5 ms·

My experience is precisely the opposite: Spotify has been instrumental in exposing me to niche bands and expanding my taste. The "2017 Wrapped" email says I lis

by pdpi 9y ago

My experience is precisely the opposite: Spotify has been instrumental in exposing me to niche bands and expanding my taste. The "2017 Wrapped" email says I listened to 6944 different songs by 1426 different artists across 103 different genres this year.

scrumbledober 9y ago
This is exactly my experience as well. I have discovered (pun intended) more musical artists and genres than I ever would have found in the olden days of spending countless hours downloading and curating my own musical collection that rarely ventured out of my genre comfort zone. Just looking through my more recent playlists there is so much niche music that I would not have known about with the itunes model.
pfd1986 9y ago
Yes but with a caveat. Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. The truth is that unless you're buying an album (1) or other merchandise, you're not contributing significantly for the artist's survival. I was chatting with Brock Van Wey last week (aka bvdub, my favorite choice of background music when programming) and he was describing how challenge it is to stay in business nowadays. I naïvely thought these apps were helping those folks... I for one will try to buy more albums, even if digital, of the bands I listen to all the time. (1) directly from the artist (e.g. via bandcamp). Google Music, at least, doesn't really give you the mp3 but only a protected file that can solely be played in their software.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  You might as well use Patreon or something if you’re just giving them a donation for something you could already stream, then they’ll get both revenues.
- 7ewis 9y ago
  For me it comes down to ease of use. If Spotify didn't exist, I doubt I'd be buying albums etc. anyway. It's the same as torrenting movies, people do it because it's convenient (and free) but now Netflix is here, it's even easier than torrenting. So that's why I'm subscribed to both services and have been for many years. So artists that leave Spotify, like Taylor Swift for example. I may listen to their music because it's in the charts, but when she left Spotify I just didn't listen to her music at all. So I'm sure Spotify do give the artists attention they would never usually get.
- chipotle_coyote 9y ago
  Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. Yet Spotify is not only still unprofitable, they're still all but setting money on fire. Some of the more recent reports I've seen are that they're trying to negotiate for lower music royalties. I can't help but wonder if the ultimate problem here isn't with the idea of all-you-can-eat streaming, but with the idea that all-you-can-eat streaming is only worth $10 a month. What if the earliest services in this space had priced their services at $20 a month? I know, the immediate reaction is "they would have had no customers and it would be a death knell because no one would possibly pay that much," but is it possible we have that reaction because we've just internalized the notion that "$10 per month" is the "proper" price? Back in the Dark Ages--the 1990s and early 2000s--I knew many, many people who were spending $20 or more a month buying individual CDs. If in 1994 I'd have been told, "Hey, what if you could listen to nearly every song ever recorded for the price of only two CDs a month!?" then I'd have been on board.
  - jakelazaroff 9y ago
    All four major record labels are investors in Spotify, so the lack of profitability isn't a huge issue if you look at it from their perspective. Since Spotify wields an enormous influence over what music becomes popular, labels can treat it as a loss leader and keep pumping money into it that they make back from album sales/tours/merch/etc on their top artists. The issue with this is that it vastly favors labels who can leverage this economy of scale, and independent labels for whom album sales are a larger slice of their income can't weather the decrease in payment as well. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Spotify divides payment per stream up by the total number of streams. Simplified example: if I stream two songs in one month, an indie artist once and a major artist once, they'll each get $5 of my $10. If I stream the indie artist once but the major artist twice, however, they get $6.66 and the indie artist only gets $3.33, even though I the amount I listened to them didn't change. (edit, the pool is actually comprised of all users, I just used one in this example for simplicity) All this adds up to a system that is heavily stacked in favor of major labels and their respective artists at the expense of independent ones.
    - 9y ago
ng12 9y ago
Same -- I've been a paying Spotify subscriber since 2012 and I have only two playlists. Both are for niche genres where most bands have only one or two songs I like. Spotify hasn't changed my listening habits, just the technology I use to listen.
- pdpi 9y ago
  Oh but that's precisely what I'm saying — Spotify _has_ changed my habits, and it's changed them a lot. Through the Discover Weekly playlist and the related artists sidebar, it was single-handedly responsible for me finding out about a tonne of bands I love.
username223 9y ago
> Spotify has been instrumental in exposing me to niche bands and expanding my taste. Hm... maybe I'll have to try it, but I'm not optimistic. The best way I have expanded my musical horizons was back in the day when iTunes shared your music library by default with other people on the same local net. I could go to the Uni library and browse through a wide variety of people's collections while doing my work. We even "talked" using our music library names, and occasionally met in person. "Show me more of the things I already like" won't be terrible, but it won't be the same thing.
longerthoughts 9y ago
As a very deliberate listener this has been the case for me too but I don't know that the same applies broadly. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something I liked in somebody's car, apartment, etc. and asked what it was only to find that they had no idea and it had popped up on their Discover Weekly, radio playlist for some other band/song, or some random mood playlist. Many people probably have similarly shocking listening stats but for the average user how many of those songs were just background noise and wouldn't be recognized again? Spotify is also a little crafty with the genre stats by using a ton of sub-genres that nobody has heard of to create the illusion of diversity. As for expanding taste, wouldn't Spotify-generated playlists theoretically do the opposite by attempting to replicate your demonstrated taste and converge on certain themes? Again, I would describe my experience with Spotify as you did, I just don't think Spotify inherently expands peoples' tastes so much as it provides an endless supply of somewhat anonymized music that people already have a taste for.

