A Spotify And General Streaming Discussion

Spaldy

Spaldy

Ancient Mariner
After all the recent controversy around Neil Young vs Joe Rogan I was hoping to gauge opinion on this.

I think the media (as usual) have built this up into something that it wasn't. Young merely asked for his music to be removed over his objection to Rogan's platform. He never gave Spotify an ultimatum. If you know Neil Young's history you'll know that he suffered from Polio as a kid before there were vaccines available so it's not surprising that he takes umbrage that Spotify are paying $100m/pa to a doofus podcaster well known for spreading anti-vax conspiracy theories.

It probably makes things worse that Spotify don't pay nearly enough to even the biggest artists on there so it must be insulting knowing how much they value a podcast over the music that built the platform. To be clear, no artist on Spotify earns $100m a year.

More artists are joining him in boycotting the platform and their market value has dropped over $2bn this week so it's having an effect. I'm not sure if any of the younger artist will join them though. And I highly doubt that Maiden will take a political stance like this, especially if the rumours about Steve's anti-vaxxing are true.

What tipped the barrel for me was finding out that the Spotify CEO buys shares in the arms industry. I cancelled my subscription yesterday and have switched to Tidal who, according to my research, pay their artists a lot more and also have far better audio quality. Not that I'm advocating streaming as an end-all. I still believe that more people should purchase music including Vinyl and CD's. I've also seen increased support for sites like Bandcamp over the past few days.

Do I think there will be a push back against music streaming? Unlikely, it's still the most convenient way to hear your favourite albums but I also think it's turned the art more into a commodity. The idea of unlimited choice is a lie. Despite having every piece of recorded music for just £10/month (and I believe there's something inherently wrong with this) most people end up just playing their favourite albums and little else.

Which makes you ask "why not just buy those albums and quit streaming altogether?"

Any thoughts?
 
Do you have a list of the artists boycotting the platform? I've only heard of two, both of which are older artists listened to by older generations and which therefore constitute a drop in the ocean as far as Spotify is concerned.

As per the business model, £10 a month on Spotify is and has always been a waste of money. You can get even more music on YouTube for free, and you can easily get an adblocker to avoid interruption.
 
DJMayes said:
As per the business model, £10 a month on Spotify is and has always been a waste of money. You can get even more music on YouTube for free, and you can easily get an adblocker to avoid interruption.
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I think this is missing the point. YouTube pay artists even less than Spotify and by using an ad-blocker (ads provide the revenue for the stream in many cases) you'd be just as well pirating the music. Also you can't use it on the go unless you're subscribed to Premium.

And the quality is crap.

I use YouTube to watch videos not for streaming music.
 
I think streaming music is here to stay, but I wonder for how long streaming will be centralized in single outlets before being divided into label-specific streaming services, the way that TV and movies are starting to break apart.

There's lots of money to be made in streaming, however, Spotify takes a cut, and it is primarily paying labels, who take a cut. By the time it gets to the artist, there's not much money left. And since the prices are so low, well. I strongly suspect that once a big label figures out they, too, can pull a Disney+, we'll see that start to happen.
 
LooseCannon said:
I think streaming music is here to stay, but I wonder for how long streaming will be centralized in single outlets before being divided into label-specific streaming services, the way that TV and movies are starting to break apart.

There's lots of money to be made in streaming, however, Spotify takes a cut, and it is primarily paying labels, who take a cut. By the time it gets to the artist, there's not much money left. And since the prices are so low, well. I strongly suspect that once a big label figures out they, too, can pull a Disney+, we'll see that start to happen.
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Is there a label that has the same sort of market dominance as Disney does? Honestly asking, I lost all familiarity with the music label landscape.
 
Spaldy said:
I think this is missing the point. YouTube pay artists even less than Spotify and by using an ad-blocker (ads provide the revenue for the stream in many cases) you'd be just as well pirating the music. Also you can't use it on the go unless you're subscribed to Premium.

And the quality is crap.

I use YouTube to watch videos not for streaming music.
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I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that many people care about the difference in audio quality between two streaming sites. Fewer still would equate listening with an adblock enabled to piracy.
 
LooseCannon said:
I think streaming music is here to stay, but I wonder for how long streaming will be centralized in single outlets before being divided into label-specific streaming services, the way that TV and movies are starting to break apart.
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True fragmentation would actually kill the market. E.g. you'd need a subscription for all the labels your bands belong to. However in the TV arena, and I might mention that I've implemented a working, nation-wide IPTV system on a very low level, fragmentation is low because most of the channels aren't platform-exclusive and are handled by a 3rd party B2B licencer/DRM, the only part of equipment ISP needs to purchase as a 'black box'. The rest of infrastructure can be yours from the ground up. The ISP takes a source feed from the 'vendor', decrypts it via the box and multicasts it for its own subscribers, paying fees in between.

The key here is that streaming platform is not the content distributor - the ISP I worked for never had to have any sort of legal contracts with TV companies, the B2B vendor is. They take care of all the corporate hassle.

That's why IPTVs compete for a few specific channels like ones with sports rights, with everything else being mostly the same. They resell streams, that are made to be resold. This is not how it's done in the music industry.

But on the other hand, the end user package of IPTV is made to be 5% what you want and 95% what you don't need, which is not akin to your music experience.
 
Zare said:
But on the other hand, the end user package of IPTV is made to be 5% what you want and 95% what you don't need, which is not akin to your music experience.
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I might be misinterpreting this, but how is it not akin to our music experience? When we pay for a streaming service, we get access to its entire catalogue, but we certainly don't (and can't) listen to all of it.
 
