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How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

karldanninger 8y ago
Wow, this is pretty informative. Thanks for sharing.
p_roz 8y ago
This is a great example of the opportunity created by ‘the long tail’ of web platforms. I’m glad that people can make money making music and that listeners have so much more choice. Very insightful.
sylens 8y ago
Very cool writeup. I'm a big fan of Discover Weekly as it turns me onto new artists constantly.
djhworld 8y ago
Nice write up, I listen to my DW playlist quite a lot. I wonder if this approach is fraught with risk though, in the sense that if Spotify tweak the algorithm and suddenly his listener numbers drop. I guess in his case the snowball effect is already in motion, but a tweak could curtail that growth.
css 8y ago
This is pretty awesome to read, and the charts are really telling. > For an indie artist like me, the major difference between Apple Music and Spotify is Discover Weekly. Apple Music has no equivalent. This is just not true, Apple Music sends you 3 different personalized weekly playlists, two of which from Music you do not already have in your library. I have discovered tons of indie artists (many with < 100 followers on Twitter) through these playlists.
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out— I just updated the post with a note about that!
  - Flenser 8y ago
    Any idea why you're not getting featured on those playlists?
    - steve-benjamins 8y ago
      None. Would love to know why but it's honestly all a black box to me.
  - Orphis 8y ago
    As for programmatic plays, there's Discovery Weekly, that eclectic and weekly. And you also have the Daily Mixes which are clustered by artist and genres. They easy enough to find on Android, all are in "Library > Made for you"
numbers 8y ago
Thanks for sharing with actual numbers! I'll check out your music too. Discover Weekly is how I find a lot of new music similar to my music, I trust it more than most of the other playlists Spotify or Apple Music create. So far, I've probably discovered 300-400 new songs using Discover Weekly.
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  That's awesome— thanks!!
  - scarcely 8y ago
    Your welcome!
toastking 8y ago
They bring up something interesting which is how streaming has changed how music is made. Albums are now shorter with more songs, that nets more plays and more money. They also focus on singles instead of full albums, which gives more opportunity for "playlisting". It's an interesting, albeit concerning, effect that technology is having on art.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  Technology always has an effect in art, simply because it impacts the media art is performed on, be it cave paintings, marble sculptures, live concerts, radio or Netflix series.
- hnhg 8y ago
  Why is it any less natural than a vinyl album in the first place? For example the concept of A and B sides is simply because there are two sides to a vinyl record. I don't know much about the evolution of albums but I assume it's just arbitrary and a result of the underlying technology plus consumer expectations.
  - toastking 8y ago
    That's fair. It was mainly the constraints of the medium that lead to ideas such as rock operas. Now that the constraints of physical storage are lifted we've seen new concepts.
- blang 8y ago
  switched on pop has a great episode on this: https://www.switchedonpop.com/how-streaming-changed-the-sound-of-pop/ https://www.switchedonpop.com/how-streaming-changed-the-soun...
- jessemillar 8y ago
  I wouldn't say that the changes to album structure in response to technology changes is "concerning". Art changes as a society changes since art is a representation of the human condition (and the representation is usually made by people trying to represent their current condition). If the majority of music existed solely to get money, that's what would be concerning but I'd argue that's not the case presently.
fourbits 8y ago
Next figure out how to work the YouTube and YTM recommendation algorithm. I know I'm not the only one paying for premium and actively discovering small independent artists everyday through recommendations.
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  Oh interesting— I haven't been paying attention to the YTM recommendation algorithm. I'll have to subscribe and see if I can figure it out.
  - fourbits 8y ago
    The YouTube music equivalent of Discover Weekly is probably the "Mixtape" feature (with the main difference being repeats from your listening history are allowed which is convenient in the case of the offline Mixtape feature). A lot of my discovery comes from the new releases view on mobile and desktop. Sometimes I'm one of the first people to view newly released songs from artists I've never heard of. Which makes me think they can't be doing it all by some sort of cross referencing of listening habits to recommend songs that other people with similar tastes to mine liked. Maybe they do actually have a complex neural network trained on my listening history that can do decently well in deciding what I would like. I do actively like and dislike songs and have been doing so for years so that may be why it's working so well for me.
kaycebasques 8y ago
I also use Discover Weekly (DW) as a listener fairly consistently and have had some success with it. I believe Spotify mentioned in their S-1 how transformative DW has been to music discovery at large. Side note: Spotify keeps making small UI changes that don’t really seem to improve my UI usage. The changes don’t even make it worse. They just keep moving everything slightly. I’ve run into this a few times while trying to find DW.
- tartuffe78 8y ago
  You can just add Discover Weekly to your list of play lists if that is helpful for you. I do that for DW and my Release Radar.
eyeareque 8y ago
It would be interesting to see the bump you get in listeners post HN front page.
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  It's a nice uptick— I have ~60 real-time Spotify listeners right now (usually it's around 25 this time of day).
  - bridanp 8y ago
    Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm hoping there are a lot of indie artists out there who are seeing success through Spotify like yourself. Musicians and the songs they write are like authors and their books: there are way too many good ones to read in a lifetime so we end up just focusing on a few really popular ones. Spotify is like a giant library just ready to be browsed for those who want to step off the path. Also I really enjoyed A Laughing Heart!
  - scenestealreric 8y ago
