can you follow up on the recreating popular songs and how spotify wronged taylor swift?

Sure, quick google searches… there’s definitely more but this gives you enough info.

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.

There's a ton of stuff like this, where the original artist isn't on Spotify, but these "covers" are:

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.

Ugh… that last one. 65m listens followed by 40m and so on. This is exactly my point. Who the hell is this?

Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.

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.

I had high hopes for SoundCloud but in the end, VC’s always win.

They still pretty much same. I don't get any audio ads, some ads in my stream, but never seem to be playing. Premium offering is stuck somewhere in 2009 when offline playback was a thing. Lack of integrations with Homepod & Tesla is somewhat becoming a problem. Still no way to filter your stream or get know what bitrate you are streaming.

(I studied with one of the founders)

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.

free money for VC via low interest rates was a terrible strategy for creating innovation that would last.

yes, I was very hopeful for sc: such a waste.

> Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.

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?

there's this neat website/app called bandcamp, you may have heard of it somewhere. it asks you to occasionally buy albums, rather than pay a fixed fee.

> trying to find music that I like to listen to

As mentioned, my problem, as a listener, is discovery, which bandcamp doesn't address.

As a listener, Bandcamp is my favourite place for discovery bar none. Find a genre or label and start exploring the catalogue. Find other users with similar tastes and explore their lists. Follow artists, labels and users to see their activity stream.

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.

This is, effectively, what the recommendation systems do. They suggest songs/artists that users with similar tastes liked, and songs with similar styles (there's deep analysis/categorization of the sound of the song).

I prefer an automated process, rather than clicking about, navigating lists. It's ok that this is my preference.

NTS Radio, Rate Your Music or Discogs should be great, deep rabbit holes that lead to new and interesting discoveries.

I’m afraid if bandcamp doesn’t address discovery and SoundCloud doesn’t either then you’re referring to the “shuffle-radio” where you discover new music without doing anything? This is how Brooks Jefferson got to 60m listens in the first place. “Sounds like Garth Brooks!” Because it’s his songs sang by a wedding singer.

> then you’re referring to the “shuffle-radio”

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.

Junodownload is where I buy music most. They have a wide variety of options and fair pricing. It's much easier to find and browse music there. Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...