Spotify

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  • I gain to 89db on average, an ok compromise given a lot of my softer improv and experimental, but that pulls contemporary pop music down from 96+, so it's way softer than the originals for that stuff. It's funny when mp3gain tries to find the average volume for some soft, sparse experimental stuff - it just displays "???????".
  • Lately I've drifted away from using Spotify, but I decided to give it another try. Nothing negative about it, it just sort of fell out my regular routine. However, today I tried using and then refining a playlist from KCRW, supposedly "improving" it. When I gave a thumbs up to some tracks it began giving me mostly tracks by those same artists. That diverts it from being the music discovery method I thought it would be.

    Spotify was useful in playing an earbug, "Corinna, Corinna" by Ray Peterson, that popped up yesterday from some remote corner of my brain.
  • I prefer the version by Big Joe Turner. Peterson sounds like he's happy to be away from the girl. I still recall learning from my older cousin that many of the songs the white radio stations played were hastily-recorded covers. The Big Joe Turner version is an important recording, one of the first to be called Rock and Roll.
  • But Turner's version didn't get the early and repeated plays that locked it in my memory. I guess that was just a "race record."
  • Short video of interview with Jeff Price, who was canned from TuneCore CEO. "Ex-TuneCore CEO Jeff Price on ousting, Spotify and AM/FM, oh my! The former TuneCore chief discusses his recent unexpected ousting, as well as what he thinks remains unfixed in the digital music industry."
  • NPR has an audio program titled How Musicians Make Money (By The Fraction Of A Cent) On Spotify. A transcript is available.
  • I've been using Spotify a lot more lately and wondered if I would ever hit a limit under their free plan. According to their website, it is not limited to 10 hours a month, at least in the United States.
  • I've never hit a limit either. Whereas Rdio seems to have given up on me or on the idea of a free version and locked me out. Shame, I like their interface better.
  • too bad about Rdio. I only used it a few times, but liked it as well.
  • I don't know the state of people's finances, of course, but given the levels of music expenditures I imagine typifies the folks here, I find it hard to imagine not finding $5/month worth of value in a streaming service with an enjoyable interface. I for one think streaming services are way too cheap for the imo significant value they offer.
  • edited October 2012
    I agree, the price is very reasonable. Personally I continue to find that I am a very intermittent user. I use Spotify (or a while back Rdio) for maybe an hour, two hours a month, or maybe 4-5 hours in a high month; on Rdio I never used up the free listening meter within a month, in fact never even used half of it. When I do use them it's usually because I have some time where I have decided to check out some thing I might be interested in downloading to see if they are really of interest. So even with it being free I just haven't got into the habit of using either one. Maybe if I paid I'd care more? Mostly it's just that I don't do a lot of actual listening via computer, largely through habit (because I am certainly at a computer often enough).
  • edited November 2012
    I just got Rdio a couple of days ago. I came across a mention of a new album I wanted to listen to. It wasn't on Spotify, so I looked on AMG and it was on Rdio. So far Rdio seems to work well.

    And what an album it is, too. Ten Freedom Summers by Wadada Leo Smith. http://rd.io/x/QW5e4CJHd5Y I'll probably cross-post on another thread.
  • edited November 2012
    denver, I've been through it about 1.5 times. Earns its high praises, IMHO. As mentioned in another thread, $9.99 at 7digital.

    Meanwhile:
    What Is Spotify Worth?
    Goldman Sachs says $3 billion.

    Spotify hasn't turned a profit, but give the company credit. It somehow seems to have convinced Goldman Sachs to bet on that battered wreck otherwise known as the music business.

    The digital streaming service is reportedly in the process of closing out a deal that would raise $100 million from a group of investors including Goldman and peg its value at around $3 billion total, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's a big vote of confidence from Wall Street in yet another hot web upstart with millions of devoted users and millions in annual losses to show for it.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/what-is-spotify-worth/265111/
  • Doofy, a search turns up that it's actually been on two different threads. How forgetful I'm getting! I guess I won't be posting it again.
  • Repeat posts are not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes they remind me to actually go look at something...stuff flies past too fast sometimes.
  • Which has been reposted - the Wadada Leo Smith or the Goldmann Sachs!?

    Spotify can't lose with that kind of money behind them - can they? Interesting to learn from that article that they make their money off subs, not ads. Quoting Sean Parker:
    "You get addicted to it...You get the songs stuck in your head. You see all your friends' playlists. You end up building a music library that's 100 times bigger than anything you've ever had. And at that point you've got no choice: we've got you by the balls. If you want that content on your iPod, you're going to have to pay for it. If you want that content on your iPhone, you're going to have to become a subscriber."