    I love this article! Thank you for sharing, Steve. I have two followup questions, if you have time to answer. I used CDBaby and got a deal on uploading a full album, as long as it was under a certain number of tracks and the tracks themselves were under a certain amount of minutes. It was a very affordable way to get my band's music distributed throughout Spotify, Apple Music, Google, Amazon, etc. If I wanted to trickle out a series of singles leading up to the release of our album to "prime the pump" on all platforms at once (like CDBaby), what service can you recommend that might be the most affordable to do this? Secondarily, what would happen when all these tunes are collected later to become an album? Would we have to pay again and re-upload the same tracks? Thanks in advance,Steve!
DontGiveTwoFlux 8y ago
In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up. Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. It's become normal and acceptable to have a subscription to this stuff. It was hard to imagine in the early 2000s when so many pirated their music for free.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first. Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was hard. Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer. Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated convenience. And Convenience is King.
  - velcrovan 8y ago
    Spotify is literally where I discovered Kings of Convenience https://open.spotify.com/artist/41AbNVba2ccpmcc9QtOJE7?si=4vt9sJDCSW2DITF2x1wBmA https://open.spotify.com/artist/41AbNVba2ccpmcc9QtOJE7?si=4v...
    - siquick 8y ago
      Great band. Check out Erland Oyes other band Whitest Boy Alive if you haven't already.
  - iamben 8y ago
    Exactly this. And this is exactly the reason why we'll probably all end up pirating movies again. Pretty much everything mainstream (with the exception of a few artists) is on Spotify. Netflix, Amazon, etc etc. get more fractured every day. Every studio wants their own streaming service. How many will you pay for? 2? 1? 0? Everybody loses.
guyzero 8y ago
This is great but I worry that it's like when Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn't. Everyone loves free money but it sounds like it could dry up at any time at Spotify's whim and there'd be no recourse and no explanation. It is really great that Spotify is putting small to tiny artists into their mass-market playlists. Enjoy it while it lasts.
- soared 8y ago
  > Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn't Is this actually the case / is there data to back this claim outside of generic google bashing? The sole reason I love my discover weekly is I find music I've never heard of, and I can listen to my friend's discover weekly to get new music from their genres. Only supplying big name music would defeat the purpose.
soared 8y ago
I would love to see an analysis of the artists I listen to on spotify. Last.fm tracks all the songs I listen to so someone would just need to scrape that, find info on each song/artist, and make some nice charts. I'd love to see which artists I listen to that are very small/unknown and send them a thank you.
- richrichardsson 8y ago
  Just after New Year I got some email from Spotify about looking at stats for exactly that kind of thing, it required giving access to a 3rd party (which I revoked immediately after), which suggests to me that it's all data that you can grab from the API.
xrisk 8y ago
Anybody have stats on $ per stream? How does that number vary between premium/non-premium and on the region you’re streaming from?
- saaaaaam 8y ago
  Varies depending on how much of your audience is ad supported vs premium and other variables (family plan, bulk deal through mobile operator, student deal) but blended it’s safe to work on the assumption of ~$5 per thousand for Spotify. Higher for Apple Music as they don’t have a freemium audience.
ozzyman700 8y ago
The insight to upload a single every 4 weeks is quite valuable. My songs are all done with pocket operators/an op-1/tone.js, theres a small soundcloud community that follows this type of dawless production but possible longer form ambient tracks would do well on spotify.
- lozaning 8y ago
  I've got spotify premium but end up listening to tons of Red Means Recording style videos on youtube almost as much as I use Spotify.
  - ozzyman700 8y ago
    RMR and Cuckoo music were pretty much all I watched while waiting for my op-1 to ship, the format is so pleasurable. I feel I have run out of brian eno to listen to and I would like to make some of my own.
- svantana 8y ago
  I'm curious to know how you use tone.js in a creative way, as I have seen it as a framework for developing musical apps, not a creative tool in itself. Also, do you sync the hardware devices with js stuff, if so how?
  - ozzyman700 8y ago
    I have been at it for a very short period of time but I mainly think in terms of what cycles can i make that will rarely repeat themselves and result in interesting compositions. Typically I start by defining a main loop, and then have a synth of my choosing randomly select notes and timings. I listen to this randomness until I realize what I don't like about it, then I change the parameter. Something that helps is every time I instantiate a Tone object I make sure to copy paste the entire params from the Tone API, that way the code itself is the "knobs and buttons" I am used to fiddling with on a real synth. This is a brian eno tip but I listen to the track at x2-x4 the bpm of what I actually want the track to end up being, it makes protoyping faster while still allowing complex composition. I keep adding loops and chaining effects until I find something 'almost' complete that needs a human nonrandom touch. Then I connect my PC output to my OP-1, record the output onto a track, and finish the song on my OP-1. I plan on recording the midi output of my op-1 and feeding that into Tone so that I can record some more complicated key movements without having to literally program each key press and release. The path is OP-1 MIDI->MIDItoJSON->Tone.js If you do know of a programming language/library/software like Tone.js but more suited to generative audio I am 100% interested in this field. I am looking to pursue creative coding once I am out of undergrad. I see it as an easy way to stay away from RDBMS which make me feel a sense of corporate dread.
legohead 8y ago
I look forward to every Monday to check out my Discover Weekly. Cool to hear it's having a positive impact on artists.
wesleyfsmith 8y ago
As an artist I totally loved this! Especially you talking about just wanting to make songs when you get home in the evening, not hustle on every single front. $400 a month is admirable for music creation!
carpo 8y ago
I bet you'll get some new interest from this being on the front page of HN too. I just listened to a bunch of your songs and really liked them :) I love Discover Weekly and get excited every Monday morning when I start work and remember there's a new playlist with music I'll probably like. I created a separate playlist called "Discover Favourites" and when I hear a song I like I put it in there, and it's got hundreds now. I've found so many artists I never would have heard of.
