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It is alot easier (cost and effort) to start a band and put on album on Spotify, compared to creating a movie/tv show. Consumption is different, as well - seve

It is alot easier (cost and effort) to start a band and put on album on Spotify, compared to creating a movie/tv show. Consumption is different, as well - several minutes at a time versus dedicated visual attention for a minimum of 22 minutes.

whatok 9y ago
And how is anyone supposed to sift through all that garbage to find something worthwhile?
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  Discover Weekly
  - whatok 9y ago
    Who is listening to all of this self-published music to get training data for Discover Weekly?
    - samfriedman 9y ago
      I'd imagine that the self-published music gets discovered by a few people and put into playlists, then more people who follow those playlists discover those songs, and then they percolate upwards through layers of algorithmic and editorial Spotify playlist generation including Discover Weekly. There's also the Fresh Finds playlists, which work a little differently by surfacing unknown songs that "tastemakers" have been listening to.
      - whatok 9y ago
        Agreed that your hypothesis makes sense given the current state of things but I do not think it scales with any sort of consistency/quality control in the utopian "no labels all self-published" world.
    - noxToken 9y ago
      They're not starting in a vacuum. Spotify has metric tons of listening and catalog data to help properly tag a newly signed artist. Discover weekly would help fine tune the data that's already on hand.
    - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
      You algorithmically seed new music to those with an interest in the genre and keep the songs with higher replays around for more recommendations. With perfect knowledge of who is listening to what and their overall tastes you can cut out all the inefficiency of the current gatekeepers (labels, billboard, and corp. radio) who act as self imposed kingmakers for a few anointed acts. The cream will rise to the top naturally.
      - whatok 9y ago
        This sounds terrible from a user perspective and arguably promotes certain types of music while penalizing others. As a user, if I hear more than a few songs that are terrible that were forced upon me by some algorithm, I am not going to listen to that playlist/use that service anymore. If users are the only way you are generating training data (for this supposed only self-published music world), you are going to end up with the music version of clickbait to get users' attention before they hit skip. I really cannot emphasize how bad optimizing for this would be for music. Whatever your opinion on "current gatekeepers", some of them do provide valuable filtering services that I struggle to see how an algorithm could accurately replicate without compromising what makes music magical.
        maherbeg 9y ago
        I think you could do this by pushing to users who tend to look for new artists already. There's a large set of folks that love to discover new music, and actively do so, and adding one or two new artists to promote here would be an easy way to start the network effect to other users.
    - lavezzi 9y ago
      In-house positions or they scrape/steal from the blogs.
      - whatok 9y ago
        Definitely would necessitate something resembling in-house positions but I just don't see how you maintain any sort of consistency if you have a group of people reviewing thousands of tracks. And then at that point aren't they just functioning as a label? Blogs, don't know how they're going to discover stuff if it's all published on Spotify initially.
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      Discover Weekly as far as i know didn’t begin immediately or at least wasn’t what it is now at first. Now it’s great. Spotify has so much past and present data from listeners. Way more than they need.
    - heartbreak 9y ago
      I don't know if Paul Lamere is on HN, but he's likely the best person to answer this question. Short answer: It's not all about user-fed listen data.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        I've watched some of Paul's talks as well as seeing some of his early demos at Sun Labs. The bottom line is that discovery is really hard generally and, for the most part, no one has cracked it pretty much anywhere even when there aren't competing commercial interests.
- synaesthesisx 9y ago
  Personalized playlists, artist radios etc. The point is you don't have to sift because they do it for you.
  - whatok 9y ago
    The GP's post was implying that it's easier to bypass traditional gatekeepers (labels) by self-publishing on Spotify. I don't see how either of your recommendations solves the problem of the flood of self-published releases in a "labels are no more" scenario.
    - nicky0 9y ago
      Finding music you like among all the competing possibilities is Spotify's strong point.
  - shocks 9y ago
    Sort of, but not really. In reality a lot of the streaming contracts with record labels dictate that they must promote certain artists more than others. Spotify playlists and Browse are very bias. My Spotify 'home page' shows me mostly popular/mainstream stuff that I never listen to. :)
    - simias 9y ago
      It was my understanding that Spotify's home page generally shows global trends and probably sponsored content, at least it's pretty obvious for me because as you point out it's filled with artists and music genres I never listen to. There's however plenty of automatically generated customized playlists available next to that. When you create a playlist it also recommends tracks it thinks will fit etc... I haven't found any obvious bias in those so far and they often recommend obscure old tracks that I doubt anybody cares to promote anymore.
    - wyclif 9y ago
      Social playlists are where it's at. Expect Spotify to further leverage social and friend features.
- lallysingh 9y ago
  This is roughly the youtube model now, isn't it? Some grass-roots promotion will get content fed into a recommendation engine of sorts.
- jqbx_jason 9y ago
  I built https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm to help with that. It let's other people play music for you. So if you know someone's whose taste or playlist you like you can listen to music in sync with him/her/them. Like a user-generated radio.
dublinben 9y ago
I suspect that the average paid Spotify user is actually listening for hours at a time, while they are working or driving. I don't think people are turning it on and off a few songs at a time.
- frenchie4111 9y ago
  I think the parent comment's point is that the smallest unit of attention is smaller for Spotify than Netflix
- andrewstuart2 9y ago
  The point that it's a different consumption model is still valid and interesting, though. Nobody with a long commute (until self-driving is solid) is/should be watching Netflix to pass the time. Audio-only is feasible, though. Same goes for the gym and during the day at work. Music is common and acceptable, but video is definitely more of a leisure activity since it monopolizes your attention. Do I think Spotify has anything special over Apple, Google, or Amazon? Call me skeptical. I'm just not sure you can make a direct comparison between an audio service and a video service.
  - tompagenet2 9y ago
    I understand what you're saying, but a huge number of people commute by rail or bus (perhaps more so outside of the US, I don't know). Watching video on the Tube (London Underground) is fairly common, as it is on commuter rail into London

whatok 9y ago

And how is anyone supposed to sift through all that garbage to find something worthwhile?