Isn´t it abit like a dinner buffet? You can eat as much as you want (read:can) for 2 hours and have access to all the food: starters, main dishes and desserts. But it´s impossible to eat all of it. :p
 
I don't know. I do not see music going the way of TV/movies with streaming. Beyond Spotify and Apple and whatever streaming services are out there, the record companies make some decent money on streaming back catalog items without the cost/hassle of starting up a service on their own.

They are not even bothering to delay the release of new albums on the streaming services anymore
 
Perun said:
Is there a label that has the same sort of market dominance as Disney does? Honestly asking, I lost all familiarity with the music label landscape.
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Disney is not that dominant, it's currently third behind Netflix & Amazon.
Among the big three music labels (UMG 32%, SONY 20% & Warner 16%) & three major publishers (SONY 25%, UMP 21% & Warner 12%), SONY has a similar dominance than Disney and most importantly the infrastructure to do such a thing easily & effectively.

Not sure why they don't do it, but it won't be technically difficult for them if they decide so.
 
bearfan said:
They are not even bothering to delay the release of new albums on the streaming services anymore
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Absolutely my point, I wanted to write this but didn't want to go on a tangent.
You can't watch the new Star Trek movie on your TV at the moment of release, while that's the norm with the entirety of new music. You can't even watch it on your TV after cinema phase, if you don't have appropriate service.

Midnight said:
I might be misinterpreting this, but how is it not akin to our music experience? When we pay for a streaming service, we get access to its entire catalogue, but we certainly don't (and can't) listen to all of it.
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IPTV has packages with distinct channels. Say there's 50 channels in the entire distribution. 10 are local, 30 are free-to-air satellite stuff, and 10 are added-value, exclusive movie/sports channels that have rights to cover contemporary works and events.

You're never going to get 10 of them in a single affordable package. The package will have three of them, together with the 40 you don't care for.

Imagine having a Spotify subscription but you must pick 1 of Metallica,Maiden and Sabbath because those are the 3 most valued metal outlets. Or you can have some overpriced gold subscription. Which will again be bloated with features you don't necessarily want.

The term "streaming" for me does not cut it. This term is strictly technical yet its being abused by the consumer industry - music streaming, video streaming, game streaming. Streaming does not just mean sending your shit elsewhere.

For instance, voice streaming is not actually streaming. Or game video streaming. Although everyone calls it streaming it's rather the opposite. And if you by any chance end up on "streaming media" pile of a wiki, TV/radio are not streaming. They are broadcasts.

What matters here is the dogma used by transmitter to send data to subscriber. In the sense of basic science of communication protocols. Streams are character based stateful transmissions. They send variable amounts of data to the endpoint, depending on the feedback info from the endpoint - "I can't receive more, I'm full, slow down". The transmitter keeps track of the stream per endpoint. If endpoints go down, the transmitter can resume at the exact data it stopped. As opposed to block based stateless protocols - used exclusively for media "streaming" because it doesn't matter if you drop a frame from the live feed as long as you're practically real-time or near real time. They send out fixed blocks of data and they don't respond to feedback from endpoints (thus having lower internal latency). Fire and forget.

(yes you read that right, download is a stream, while the Zoom stream is not a stream. I'm not the one to blame for this confusion, sorry)

Is Spotify streaming? Yes. It's built over HTTP which is possibly the first widely adopted stream protocol. It actually means that Spotify is a downloading service, as opposed to being a broadcasting service. With broadcasting your set doesn't have capacity to say - ugh this frame is not correct - resend it, it doesn't have a tailored client experience. It can try to tune to the data and whatever it gets or doesn't get is out of its control.

To not complicate things any more, the terms used should be VOD/MOD - video, or music, on demand. Not something you "tune into" but something you request on an individual basis.

Therefore TV/radio/IPTV aren't good examples. But netflix is. And their bias to their home production is only showing that it's cheaper to produce your own exclusive then try to license most of the proprietary works out there.
 
From the way I interpreted things, Neil Young was seriously angry about Joe Rogan’s focus on fringe scientists (and personas), and when Rogan covered Covid the same way he flipped. And Joni Mitchell joined.

Has anyone seen the recent clips of the Rogan/Jordan Peterson podcast? Peterson had some DEEP stuff to say, to say the least...

About Spotify not paying enough to the artists: as far as I know Spotify still loses money itself. The solution would be higher prices for consumers of course, but that would result in piracy again.
 
LooseCannon said:
Peterson is off the deep end, anyway. National embarrassment of a human being.
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I'm sure he's a decent scientist in his own field given that he has a professorship (I can't judge that - but I do know professors can be full of shit too), I bet he's a good shrink and can make you feel better about yourself after you walk away from his couch the way empty carbs can make you feel saturated after you eat them, and I'll grant him that he is more consequential in his political views than most people from the swamp he comes from. But just because he is well-spoken and can pause in a thinker's pose doesn't mean that what he says has any depth to it. He frequently talks about things he has no clue about, and he knows how to write and say a lot of words to conceal that what he's peddling is just platitudes and psychological snake oil. His political commentary consists, for the most part, of just the typical paranoid alt-right talking points only framed by better wording and a professorial demeanour.
 
From a strictly consumer perspective, services like Spotify IMO are fantastic. I cannot tell you how many albums I bought in the 80s/90s based off of a good single, some hype, etc to find out that there were 2 of 10 good songs. I have some bands that I will hit the pre-order button the moment anything is announced, but for the most part, it lets me check out unlimited bands for $10 a month and if I like them, I will buy their LPS. Compared to what it used to be, the monetary value is great. I get it that I can do the same thing on YouTube for free, but I think Spotify sounds better and being able to listen offline/cast to speakers, etc is worth it for me.
 
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