drexlspivey 8y ago
For the machine learning enthusiasts, here is an old article on how Spotify classifies songs into genres based on what they actually sound like (input is a spectrogram) https://outline.com/C3PVuU https://outline.com/C3PVuU. Most conventional methods used to recommend based on what other artists people with the same taste as you like. This method is biased against newer artists as there is no easy way to bootstrap them into the process. Their new technique circumvents this problem and as a result new artists get more exposure.
Miner49er 8y ago
From my understanding, Spotify's recommendations have a major flaw - they're based off other users' listening data. What this means is that if a song isn't listened to by very many people it'll never be recommended, and many songs on Spotify don't even have a single stream, let alone however many it takes to get the data to make it a recommendation.
- drexlspivey 8y ago
  Not true, it's actually the exact opposite. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19503994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19503994
  - Miner49er 8y ago
    No, that is simply research they've done. They haven't implemented it AFAIK. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-spotify-discover-weekly-works-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-spotify-discover-weekly-...
- hbosch 8y ago
  Luckily, the author outlines the fact that many of Spotify's playlists are curated by humans and when you submit an album to Spotify, you highlight a single track for a human to listen to. It is very possible to catch the ear of a human at Spotify and be placed on playlists, which is a spark that ignites more listenership.
  - deegles 8y ago
    How does one land a job as one of these playlist curators?
    - plorkyeran 8y ago
      They have a few openings listed on their job site, such as https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/content-programming-manager-kids-and-family-oy3n8fwg/ https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/content-programming-manager-...
driverdan 8y ago
This is a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify. One thing that stuck out to me: > Because you can only submit one song, it’s best to space out releases. That way you can have ten singles considered by Spotify editors— rather than one single from an album for an entire year. I've wondered why so many artists were releasing a ton of singles on Spotify. This seems like a gameable system.
- dyeje 8y ago
  Is it though? The author makes $400 a month, that's not even close to being a living. Mis metrics and revenue match up with my own experience with Spotify and they are very difficult to achieve. Now imagine that your musical project has 4 people instead of 1, now it's $100 a month per person. Except just kidding, because you'll need to pump all that money (and personal money from members) back into the band to keep things growing.
  - driverdan 8y ago
    It's a success because he considers it to be one. Also he's earning more money from his music on Spotify than he was through other means. He explicitly says he's not trying to earn a living from it. > Of course that’s not enough to support a full-time artist but that’s not what I’m trying to be. I don't tour, I don't sell merch and I'm not on a label. I just want to make music and Spotify is making that possible.
    - dyeje 8y ago
      Sorry, I should have been more clear. The 'Is it though?" is in response to saying it's a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify. The author isn't trying to make a living of Spotify, but many people are. Spotify revenue isn't even close to enough for them even if you're extremely successful getting listeners like the author has been.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    I think the key point is the artist didn’t really have to do any promotion. Or spend on marketing.
Fogest 8y ago
I used to love the Discover Weekly, but now that I use Spotify most days when going to the gym any of my auto generated playlists like discover weekly kinda suck. I usually put on random gym playlists like the popular "Beast Mode" one. While I like this music for working out, I definitely don't normally enjoy listening to rap, hip hop, and EDM music however this is what most workout music consists of. I wish I could have playlists that get ignored from Spotify's recommendation engine. Because I totally get it, Spotify thinks I'm into that kind of stuff so it's what I use Spotify for the majority of the time, however I have such a hard time finding new music to listen to on there :(.
- Signez 8y ago
  I don't know if it could really help in your case, but the "Private session mode" available in Spotify's menu could help. In my limited understanding on how things work, I would expect songs listened in that mode not to be used by their awesome recommendation engine.
  - Fogest 8y ago
    It won't factor in songs when making the discover weekly that were listened to in private mode, however the daily ones it doesn't matter for. It's also a bit annoying to have to everytime I go to the gym not only have to find what I want to listen to, but also remember to go into the settings, scroll down, and turn it on, and make sure to turn it off in case I don't want it to stay private for the next 6 hours. I wish it turned on based on location. Hell even if there was some intent or way I could trigger that to turn on/off from Tasker I could automate it myself :P. I'm really bad at finding new music or just music to enjoy in general that I'd like and it's a huge annoyance to have shitty suggestions. Lately I don't even use Spotify much and have been considering just cancelling it.
- michelb 8y ago
  This is the main reason why recommended content just doesn’t work for me. Youtube, spotify, and many other services try to be clever but are just really dumb.
m348e912 8y ago
It's gatifying as a spotify user to think maybe someday soon there could be a population of artists that make a reasonable living uploading their own music and sustaining their efforts without the need for merch, marketing, or touring -- instead just quietly subsisting on doing something they love doing.
- brlewis 8y ago
  That seems unlikely to ever happen. Corporations have always been better than artists at maximizing their share of revenue. If such a population started to develop, Spotify would probably lower their percentage payout.
brogrammer5 8y ago
The main problem I have with discovery weekly now is that I primarily use Spotify for the gym but during the day I like to listen to a work playlist that mostly consists of non-vocal electronica. So because I spend so much time listening to the work playlist it's began to influence the music on my Discover Weekly which I used to use to curate new hip-hop/metal music for the gym. It would be nice if Spotify gave you finer control over the type of music that hits your Discover Weekly because it really would suggest good music for me occasionally.