    Makes me glad to still be a DL-er - I could never buy another mp3 in my life (sure I could) and never run out of music to listen to.
  • Agreed. I don't mind subscribing to things, but not things that require me to keep subscribing to retain access to things that have become personally important to me. If I did subscribe to Rdio or Spotify it would not be to replace buying things, but just for trawling.
  • edited November 2012
    Which has been reposted - the Wadada Leo Smith or the Goldmann Sachs!?
    The WLS.
  • Has anyone else noticed that Spotify has recently (at least for me) started recommended artists based on what you have been playing? And unlike some eMu's recs, it's much I'm mostly interested in.
  • If your Spotify App has been acting as slow as mine, here's one possible solution.
  • Here is an interesting article from Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age. "Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80."
  • Is writing one song with Ringo Starr worth a house and a pool or worth $80? If I had to assign a value, I'd shoot closer to the $80 end of the spectrum. (And now someone can tell me that nothing "should" be "worth" anything, or there is no should or worth or whatever.)
  • edited June 2014
    Makes no sense.
    Let's very charitably assume that half of those plays on Spotify represent unique listeners who would have bought a separate copy of the song on disk (as opposed to being repeat plays by the same person and people listening to their friends' records/the radio). I think that's pretty charitable.
    Let's also assume that the pool is attached to a very modest house - an average house that would have cost GBP5000 in 1970 according to a quick Google. Let's say the pool costs another 500. Kind of a paddling pool.
    Cost of a single record (more Google) in 1970 was about 35 pence.
    Sell 50000 and that's GBP 17500 gross.
    And the unknown *co*-writer is going to make GBP5500 off that??
    Really?
    Of course I have not read the article. The quotation just struck me as silly.
    Or is it that you used to get a pool and a house for being mates with Ringo Starr? (Who was also a slightly bigger draw 40 years ago than now).
  • Swimming pools aside, I meant to post this article on artists' anxiety about iTunes shifting to streaming. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-29/cellist-frets-apple-s-streaming-push-means-smaller-checks.html
    Recording artist Zoe Keating only needs to look at her earnings to zero in on why she has misgivings about Apple Inc. (AAPL) buying Beats Electronics.
    The cellist made $38,196 selling downloads on Apple’s iTunes last year, along with about $34,000 from three other download services. By contrast, five streaming outlets, from Spotify Ltd. to Pandora Media Inc., netted her just $6,381
    ...
    “ITunes downloads help me pay my monthly mortgage,” Keating said in an interview. “Unless you’re a mega-star, you can’t count on the same for streaming services. Me and a lot of my music artist friends are worried about the switch from music buyers to music listeners.”

    I guess I would add, Ringo had a couple of gold records back in the 70s. That's what, a million copies, in the US alone!
  • OK, I did read the article, and funnily enough even though I am very sympathetic to critiques of the Spotify model, something in the tone of the article turned me against it. By the end it sounds as if it was saying that patronage should mean that composers should get funded regardless of whether there is an audience, because the music most people want to listen to is bad. It also cuts some corners: things like kickstarter and bandcamp are creating new kinds of patronage (though I agree not on a scale to counterbalance spotify). Spotify is perhaps more equivalent to radio than to record sales back in the day. And there is just vastly more music being marketed these days, which is bound to affect its economics.
  • Van Dyke Parks is not exactly an unknown songwriter. However, I did not know "In 1965, Parks briefly joined Frank Zappa's The Mothers of Invention on stage, where he was referred to as 'Pinocchio.'" (from the wikipedia article, this changes my mental image of the man considerably.) Aside from the rhetorical flourish of Ringo buying him a house with a pool, the songwriter is least compensated in the streaming format. For all other sales, including licensing, Van Dyke can still make good money for a tune he wrote 50 years ago, especially if he can get it used in an episode of MadMen.

    According to this article, "Even 40 years after he wrote "American Pie", today Don McLean still earns an estimated $300,000 in combined royalties every year. Scottish musician Gerry Rafferty earns $100,000 a year off his 1978 song "Baker Street"." Yep, Baker Street makes more money than I do.

    Perhaps the tl;dr version is: Songwriting used to be where there money was, now it is not.
  • I meant unknown in relation to the buying public. How many purchasers of any popular song can name the co-writer?
  • And I just noticed in Doofy's post:
    The cellist made $38,196 selling downloads on Apple’s iTunes last year

    and
    “ITunes downloads help me pay my monthly mortgage,”

    Apparently her mortgage is rather higher than mine :-)
  • edited December 2014
    Hmm, I just learned something I hadn't realized. I got an offer for 3 months of Spotify Premium for 99 cents and took it. Nice timing with all those end of year lists appearing. And it is nice not to hear ads with really bad music in them in between the really good music :-). Call my mind "open" with regard to whether I might continue it once paying for real kicks in. So I looked into one of the touted benefits of having a paid spotify account - being able to listen offline.

    If I understand it correctly the only way to isten offline on an i-device (iPod Touch in this case) is to erase all your existing music on the device and have Spotify be the sole source of music.

    I suspect this is an Apple-induced limitation, still, assuming I understood correctly, it's a deal breaker. Spotify is not even close to having all the music I listen to, and a LOT of my listening is while out walking with the iPod Touch.
  • Hey GP,

    Unless things have changed, that's not true. Let me check...nope. You just go to the music you want to play offline and turn the Available offline on - the songs sync to your device, then you can listen offline. It does nothing to my iPhone's regular music.
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