not sure how fraud detection works there, though. Maybe there's third party counting that includes third party fraud checks? Back then, at least, the incentive to spot fraud wasn't high - advertisers didn't want to admit to their stakeholders that they were wasting their money any more than the adtech network wanted to admit it to the advertiser.

Your scenario is also interesting from the publisher side - especially on non-web properties where a musician doesn't even have the ability to embed their own JS in their song to collect their own counts or use someone else's playcount counting library...

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#34

Post by maxbendick » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

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…

With regards to SoundCloud's future, their revenue is growing, they're profitable, and they've recently raised. I'm also one of the developers working on it. Can't speak to fraud as it's not my area + NDA, but earnestly, thank you for reporting what you see.

Source: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/soundcloud-revenues-s....

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#35

Post by bredren » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

On the opposite side, I’ve wondered if Apple Music purposefully attempts to play music with lower licensing cost when possible.

For example, if you ask for a particular classic song, and some newer cover is available, Apple Music will play the cover. Sometimes you must specifically ask for the song by the original artists name.

I have gotten this vibe in some “curated” playlists as well.

Could also just be bad algorithms, however since Apple Music “For You” has felt very payolla-y in the past I would not be surprised if the company used tricks anywhere it could to increase margins on the Music service.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#36

Post by oh_sigh » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

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.

It's weird to me that a large share of my spotify monthly fees go to Ed Sheeran and Drake and Taylor Swift even though I literally have never streamed them, and almost none of my monthly fee goes towards the artist that I stream all the time.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#37

Post by jasonv » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

bredren wrote: post #35

On the opposite side, I’ve wondered if Apple Music purposefully attempts to play music with lower licensing cost when possible. For example, if you ask for a particular classic song, and some newer cover is available, Apple Music will play the cover. Sometimes you must specifically ask for the song by the original artists name. I have gotten this vibe in some “curated” playlists as well. Could also just be bad algori…

This is why I gave up on Pandora. Good music for 20 minutes then unrecognizable pablum after that.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#38

Post by goblin89 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #27

dyeje wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Bandcamp is a way to enable your existing fans to support you. They don’t really have the popularity contest or “discovery mechanisms” over there.

Soundcloud is a radio and Bandcamp is a CD shop, if you like a retro metaphor. One is Instagram, the other is Shopify. Apples and oranges. Find new fans through Soundcloud and Spotify, sell your work through Bandcamp.

Re: The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting services

#39

Post by nchase » Wed, Jan 06, 2021, 4:06 AM UTC

maxbendick wrote: post #34

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…

With regards to SoundCloud's future, their revenue is growing, they're profitable, and they've recently raised. I'm also one of the developers working on it. Can't speak to fraud as it's not my area + NDA, but earnestly, thank you for reporting what you see. Source: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/soundcloud-revenues-s... .

Interesting! Sounds like the company is doing pretty well, that's nice to hear. I'm a fan of it, just wish there were fewer bots. Thanks for your work, whatever you're doing there :)