- misterprime 8y ago
  Sounds like a feature "power users" would appreciate, such as Circles in Google Plus, but most users would not spend the time to learn.
erikschoster 8y ago
This is interesting anecdotally but for those trying to make a living from their music, I would argue direct subscriptions seem far more stable and useful as part of your income. For example bandcamp or something like patreon, where I can subscribe to some artist I really like for $1-3/month or something and get access to everything they do. That's the closest model I've seen for non-huge-industry folks making a living from recordings -- which is of course usually supplemented by touring and a dozen other hustles. (for example mastering or teaching) IMHO overall it doesn't feel like the situation has changed all that much in this era though. The same huge institutions remain magnets for a handful of lottery-winners (big labels, funded orchestras, etc) and everyone else is scraping by in myriad ways, though the ways are a bit different now.
mapleoin 8y ago
A killer feature for spotify would be if they would tell each individual user how much they are contributing to each individual artist they've listened to. I think that could encourage users to subscribe to spotify and listen more to small artists. I suppose this too could be gamed, but the benefit might outweigh the risk.
- nwsm 8y ago
  Like in dollars? I think it would just turn users off seeing how little artists make off streaming.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I'm glad Spotify has opened up as a new revenue stream for musicians but it's a laughably small amount of revenue for how much work it is to compose/record hours of original music. Live music is still king for making money. As an amateur pianist myself, $400 isn't a lot of money per month. I can pull $100/hr in an afternoon at a classy gig playing Classical/Jazz/Folk/Pop, you do that once per week and you're well over the $400 total for the month, without all the long history of recording/mixing/mastering/promoting that OP has done. This has allowed me to focus much more heavily on my musicianship and expanding my repertoire, rather than on recording tech/marketing. My ceiling for income is much lower this way-- I can't/don't want to find enough gigs to solely perform...but that's why I code to pay the bills.
- vthallam 8y ago
  The thing about recorded songs or videos is, the income compounds and has a chance to grow exponentially over time. The same is not true for you going around and playing music.
- empath75 8y ago
  With the amount of exposure he's getting from spotify, he could almost certainly get paying gigs if he were interested. Also, for some people recording is more interesting than performing.
maxaf 8y ago
If Spotify is becoming for musicians what GitHub became for programmers, I say that’s pretty damn cool.
pradn 8y ago
I wonder if the $10/mo price of Spotify has anchored listeners to a low price that Spotify can't get out of. Spotify will need to pull more money in to be able to give musicians more money per stream. Even if they were able to increase revenues, musicians will need to be able to claim a bigger part of that pie.
- firloop 8y ago
  This is an interesting point. Netflix has survived multiple price increases over the years, but they offer content that isn't available anywhere else. I think what will probably happen is one music streaming service will raise prices and the others will eventually follow.
z3t4 8y ago
12% conversion rate is very good. I suggest using more sale channels and spend some money on advertising.
astrowilliam 8y ago
I make about $200/month thanks to Spotify listing my podcast. Their partnership with Anchor.fm has really helped push my pod forward because the new features on anchor, since the acquisition, have helped me pinpoint an audience. https://open.spotify.com/show/0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p https://open.spotify.com/show/0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I find so much good music on Discover Weekly. It’s one of the big reasons I stick with Spotify. I’ve tried all of the other services but none of them come close. And I am fully in the Apple ecosystem but Apples recommendations are not even close to Spotify.
- lytedev 8y ago
  For what it's worth, Google Play's Radio system and "I'm Feeling Lucky" (a terrible name for what it does in my opinion) works beautifully for me!
frogpelt 8y ago
I'm interested how you record your music. I see on your website that you have a producer. Do you record in a home studio? Pro Logic?
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  I record in my home and Stephen Kerr (https://www.sjkaudio.com/ https://www.sjkaudio.com/) produces my music. Having a producer like him is hugely helpful to the sound— he brings so much clarity and polish ...
blckchrry 8y ago
Everyone here is marveling at the thought that Spotify could launch someone's career. But there is already a service that does this consistently and it's called SoundCloud.
ghego1 8y ago
Are you also on Tidal? I was looking for your music but I couldn't find it. I actually prefer their service and I hear they pay 4x the artists compared to Spotify.
- steve-benjamins 8y ago
  Huh. Maybe I'm not Tidal. I'm going to look into this— thanks for the heads up!
Zelphyr 8y ago
Apple should have bought Spotify. They could've renamed it "Apple Music" if they wanted but they should have otherwise left it alone. They could've even gotten rid of the ad-supported stuff and made it subscription only, I personally wouldn't have cared. But my point is that Spotify is everything Apple Music should be. I'm an avowed Apple fan owning and using many of their products and services for decades so when I say Apple Music is terrible it's not coming from a place of otherwise disdain that some have for Apple. Frankly, the whole iTunes and Apple Music teams should be embarrassed with what they continue to release. And if the Podcasts app isn't part of those teams it should be, because it is every bit as bad. I hate to be negative but a spade needs to be called a spade in this case. Apple needs to be called out on those shoddy products.
- chottocharaii 8y ago
  When in an early iteration of Apple Music, the app ‘accidentally’ erased all of my music library except that which I’d explicitly bought from the iTunes Store; they burned me as a customer forever.
blk_r00ster 8y ago
Congratulations on your achievement ! Do you have your content on Bandcamp ? As people share on this thread, convenience is winning the game but there's a rising market for other people that value supporting the artists directly. Keep it up and great work!
- tomcam 8y ago
  https://listentobamboo.bandcamp.com/releases https://listentobamboo.bandcamp.com/releases

