It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.
From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Taylor Swift.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...
https://kotaku.com/spotify-music-streaming-fake-artist-ai-ap...
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dispute-resolution/dispute...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/9/15767986/taylor-swift-appl...
And honestly, for some of this stuff, I understand Spotify’s position. At the same time, their willingness to promote fake artists with copy cat songs to circumvent paying royalties to BMG or such is why musicians are eating ramen and only a handful of musicians are eating steak.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6t6VE10ixs4wyyIgAbJzvz
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6RuIbUAQK9fmBq08AbY6XE
Honestly, I wish Spotify would stop "improving" their client and use that money to get more artists on their service.
Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.
Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for.
The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.
I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?
As mentioned, my problem, as a listener, is discovery, which bandcamp doesn't address.
It's not as passive as just hitting play on a playlist, but I've discovered so many incredible artists and labels this way. I'd be genuinely devastated if Bandcamp goes away.
I prefer an automated process, rather than clicking about, navigating lists. It's ok that this is my preference.
No, recommendation systems, like Spotify uses, uses crowdsourcing and song analysis to drive the "radio". You can make "song radio" that has the same style/feeling as a song, artist, or genre.
Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.
But yeah I still feel more can be done. Their new Hi-Fi package is supposed to have more options too.
Listen to a set and pull out Shazam whenever you hear something you like. It can even dump all that into a spotify playlist
For me its the only way to fly
Personally i still listen to the radio (streamed online obviously), in the UK NTS Radio (nts.live) and Rinse FM (rinse.fm) are good. Very few adverts, NTS is pretty much listener funded, not sure what Rinse do as I rarely hear ads.
The shows get archived on SoundCloud so you can ID tracks and find them on Spotify later if they were that good.
People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.
As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.
So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.
Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.
> which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.
This is nonsensical [1]. I follow YouTubers have their music on Spotify. Some are just spoof songs.
I get the compensation model sucks for artists. I try to buy things from bands I like. But ultimately, if artists don’t like the Spotify model, they should pull their music - but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.
I'm going to continue to use a platform that can only cost as little as it does because the people who create the art that motivates the entire existence of the platform get paid essentially nothing
well, uh, bravo, I guess.
But uh, bravo, I guess.
No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I would like that crap, Spotify". But when it hits, it hits amazingly well.
This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues.
If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to buy or own albums or music at all. It's designed to be what you have INSTEAD of buying music. When it hits, you don't need to buy music.
The music MAKERS might need you to buy their music, but Spotify is for helping you ignore that.
Heh. How about an ad-supported Spotify, except literally all the ads are for bands and live gigs and music? Bring payola to Spotify. You never pay for it, but you get radio levels of interstitials and they are all from music producers trying to sell their album or single, all for literal music. Albums used to get late-night TV ads and label promotion…
That pot is 95% premium users [2].
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120314/spoti....
If an artist is extremely popular with ad-supported listeners, that doesn't let them eat into the pool of payments from premium listeners.
Note, however, that listens are pooled by country, not per user. So premium accounts running background music in a hair salon 6 days a week will decide where your subscription money goes far more than the music you listen to.
Originally, this was because the big record companies demanded it. Now, the record companies are having second thoughts, but Spotify, which has adapted to the funding key favouring background music, are the ones resisting.
I see it very differently. I care about good music. There's an incredible amount of good music out there, and it's rare that an album is full of it. Your definition of "good" may vary, but mine isn't really influenced by the artist. Most albums are mostly not-good-music. I'm picky, and look at unrelated songs independently. This is why I don't really care for albums. I feel no debt to a single artist or a nothing-more-than-release-time-related collection of music, which is what most are.
Some albums I do considered a complete, single, work, but that's relatively rare. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories is a good example, in my opinion.
I don't see what concerts have to do with anything. Those are often related to luck and finances/privilege.
I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'm very glad that I don't need to bother any more. I don't own the medium the music is stored on, I don't really get why it matters.
Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.
Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.
Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
No, I'm the same way. Sometimes an album only has 1 good song; other times an album is great but I can't stand 1 or 2 songs. The important thing is that I listened to the whole album! I'm judging the songs in the context of their creators. I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs. Interleaving is fine and can be an artform in itself (we used to call it a "mix tape") but I believe you owe it to the artist to listen to the thing they made in its entirety. It would be like reading a book collection interleaving the chapters. It's not fair to you or the authors.
That's how I feel about it. You ARE missing something.
>Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
I have many musician friends, and they would ALL disagree with you quite strenuously. The money they make on streaming is ~0. The money they make selling CDs is almost all profit - and it's also the thing they made instead of sliced and diced and mixed with other things other people made.
I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.
I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.
However any music I care about I buy as I plan to own my library for decades to come.
Plus, you're missing out on a lot of great music that never has been available on streaming platforms.
So far it's only happened because the musician himself pulled the music, and I wasn't really enthused after that to try and find it again. As the gp said, there's so much music now... I might be missing out on some music but if I've already got too much to ever listen to then why does that matter? In fact, having to make the choice to purchase is necessarily going to limit the amount available and my willingness to take a chance on it.
Streaming has opened up so much for me that I would never have found browsing music shops. Of course if Spotify disappeared then I'd have to find another service or buy the music then. A problem for it's time.
That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.
I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.
This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.
But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.
Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).
This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you should be when someone asks for a similar sounding song.
In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them.
This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.
https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-...
If not, Spotify is worthless to me.
Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want.
Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist.
Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability to stream/cache it is a nice addition, but you don't have to rely on it as a way to give money (a pittance) to artists you like.
It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered.
Could you share your secrets?
I've been doing this for decades and as a result, I have a very eclectic collection that covers almost all genres. This approach may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me.
Youtube was much better at that IMO, but I've tried to stop using it due to the Google connection.
I don't really know where Bandcamp stands - I've bought music there that I found on YouTube, but haven't used it to find new stuff.
It requires that you like songs, and listen, of course. I have around 1600 liked songs. It knows me well enough at this point.
My biggest problem with the Spotify recommendation is that it seems to be a bit "sticky", recommended recent listens more than anything.
It seems like it gives me recommendations too similar to what I'm already listening to.
Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music.
Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps!
Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores.
It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.
So then what was the 20 dollar monthly fee truly for?
Because they understand what Bandcamp is charging for?
The page for Bandcamp Pro lists all the feature you get (and everything that isn't listed there, is stuff you don't get): https://bandcamp.com/pro
Again, clearly advocating for the platform and missing the entire message.
A musician can easily self host a site that does exactly what bandcamp represents for them. Also, most serious artists are already distributed to platforms that do exactly what Bandcamp does and more.
There is very little value in bancamp, unless you are perhaps trying to sell songs with lots of uncleared samples in them.
But if you signed up for Bandcamp Pro for $20/month, then clearly you either were happy with what you were getting, or you misunderstood what you were about to get. But personally I think that pricing page is pretty clear about what you get.
Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC.
Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.
There are decisions that can be made by some artists, although I don't recall being offered "full preview requires signin" when I put my own album on BC.
Actually, you can! Fun fact, unless an artist/label has explicitly limited what you can listen to without having made a purchase, you can listen to most of the music on Bandcamp in full, without buying it, an unlimited number of times if you're not logged in. The way it works is that, if you're logged in, you get a set (~3?) number of listens before Bandcamp basically says, "Yo, you seem to dig this, you should prolly be a mensch and throw some dough to the artist(s)/label." If you're logged out, I'm not sure what the limit is (if there even is one?), but it's likely easily circumvented by clearing cache/cookies.
This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.
How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.
Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.
> Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.
> Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.
You haven't really understood the value Bandcamp offers and you're criticising them for not being something they never claimed to be.
You need to do your own promotion.