whitepoplar 9y ago
Discover Weekly
- whatok 9y ago
  Who is listening to all of this self-published music to get training data for Discover Weekly?
  - samfriedman 9y ago
    I'd imagine that the self-published music gets discovered by a few people and put into playlists, then more people who follow those playlists discover those songs, and then they percolate upwards through layers of algorithmic and editorial Spotify playlist generation including Discover Weekly. There's also the Fresh Finds playlists, which work a little differently by surfacing unknown songs that "tastemakers" have been listening to.
    - whatok 9y ago
      Agreed that your hypothesis makes sense given the current state of things but I do not think it scales with any sort of consistency/quality control in the utopian "no labels all self-published" world.
  - noxToken 9y ago
    They're not starting in a vacuum. Spotify has metric tons of listening and catalog data to help properly tag a newly signed artist. Discover weekly would help fine tune the data that's already on hand.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    You algorithmically seed new music to those with an interest in the genre and keep the songs with higher replays around for more recommendations. With perfect knowledge of who is listening to what and their overall tastes you can cut out all the inefficiency of the current gatekeepers (labels, billboard, and corp. radio) who act as self imposed kingmakers for a few anointed acts. The cream will rise to the top naturally.
    - whatok 9y ago
      This sounds terrible from a user perspective and arguably promotes certain types of music while penalizing others. As a user, if I hear more than a few songs that are terrible that were forced upon me by some algorithm, I am not going to listen to that playlist/use that service anymore. If users are the only way you are generating training data (for this supposed only self-published music world), you are going to end up with the music version of clickbait to get users' attention before they hit skip. I really cannot emphasize how bad optimizing for this would be for music. Whatever your opinion on "current gatekeepers", some of them do provide valuable filtering services that I struggle to see how an algorithm could accurately replicate without compromising what makes music magical.
      - maherbeg 9y ago
        I think you could do this by pushing to users who tend to look for new artists already. There's a large set of folks that love to discover new music, and actively do so, and adding one or two new artists to promote here would be an easy way to start the network effect to other users.
  - lavezzi 9y ago
    In-house positions or they scrape/steal from the blogs.
    - whatok 9y ago
      Definitely would necessitate something resembling in-house positions but I just don't see how you maintain any sort of consistency if you have a group of people reviewing thousands of tracks. And then at that point aren't they just functioning as a label? Blogs, don't know how they're going to discover stuff if it's all published on Spotify initially.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Discover Weekly as far as i know didn’t begin immediately or at least wasn’t what it is now at first. Now it’s great. Spotify has so much past and present data from listeners. Way more than they need.
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    I don't know if Paul Lamere is on HN, but he's likely the best person to answer this question. Short answer: It's not all about user-fed listen data.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I've watched some of Paul's talks as well as seeing some of his early demos at Sun Labs. The bottom line is that discovery is really hard generally and, for the most part, no one has cracked it pretty much anywhere even when there aren't competing commercial interests.
synaesthesisx 9y ago
Personalized playlists, artist radios etc. The point is you don't have to sift because they do it for you.
- whatok 9y ago
  The GP's post was implying that it's easier to bypass traditional gatekeepers (labels) by self-publishing on Spotify. I don't see how either of your recommendations solves the problem of the flood of self-published releases in a "labels are no more" scenario.
  - nicky0 9y ago
    Finding music you like among all the competing possibilities is Spotify's strong point.
- shocks 9y ago
  Sort of, but not really. In reality a lot of the streaming contracts with record labels dictate that they must promote certain artists more than others. Spotify playlists and Browse are very bias. My Spotify 'home page' shows me mostly popular/mainstream stuff that I never listen to. :)
  - simias 9y ago
    It was my understanding that Spotify's home page generally shows global trends and probably sponsored content, at least it's pretty obvious for me because as you point out it's filled with artists and music genres I never listen to. There's however plenty of automatically generated customized playlists available next to that. When you create a playlist it also recommends tracks it thinks will fit etc... I haven't found any obvious bias in those so far and they often recommend obscure old tracks that I doubt anybody cares to promote anymore.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Social playlists are where it's at. Expect Spotify to further leverage social and friend features.
lallysingh 9y ago
This is roughly the youtube model now, isn't it? Some grass-roots promotion will get content fed into a recommendation engine of sorts.
jqbx_jason 9y ago
I built https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm to help with that. It let's other people play music for you. So if you know someone's whose taste or playlist you like you can listen to music in sync with him/her/them. Like a user-generated radio.

dublinben 9y ago

I suspect that the average paid Spotify user is actually listening for hours at a time, while they are working or driving. I don't think people are turning it on and off a few songs at a time.

frenchie4111 9y ago
I think the parent comment's point is that the smallest unit of attention is smaller for Spotify than Netflix
andrewstuart2 9y ago
The point that it's a different consumption model is still valid and interesting, though. Nobody with a long commute (until self-driving is solid) is/should be watching Netflix to pass the time. Audio-only is feasible, though. Same goes for the gym and during the day at work. Music is common and acceptable, but video is definitely more of a leisure activity since it monopolizes your attention. Do I think Spotify has anything special over Apple, Google, or Amazon? Call me skeptical. I'm just not sure you can make a direct comparison between an audio service and a video service.
- tompagenet2 9y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but a huge number of people commute by rail or bus (perhaps more so outside of the US, I don't know). Watching video on the Tube (London Underground) is fairly common, as it is on commuter rail into London