Wow, this is pretty informative. Thanks for sharing.

This is a great example of the opportunity created by ‘the long tail’ of web platforms. I’m glad that people can make money making music and that listeners have so much more choice. Very insightful.

sylens 8y ago

Very cool writeup. I'm a big fan of Discover Weekly as it turns me onto new artists constantly.

djhworld 8y ago

Nice write up, I listen to my DW playlist quite a lot. I wonder if this approach is fraught with risk though, in the sense that if Spotify tweak the algorithm and suddenly his listener numbers drop. I guess in his case the snowball effect is already in motion, but a tweak could curtail that growth.

css 8y ago

This is pretty awesome to read, and the charts are really telling. > For an indie artist like me, the major difference between Apple Music and Spotify is Discover Weekly. Apple Music has no equivalent. This is just not true, Apple Music sends you 3 different personalized weekly playlists, two of which from Music you do not already have in your library. I have discovered tons of indie artists (many with < 100 followers on Twitter) through these playlists.

steve-benjamins 8y ago
Thanks for pointing that out— I just updated the post with a note about that!
- Flenser 8y ago
  Any idea why you're not getting featured on those playlists?
  - steve-benjamins 8y ago
    None. Would love to know why but it's honestly all a black box to me.
- Orphis 8y ago
  As for programmatic plays, there's Discovery Weekly, that eclectic and weekly. And you also have the Daily Mixes which are clustered by artist and genres. They easy enough to find on Android, all are in "Library > Made for you"

numbers 8y ago

Thanks for sharing with actual numbers! I'll check out your music too. Discover Weekly is how I find a lot of new music similar to my music, I trust it more than most of the other playlists Spotify or Apple Music create. So far, I've probably discovered 300-400 new songs using Discover Weekly.

steve-benjamins 8y ago
That's awesome— thanks!!
- scarcely 8y ago
  Your welcome!

toastking 8y ago

They bring up something interesting which is how streaming has changed how music is made. Albums are now shorter with more songs, that nets more plays and more money. They also focus on singles instead of full albums, which gives more opportunity for "playlisting". It's an interesting, albeit concerning, effect that technology is having on art.

ucaetano 8y ago
Technology always has an effect in art, simply because it impacts the media art is performed on, be it cave paintings, marble sculptures, live concerts, radio or Netflix series.
hnhg 8y ago
Why is it any less natural than a vinyl album in the first place? For example the concept of A and B sides is simply because there are two sides to a vinyl record. I don't know much about the evolution of albums but I assume it's just arbitrary and a result of the underlying technology plus consumer expectations.
- toastking 8y ago
  That's fair. It was mainly the constraints of the medium that lead to ideas such as rock operas. Now that the constraints of physical storage are lifted we've seen new concepts.
blang 8y ago
switched on pop has a great episode on this: https://www.switchedonpop.com/how-streaming-changed-the-sound-of-pop/ https://www.switchedonpop.com/how-streaming-changed-the-soun...
jessemillar 8y ago
I wouldn't say that the changes to album structure in response to technology changes is "concerning". Art changes as a society changes since art is a representation of the human condition (and the representation is usually made by people trying to represent their current condition). If the majority of music existed solely to get money, that's what would be concerning but I'd argue that's not the case presently.

fourbits 8y ago

Next figure out how to work the YouTube and YTM recommendation algorithm. I know I'm not the only one paying for premium and actively discovering small independent artists everyday through recommendations.

steve-benjamins 8y ago
Oh interesting— I haven't been paying attention to the YTM recommendation algorithm. I'll have to subscribe and see if I can figure it out.
- fourbits 8y ago
  The YouTube music equivalent of Discover Weekly is probably the "Mixtape" feature (with the main difference being repeats from your listening history are allowed which is convenient in the case of the offline Mixtape feature). A lot of my discovery comes from the new releases view on mobile and desktop. Sometimes I'm one of the first people to view newly released songs from artists I've never heard of. Which makes me think they can't be doing it all by some sort of cross referencing of listening habits to recommend songs that other people with similar tastes to mine liked. Maybe they do actually have a complex neural network trained on my listening history that can do decently well in deciding what I would like. I do actively like and dislike songs and have been doing so for years so that may be why it's working so well for me.

kaycebasques 8y ago

I also use Discover Weekly (DW) as a listener fairly consistently and have had some success with it. I believe Spotify mentioned in their S-1 how transformative DW has been to music discovery at large. Side note: Spotify keeps making small UI changes that don’t really seem to improve my UI usage. The changes don’t even make it worse. They just keep moving everything slightly. I’ve run into this a few times while trying to find DW.

tartuffe78 8y ago
You can just add Discover Weekly to your list of play lists if that is helpful for you. I do that for DW and my Release Radar.

eyeareque 8y ago

It would be interesting to see the bump you get in listeners post HN front page.

steve-benjamins 8y ago
It's a nice uptick— I have ~60 real-time Spotify listeners right now (usually it's around 25 this time of day).
- bridanp 8y ago
  Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm hoping there are a lot of indie artists out there who are seeing success through Spotify like yourself. Musicians and the songs they write are like authors and their books: there are way too many good ones to read in a lifetime so we end up just focusing on a few really popular ones. Spotify is like a giant library just ready to be browsed for those who want to step off the path. Also I really enjoyed A Laughing Heart!
- scenestealreric 8y ago
  I love this article! Thank you for sharing, Steve. I have two followup questions, if you have time to answer. I used CDBaby and got a deal on uploading a full album, as long as it was under a certain number of tracks and the tracks themselves were under a certain amount of minutes. It was a very affordable way to get my band's music distributed throughout Spotify, Apple Music, Google, Amazon, etc. If I wanted to trickle out a series of singles leading up to the release of our album to "prime the pump" on all platforms at once (like CDBaby), what service can you recommend that might be the most affordable to do this? Secondarily, what would happen when all these tunes are collected later to become an album? Would we have to pay again and re-upload the same tracks? Thanks in advance,Steve!