by pdpi 9y ago

scrumbledober 9y ago

This is exactly my experience as well. I have discovered (pun intended) more musical artists and genres than I ever would have found in the olden days of spending countless hours downloading and curating my own musical collection that rarely ventured out of my genre comfort zone. Just looking through my more recent playlists there is so much niche music that I would not have known about with the itunes model.

pfd1986 9y ago

Yes but with a caveat. Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. The truth is that unless you're buying an album (1) or other merchandise, you're not contributing significantly for the artist's survival. I was chatting with Brock Van Wey last week (aka bvdub, my favorite choice of background music when programming) and he was describing how challenge it is to stay in business nowadays. I naïvely thought these apps were helping those folks... I for one will try to buy more albums, even if digital, of the bands I listen to all the time. (1) directly from the artist (e.g. via bandcamp). Google Music, at least, doesn't really give you the mp3 but only a protected file that can solely be played in their software.

chrisseaton 9y ago
You might as well use Patreon or something if you’re just giving them a donation for something you could already stream, then they’ll get both revenues.
7ewis 9y ago
For me it comes down to ease of use. If Spotify didn't exist, I doubt I'd be buying albums etc. anyway. It's the same as torrenting movies, people do it because it's convenient (and free) but now Netflix is here, it's even easier than torrenting. So that's why I'm subscribed to both services and have been for many years. So artists that leave Spotify, like Taylor Swift for example. I may listen to their music because it's in the charts, but when she left Spotify I just didn't listen to her music at all. So I'm sure Spotify do give the artists attention they would never usually get.
chipotle_coyote 9y ago
Many of the artists I discovered via Spotify / Google Music make pennies from these sites. Yet Spotify is not only still unprofitable, they're still all but setting money on fire. Some of the more recent reports I've seen are that they're trying to negotiate for lower music royalties. I can't help but wonder if the ultimate problem here isn't with the idea of all-you-can-eat streaming, but with the idea that all-you-can-eat streaming is only worth $10 a month. What if the earliest services in this space had priced their services at $20 a month? I know, the immediate reaction is "they would have had no customers and it would be a death knell because no one would possibly pay that much," but is it possible we have that reaction because we've just internalized the notion that "$10 per month" is the "proper" price? Back in the Dark Ages--the 1990s and early 2000s--I knew many, many people who were spending $20 or more a month buying individual CDs. If in 1994 I'd have been told, "Hey, what if you could listen to nearly every song ever recorded for the price of only two CDs a month!?" then I'd have been on board.
- jakelazaroff 9y ago
  All four major record labels are investors in Spotify, so the lack of profitability isn't a huge issue if you look at it from their perspective. Since Spotify wields an enormous influence over what music becomes popular, labels can treat it as a loss leader and keep pumping money into it that they make back from album sales/tours/merch/etc on their top artists. The issue with this is that it vastly favors labels who can leverage this economy of scale, and independent labels for whom album sales are a larger slice of their income can't weather the decrease in payment as well. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Spotify divides payment per stream up by the total number of streams. Simplified example: if I stream two songs in one month, an indie artist once and a major artist once, they'll each get $5 of my $10. If I stream the indie artist once but the major artist twice, however, they get $6.66 and the indie artist only gets $3.33, even though I the amount I listened to them didn't change. (edit, the pool is actually comprised of all users, I just used one in this example for simplicity) All this adds up to a system that is heavily stacked in favor of major labels and their respective artists at the expense of independent ones.
  - 9y ago

ng12 9y ago

Same -- I've been a paying Spotify subscriber since 2012 and I have only two playlists. Both are for niche genres where most bands have only one or two songs I like. Spotify hasn't changed my listening habits, just the technology I use to listen.

pdpi 9y ago
Oh but that's precisely what I'm saying — Spotify _has_ changed my habits, and it's changed them a lot. Through the Discover Weekly playlist and the related artists sidebar, it was single-handedly responsible for me finding out about a tonne of bands I love.

username223 9y ago

> Spotify has been instrumental in exposing me to niche bands and expanding my taste. Hm... maybe I'll have to try it, but I'm not optimistic. The best way I have expanded my musical horizons was back in the day when iTunes shared your music library by default with other people on the same local net. I could go to the Uni library and browse through a wide variety of people's collections while doing my work. We even "talked" using our music library names, and occasionally met in person. "Show me more of the things I already like" won't be terrible, but it won't be the same thing.

longerthoughts 9y ago

As a very deliberate listener this has been the case for me too but I don't know that the same applies broadly. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something I liked in somebody's car, apartment, etc. and asked what it was only to find that they had no idea and it had popped up on their Discover Weekly, radio playlist for some other band/song, or some random mood playlist. Many people probably have similarly shocking listening stats but for the average user how many of those songs were just background noise and wouldn't be recognized again? Spotify is also a little crafty with the genre stats by using a ton of sub-genres that nobody has heard of to create the illusion of diversity. As for expanding taste, wouldn't Spotify-generated playlists theoretically do the opposite by attempting to replicate your demonstrated taste and converge on certain themes? Again, I would describe my experience with Spotify as you did, I just don't think Spotify inherently expands peoples' tastes so much as it provides an endless supply of somewhat anonymized music that people already have a taste for.