My world on the web
Effortlessly convert Spotify links to your preferred streaming service
I Don’t Have Spotify, a site for finding alternative places to listen to songs found on Spotify. Alternatively, Hype Machine’s Merch Table will find albums on Bandcamp based on a Spotify playlist.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultura…
ᔥ in How Spotify hacked our ears (and our data) — Switched On Pop ()
The pitfalls of refusing to buy a separate Spotify account for a 12-year-old…
Just once, I wish my Wrapped actually wrapped up me.
Between Goblincore and Taylor Swift, I’m baffled by my Spotify Wrapped by Virginia Trioli
My top songs were those I played for my children (Please, Please, Please by Sabrina Carpenter.) I was left thinking about the artists that I thought I had on high-rotation, but did not make the list, such as Ibibio Sound Machine or Fanning Dempsey National Park (although I think this one suffered as there were no standout tracks that were placed on high rotations?) In the end, I think what taints some of this is that there is some much that I listen to outside of Spotify (on vinyl) that does not make the count?
Trioli also highlighted the amount an artist receives per play:
The American UMAW has been needling Spotify with irrefutably uncomfortable data of their own, showing that Spotify pays a maximum of 0.003 cents per stream and has fired most of their curatorial staff, instead relying on AI for the $2.5 billion salary the union says Spotify founder, Daniel Ek, makes.
Between Goblincore and Taylor Swift, I’m baffled by my Spotify Wrapped by Virginia Trioli
I was left feeling guilty at only paying only $1 for Twinkle Digitz. However, I am now left thinking that clearly is not so bad, because at 0.003 per play I’d have to play Blackmail Boogie 33333 times, which on my rough estimates would involve playing the track for 2425 minutes. I like Twinkle Digitz a lot, but I am not sure I have played any track or artist for 2425 minutes, so maybe Trioli is onto something?
Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that’s stable over long timescales, chances are you’re looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that’s the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that’s saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).
Regardless of whether Spotify succeeds or fails in its efforts, the push feels like the beginning of the end for one of the last sections of the internet to exist independently of the major technology platforms. Just as the rise of social media usurped blogging, the success of YouTube centralised video creation, and, yes, the creation of Spotify itself upended the MP3-based era of online music fandom, podcasts in their current form feel on the edge of an existential change. It’s hard to see how Spotify’s efforts can be successfully fought except through others, like the BBC, retrenching to their own walled gardens, and while a world with twenty podcasting apps is probably better than a world with just one, it would be the end of an era.
Alex Hern discusses Spotify’s acquisition of Chartable and Podsights. He explains their significance in being able to target ads within podcasts on Spotify. This is a part of Spotify’s goal to become the YouTube for podcasts.
What the company is bringing to the table for advertisers is obvious enough. When you listen to a podcast on Spotify, you’re not just downloading an MP3 from a server and playing it on a generic app of your choice – you’re streaming straight from Spotify’s servers, with your listening linked directly to your account and all the commensurate profiling that brings with it. Spotify can sell ads on behalf of podcasters, target those ads in a far more granular way than most podcasting apps, and easily roll out technical features – “tap here to buy”, for instance – as advertisers see fit.
The catch with this is that users do not have to listen to many podcasts on Spotify. Personally, I listen through an app, AntennaPod. However, this is the reason that Spotify is also purchasing and producing podcasts to play exclusive on their platform, such as the Who is Danial Johns?. It is also for this reason that BBC is changing the way it distributes its podcasts, having a focus on the BBC Sounds app. With all this in mind, it spells the end to another open format/platform on the web.
I guess this is still better than what has happened with the music industry:
Unlike a record label, publisher, or most anyone else in the music industry, Spotify devotes none of its profits to the development of new recordings.
Young’s goal was not to get Spotify to dump Rogan, as many seem to think. His goal was simply to force Spotify to go on the record, in public, with their explicit support for Rogan, and to raise awareness that their rules — right or wrong — accommodate his show’s commentary on COVID and vaccines.
Spotify Wrapped has become an annual tradition, marking the change of seasons the same way beloved cultural staples like Starbucks holiday cups or Mariah Carey mark the holidays. But as Spotify’s feature rose in popularity, so did a growing discourse about algorithms, the use of which has become standard procedure on social media, and which Wrapped relies on.
An algorithm takes a set of inputs and generates an output, the same way a recipe turns ingredients into a cake. For Spotify to rely on algorithms means it uses data from its consumers to generate music discovery delivered through playlists. Open Spotify’s home page and you can find any number of curated playlists that source user data collected from the app, from “Top Songs in the USA,” which aggregates collective data, to “Discover Weekly,” which draws from personalized data. To create these playlists, Spotify tracks the music you listen to, organizes it into certain categories, measures tracks against other listeners, and uses that information to choose what music to show you.
These choices and recommendations often come with their own sets of biases and assumptions around gender and mood. They help mold a ‘templated self’ or what David Marshall describes as a dual strategic personadual strategic persona:
Through a particular study of online entertainment reviewing, this chapter explores the emergence of a new strategic persona in contemporary culture. It investigates the way that the production of entertainment-related commentary, reviews and critiques online is increasingly defined by a complex relationship and intersection with what is described as a dual strategic persona. Along with a public presentation of the self as reviewer across multiple platforms, the new online film reviewer is also negotiating how their identity and value are aggregated and structure into algorithms.