DontGiveTwoFlux 8y ago

In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up. Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. It's become normal and acceptable to have a subscription to this stuff. It was hard to imagine in the early 2000s when so many pirated their music for free.

mfoy_ 8y ago
It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first. Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was hard. Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer. Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated convenience. And Convenience is King.
- velcrovan 8y ago
  Spotify is literally where I discovered Kings of Convenience https://open.spotify.com/artist/41AbNVba2ccpmcc9QtOJE7?si=4vt9sJDCSW2DITF2x1wBmA https://open.spotify.com/artist/41AbNVba2ccpmcc9QtOJE7?si=4v...
  - siquick 8y ago
    Great band. Check out Erland Oyes other band Whitest Boy Alive if you haven't already.
- iamben 8y ago
  Exactly this. And this is exactly the reason why we'll probably all end up pirating movies again. Pretty much everything mainstream (with the exception of a few artists) is on Spotify. Netflix, Amazon, etc etc. get more fractured every day. Every studio wants their own streaming service. How many will you pay for? 2? 1? 0? Everybody loses.

guyzero 8y ago

This is great but I worry that it's like when Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn't. Everyone loves free money but it sounds like it could dry up at any time at Spotify's whim and there'd be no recourse and no explanation. It is really great that Spotify is putting small to tiny artists into their mass-market playlists. Enjoy it while it lasts.

soared 8y ago
> Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn't Is this actually the case / is there data to back this claim outside of generic google bashing? The sole reason I love my discover weekly is I find music I've never heard of, and I can listen to my friend's discover weekly to get new music from their genres. Only supplying big name music would defeat the purpose.

soared 8y ago

I would love to see an analysis of the artists I listen to on spotify. Last.fm tracks all the songs I listen to so someone would just need to scrape that, find info on each song/artist, and make some nice charts. I'd love to see which artists I listen to that are very small/unknown and send them a thank you.

richrichardsson 8y ago
Just after New Year I got some email from Spotify about looking at stats for exactly that kind of thing, it required giving access to a 3rd party (which I revoked immediately after), which suggests to me that it's all data that you can grab from the API.

xrisk 8y ago

Anybody have stats on $ per stream? How does that number vary between premium/non-premium and on the region you’re streaming from?

saaaaaam 8y ago
Varies depending on how much of your audience is ad supported vs premium and other variables (family plan, bulk deal through mobile operator, student deal) but blended it’s safe to work on the assumption of ~$5 per thousand for Spotify. Higher for Apple Music as they don’t have a freemium audience.

ozzyman700 8y ago

The insight to upload a single every 4 weeks is quite valuable. My songs are all done with pocket operators/an op-1/tone.js, theres a small soundcloud community that follows this type of dawless production but possible longer form ambient tracks would do well on spotify.

lozaning 8y ago
I've got spotify premium but end up listening to tons of Red Means Recording style videos on youtube almost as much as I use Spotify.
- ozzyman700 8y ago
  RMR and Cuckoo music were pretty much all I watched while waiting for my op-1 to ship, the format is so pleasurable. I feel I have run out of brian eno to listen to and I would like to make some of my own.
svantana 8y ago
I'm curious to know how you use tone.js in a creative way, as I have seen it as a framework for developing musical apps, not a creative tool in itself. Also, do you sync the hardware devices with js stuff, if so how?
- ozzyman700 8y ago
  I have been at it for a very short period of time but I mainly think in terms of what cycles can i make that will rarely repeat themselves and result in interesting compositions. Typically I start by defining a main loop, and then have a synth of my choosing randomly select notes and timings. I listen to this randomness until I realize what I don't like about it, then I change the parameter. Something that helps is every time I instantiate a Tone object I make sure to copy paste the entire params from the Tone API, that way the code itself is the "knobs and buttons" I am used to fiddling with on a real synth. This is a brian eno tip but I listen to the track at x2-x4 the bpm of what I actually want the track to end up being, it makes protoyping faster while still allowing complex composition. I keep adding loops and chaining effects until I find something 'almost' complete that needs a human nonrandom touch. Then I connect my PC output to my OP-1, record the output onto a track, and finish the song on my OP-1. I plan on recording the midi output of my op-1 and feeding that into Tone so that I can record some more complicated key movements without having to literally program each key press and release. The path is OP-1 MIDI->MIDItoJSON->Tone.js If you do know of a programming language/library/software like Tone.js but more suited to generative audio I am 100% interested in this field. I am looking to pursue creative coding once I am out of undergrad. I see it as an easy way to stay away from RDBMS which make me feel a sense of corporate dread.

legohead 8y ago

I look forward to every Monday to check out my Discover Weekly. Cool to hear it's having a positive impact on artists.

wesleyfsmith 8y ago

As an artist I totally loved this! Especially you talking about just wanting to make songs when you get home in the evening, not hustle on every single front. $400 a month is admirable for music creation!

carpo 8y ago

I bet you'll get some new interest from this being on the front page of HN too. I just listened to a bunch of your songs and really liked them :) I love Discover Weekly and get excited every Monday morning when I start work and remember there's a new playlist with music I'll probably like. I created a separate playlist called "Discover Favourites" and when I hear a song I like I put it in there, and it's got hundreds now. I've found so many artists I never would have heard of.

drexlspivey 8y ago

For the machine learning enthusiasts, here is an old article on how Spotify classifies songs into genres based on what they actually sound like (input is a spectrogram) https://outline.com/C3PVuU https://outline.com/C3PVuU. Most conventional methods used to recommend based on what other artists people with the same taste as you like. This method is biased against newer artists as there is no easy way to bootstrap them into the process. Their new technique circumvents this problem and as a result new artists get more exposure.

Miner49er 8y ago

From my understanding, Spotify's recommendations have a major flaw - they're based off other users' listening data. What this means is that if a song isn't listened to by very many people it'll never be recommended, and many songs on Spotify don't even have a single stream, let alone however many it takes to get the data to make it a recommendation.

drexlspivey 8y ago
Not true, it's actually the exact opposite. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19503994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19503994
- Miner49er 8y ago
  No, that is simply research they've done. They haven't implemented it AFAIK. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-spotify-discover-weekly-works-2015-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-spotify-discover-weekly-...
hbosch 8y ago
Luckily, the author outlines the fact that many of Spotify's playlists are curated by humans and when you submit an album to Spotify, you highlight a single track for a human to listen to. It is very possible to catch the ear of a human at Spotify and be placed on playlists, which is a spark that ignites more listenership.
- deegles 8y ago
  How does one land a job as one of these playlist curators?
  - plorkyeran 8y ago
    They have a few openings listed on their job site, such as https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/content-programming-manager-kids-and-family-oy3n8fwg/ https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/content-programming-manager-...

driverdan 8y ago

This is a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify. One thing that stuck out to me: > Because you can only submit one song, it’s best to space out releases. That way you can have ten singles considered by Spotify editors— rather than one single from an album for an entire year. I've wondered why so many artists were releasing a ton of singles on Spotify. This seems like a gameable system.

dyeje 8y ago
Is it though? The author makes $400 a month, that's not even close to being a living. Mis metrics and revenue match up with my own experience with Spotify and they are very difficult to achieve. Now imagine that your musical project has 4 people instead of 1, now it's $100 a month per person. Except just kidding, because you'll need to pump all that money (and personal money from members) back into the band to keep things growing.
- driverdan 8y ago
  It's a success because he considers it to be one. Also he's earning more money from his music on Spotify than he was through other means. He explicitly says he's not trying to earn a living from it. > Of course that’s not enough to support a full-time artist but that’s not what I’m trying to be. I don't tour, I don't sell merch and I'm not on a label. I just want to make music and Spotify is making that possible.
  - dyeje 8y ago
    Sorry, I should have been more clear. The 'Is it though?" is in response to saying it's a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify. The author isn't trying to make a living of Spotify, but many people are. Spotify revenue isn't even close to enough for them even if you're extremely successful getting listeners like the author has been.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  I think the key point is the artist didn’t really have to do any promotion. Or spend on marketing.

Fogest 8y ago

I used to love the Discover Weekly, but now that I use Spotify most days when going to the gym any of my auto generated playlists like discover weekly kinda suck. I usually put on random gym playlists like the popular "Beast Mode" one. While I like this music for working out, I definitely don't normally enjoy listening to rap, hip hop, and EDM music however this is what most workout music consists of. I wish I could have playlists that get ignored from Spotify's recommendation engine. Because I totally get it, Spotify thinks I'm into that kind of stuff so it's what I use Spotify for the majority of the time, however I have such a hard time finding new music to listen to on there :(.

Signez 8y ago
I don't know if it could really help in your case, but the "Private session mode" available in Spotify's menu could help. In my limited understanding on how things work, I would expect songs listened in that mode not to be used by their awesome recommendation engine.
- Fogest 8y ago
  It won't factor in songs when making the discover weekly that were listened to in private mode, however the daily ones it doesn't matter for. It's also a bit annoying to have to everytime I go to the gym not only have to find what I want to listen to, but also remember to go into the settings, scroll down, and turn it on, and make sure to turn it off in case I don't want it to stay private for the next 6 hours. I wish it turned on based on location. Hell even if there was some intent or way I could trigger that to turn on/off from Tasker I could automate it myself :P. I'm really bad at finding new music or just music to enjoy in general that I'd like and it's a huge annoyance to have shitty suggestions. Lately I don't even use Spotify much and have been considering just cancelling it.
michelb 8y ago
This is the main reason why recommended content just doesn’t work for me. Youtube, spotify, and many other services try to be clever but are just really dumb.

m348e912 8y ago

It's gatifying as a spotify user to think maybe someday soon there could be a population of artists that make a reasonable living uploading their own music and sustaining their efforts without the need for merch, marketing, or touring -- instead just quietly subsisting on doing something they love doing.

brlewis 8y ago
That seems unlikely to ever happen. Corporations have always been better than artists at maximizing their share of revenue. If such a population started to develop, Spotify would probably lower their percentage payout.

brogrammer5 8y ago

The main problem I have with discovery weekly now is that I primarily use Spotify for the gym but during the day I like to listen to a work playlist that mostly consists of non-vocal electronica. So because I spend so much time listening to the work playlist it's began to influence the music on my Discover Weekly which I used to use to curate new hip-hop/metal music for the gym. It would be nice if Spotify gave you finer control over the type of music that hits your Discover Weekly because it really would suggest good music for me occasionally.