Although these curations are designed to share, I am more interested in using them as a point of reflection. I am always intrigued about what they do and do not say about my listening habits this year, this goes with the regular recommendations as well. I actually wonder if Spotify Wrapped reflects the place that music has served at times this year, a form of fast food, consumed as a means of escape, rather than something to stop and consider. For me, this has led to more pop at times. In addition to this, my statistics are corrupted in that I often play music for my children.
In addition to this, there are quite a few albums not on Spotify, which have soundtracked my year, such as Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn and Damian Cowell’s Only the Shit You Love. Also, I created a playlist of all the tracks that Damian Cowell mentioned on his podcast, which I noticed totally threw out my recommendations at times too.
What remains more difficult to predict are the qualities that make you truly distinct: your thoughts and beliefs, your personal history, the unspoken nuances of the relationships that have made you who you are, and the unbounded expanse of moral and imaginative possibilities that constitutes your own mind. Attending to those aspects of yourself is the work of a lifetime—and far from boring.
Spotify’s business model is expressly not rooted in music or musical quality. It’s driven by the amount of time you listen to Spotify. The company doesn’t sell songs; it sells subscriptions, and user data are probably its most lucrative commodity. Over the years, Spotify has been periodically accused of padding massively popular playlists like “Peaceful Piano” with “fake artists” and royalty-free music to avoid paying royalties to working musicians. Spotify has mostly denied the accusations, but their existence alone raises uncomfortable questions. Would listeners even notice? Would they care?
The danger of mood-based recommendations is the subjective judgement that needs to be made – do you suggest songs that allow a user to revel in that mood, or do you suggest songs that try to shift a user’s mood? YouTube’s recommended videos have often been criticised for leading people down topical rabbit holes that are difficult to escape from. For instance, maybe you wanted to see that video of Ben Shapiro owning a liberal snowflake, but 2 months on, you’re now being presented videos on the latest Q-Anon conspiracy. The parallel when it comes to mood may be you’re feeling depressed, Spotify recommending “sad boi / sad girl’ songs, and making it harder for you to escape that mood.
What Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram did to blogging — Spotify and Apple Podcasts are attempting to do to Podcasts.
A guide to the Spotify Kids app.
Share playlists you create in the Spotify app with your children in the Kids app
This allows for the inclusion of tracks beyond those selected by Spotify.
Twitter needs to change gears quickly — and it needs to start rebuilding itself now. It won’t be long before the toxicity on the platform starts to deprecate the brand itself. So far, the company seems to be set on taking the content-delivery road more traveled. Changing course could make all the difference.
In much the same way Spotify has become a place where people experience music, Twitter could be the place where we discover, share, and consume news and other written content. And unlike Spotify, it could be a place where new, independent voices are found and build an audience.
Spotify’s reward structure doesn’t help the independents, and many smaller artists feel left out in the cold and understandably frustrated. Twitter could develop a subscription system that rewards both big and independent content creators. A system proposed earlier could be a skeletal template that satisfies both the big and the independent.
In part, this sounds like what Nuzzel offers, without the explicit organising. Interestingly, this sounds like a feed reader, I therefore wonder if that is where the opportunity lies, with things like Inoreader’s magic sort?
Independent musicians detail how Bandcamp is putting money in their pocket in a more meaningful way than Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.
First, Spotify is gaining power over podcast distribution by forcing customers to use its app to listen to must-have content, by either buying production directly or striking exclusive deals, as it did with Rogan. This is a tying or bundling strategy. Once Spotify has a gatekeeping power over distribution, it can eliminate the open standard rival RSS, and control which podcasts get access to listeners. The final stage is monetization through data collection and ad targeting. Once Spotify has gatekeeping power over distribution and a large ad targeting business, it will also be able to control who can monetize podcasts, because advertisers will increasingly just want to hit specific audience members, as opposed to advertise on specific shows.
Not so long ago we stored our music in records, radio cassettes, discs and our MP3 players. We always carried our music with us. Today, There is no more need for that, we use streaming services. But what happens if you want to switch from one service to another, and move all your music from Spotify to Deezer? or when you find a great YouTube playlist but you want to listen to it in Spotify? or maybe you just want to upload your local MP3 library to your favorite streaming service? TuneMyMusic solves exactly that.
To create Discover Weekly, there are three main types of recommendation models that Spotify employs:
- Collaborative Filtering models (i.e. the ones that Last.fm originally used), which analyze both your behavior and others’ behaviors.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, which analyze text.
- Audio models, which analyze the raw audio tracks themselves.
let this be a warning to you: if you use Spotify as your podcast app, you are a prisoner to Spotify, and if you decide to switch to another podcast app there isn’t any way to get your data out of Spotify.
Spotify made some big news this week with their purchase of Gimlet and Anchor. Gimlet is an award-winning podcast studio. Anchor is a great tool/platform to allow you to create and share a podcast.