misterprime 8y ago
Sounds like a feature "power users" would appreciate, such as Circles in Google Plus, but most users would not spend the time to learn.

erikschoster 8y ago

This is interesting anecdotally but for those trying to make a living from their music, I would argue direct subscriptions seem far more stable and useful as part of your income. For example bandcamp or something like patreon, where I can subscribe to some artist I really like for $1-3/month or something and get access to everything they do. That's the closest model I've seen for non-huge-industry folks making a living from recordings -- which is of course usually supplemented by touring and a dozen other hustles. (for example mastering or teaching) IMHO overall it doesn't feel like the situation has changed all that much in this era though. The same huge institutions remain magnets for a handful of lottery-winners (big labels, funded orchestras, etc) and everyone else is scraping by in myriad ways, though the ways are a bit different now.

mapleoin 8y ago

A killer feature for spotify would be if they would tell each individual user how much they are contributing to each individual artist they've listened to. I think that could encourage users to subscribe to spotify and listen more to small artists. I suppose this too could be gamed, but the benefit might outweigh the risk.

nwsm 8y ago
Like in dollars? I think it would just turn users off seeing how little artists make off streaming.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

I'm glad Spotify has opened up as a new revenue stream for musicians but it's a laughably small amount of revenue for how much work it is to compose/record hours of original music. Live music is still king for making money. As an amateur pianist myself, $400 isn't a lot of money per month. I can pull $100/hr in an afternoon at a classy gig playing Classical/Jazz/Folk/Pop, you do that once per week and you're well over the $400 total for the month, without all the long history of recording/mixing/mastering/promoting that OP has done. This has allowed me to focus much more heavily on my musicianship and expanding my repertoire, rather than on recording tech/marketing. My ceiling for income is much lower this way-- I can't/don't want to find enough gigs to solely perform...but that's why I code to pay the bills.

vthallam 8y ago
The thing about recorded songs or videos is, the income compounds and has a chance to grow exponentially over time. The same is not true for you going around and playing music.
empath75 8y ago
With the amount of exposure he's getting from spotify, he could almost certainly get paying gigs if he were interested. Also, for some people recording is more interesting than performing.

maxaf 8y ago

If Spotify is becoming for musicians what GitHub became for programmers, I say that’s pretty damn cool.

pradn 8y ago

I wonder if the $10/mo price of Spotify has anchored listeners to a low price that Spotify can't get out of. Spotify will need to pull more money in to be able to give musicians more money per stream. Even if they were able to increase revenues, musicians will need to be able to claim a bigger part of that pie.

firloop 8y ago
This is an interesting point. Netflix has survived multiple price increases over the years, but they offer content that isn't available anywhere else. I think what will probably happen is one music streaming service will raise prices and the others will eventually follow.

z3t4 8y ago

12% conversion rate is very good. I suggest using more sale channels and spend some money on advertising.

astrowilliam 8y ago

I make about $200/month thanks to Spotify listing my podcast. Their partnership with Anchor.fm has really helped push my pod forward because the new features on anchor, since the acquisition, have helped me pinpoint an audience. https://open.spotify.com/show/0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p https://open.spotify.com/show/0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I find so much good music on Discover Weekly. It’s one of the big reasons I stick with Spotify. I’ve tried all of the other services but none of them come close. And I am fully in the Apple ecosystem but Apples recommendations are not even close to Spotify.

lytedev 8y ago
For what it's worth, Google Play's Radio system and "I'm Feeling Lucky" (a terrible name for what it does in my opinion) works beautifully for me!

frogpelt 8y ago

I'm interested how you record your music. I see on your website that you have a producer. Do you record in a home studio? Pro Logic?

steve-benjamins 8y ago
I record in my home and Stephen Kerr (https://www.sjkaudio.com/ https://www.sjkaudio.com/) produces my music. Having a producer like him is hugely helpful to the sound— he brings so much clarity and polish ...

blckchrry 8y ago

Everyone here is marveling at the thought that Spotify could launch someone's career. But there is already a service that does this consistently and it's called SoundCloud.

ghego1 8y ago

Are you also on Tidal? I was looking for your music but I couldn't find it. I actually prefer their service and I hear they pay 4x the artists compared to Spotify.

steve-benjamins 8y ago
Huh. Maybe I'm not Tidal. I'm going to look into this— thanks for the heads up!

Zelphyr 8y ago

Apple should have bought Spotify. They could've renamed it "Apple Music" if they wanted but they should have otherwise left it alone. They could've even gotten rid of the ad-supported stuff and made it subscription only, I personally wouldn't have cared. But my point is that Spotify is everything Apple Music should be. I'm an avowed Apple fan owning and using many of their products and services for decades so when I say Apple Music is terrible it's not coming from a place of otherwise disdain that some have for Apple. Frankly, the whole iTunes and Apple Music teams should be embarrassed with what they continue to release. And if the Podcasts app isn't part of those teams it should be, because it is every bit as bad. I hate to be negative but a spade needs to be called a spade in this case. Apple needs to be called out on those shoddy products.

chottocharaii 8y ago
When in an early iteration of Apple Music, the app ‘accidentally’ erased all of my music library except that which I’d explicitly bought from the iTunes Store; they burned me as a customer forever.

blk_r00ster 8y ago

Congratulations on your achievement ! Do you have your content on Bandcamp ? As people share on this thread, convenience is winning the game but there's a rising market for other people that value supporting the artists directly. Keep it up and great work!

tomcam 8y ago
https://listentobamboo.bandcamp.com/releases https://listentobamboo.bandcamp.com/releases