All the platforms have the same model. In simplified terms, it’s 70% of all subscription revenue goes into a pool and it gets divided out over the total number of streams by subscribed users. Spotify’s rate is so low because it has more total streams in that pool. Meaning they have more listeners listening to more music than the other platforms. For an example (these numbers are just made up for this example), an average Spotify user has 1,000 different streams in a month where as the average Apple Music user only has 700 different streams in a month. Spotify has a lot more collaborative features than the other platforms, hence the increased/more active userbase.
apparently some figured out how to beat the <1000 plays thingy… a recent post on r/TechnoProduction about a new genre “Spotify Techno” shed some light into a nice formula combining AI generated short tracks that apparently making their way into the automated playlists of people that have the “keep playing” feature ON, my guess is by having such short tracks they get much more plays.
and it looks like this (all of these are commercial type AI generated techno-ish stuff similar to what’s playing on Tomorrowland, but reeealy short, some of these are like single note playing for a minute lol, also using screenshots instead of links so anyone with spotify won’t get this “virus”):
That they make really short tracks to game the system is fine, i guess. But why do they not maker the tracks themselves?
I’m not sure how this works in practice. Bunch of short tracks. Ok. How does the keep playing feature on Spotify work? Who is listening to these short, probably terrible tracks over a thousand times? (let’s face it, they can’t be any good if made by an automated bot)? I don’t think having a bunch of bad but short tunes is going to get anyone more than 1000 plays 
the way it works is for example you play an album of artist you like, or a playlist, both are finite in amount of tracks, so when the album ends it should stop playing, right?
so in spotify there’s a toggle button in settings “keep playing”, so when it ends instead of stopping spotify will continue playing stuff based on “aLgORiThM”, that’s where they come in, the listener can be away from phone/player and it just keeps playing, so in an hour it plays 30-60 1-2 minute tracks instead of 10x6 minute tracks, that’s how you get more plays.
my guess is that there’s a way of promotion to these in the first place, for example adding one or two tracks into “mega-playlist” people are following, the playlists are updated constantly and no one notices, so you get the first plays based on these playlists positioning, then the algorithms picks it up and start pushing it from the algorithm to other people based on keywords/genre etc.
but I’ve found one of them on beatport and you can evaluate the music:
But why would the aLgoRithM push those into playlists over others? And how many people leave their devices playing for hours upon hours without doing something about it or their battoeries dying? This is all so surreal, it sounds made up.
Listening: is it because they are so bad that you think they are “made” by bots? This could have been made by a noob too.
Haha some of those tracks actually have sold on Beatport. Fascinating.
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some playlists are created by users, imagine a label starting a playlist “Deep House - The Top” with top hit songs, people looking for these generes will find these playlist and just follow, now the playlist owner changes tracks, the listeners can’t know it’s just a playlist, so now there’s opportunity to push your tracks into the playlist. after they get X amount of plays these tracks are promoted by their algorithm to other people listening to generated playlists or “suggestions” which most of the time happens automatically.
millions of users just put their streamer or pc spotify on and that’s it, not everyone on phone…
not just that, it’s like the tracks generated by a query, like “give me that style track, other style track”, they are just so different I find it hard to believe same person did all these sketches, they all sound like a query for a prompt you know?
So you mean the owners of these popular playlists put these tracks in there? But that would ruin the playlist popularity, no? Is it not a downside to damage the playlist popularity?
Idk, there’s plenty of noobs making all sorts of disparate styles cause they haven’t figured out what they like. But, let’s pretend these are out of prompts… That means whomever owns the rights of the algorithm is the one doing this cause otherwise they are the ones who own the rights and therefore the royalties. There was a piece a while back on 5magazine that covered this very topic regarding royalties from works out of bots. here’s the link: The AI music company shitting up your streams - 5 Magazine
Buh. Fight Club tried to warn you i should add.
Sorry to be that guy, but that’s not at all what this article says. It says that $366 billion out of roughly 5 trillion dollars went to the top 20% of earners. That’s less than 8% of the total stimulus package, which included about $1 trillion that went directly into people’s savings accounts and paying down their debts.
While the paper in the article points out that most of the Paycheck Protection Program (not the entire stimulus package) went to the top 20%, the PPP represents one portion (about $800 billion; see below) of the whole $5 trillion package. It was a messy shotgun approach, butit helped save over 3 million jobs in Q2 2022. (Though yes, it could have saved many more). According to your article, the majority of the rest of the stimulus went to the bottom 80%.
Those PPP checks kept my wife’s small business solvent during the pandemic, so I was curious to see what the breakdown was and how much went to the fat cats. Here it is:
Am I totally happy with the way this money was allocated? Hell no. But let’s not get confused here. The covid stimulus massively reduced hardship. It did not go directly to the 1%.
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Ha, thanks for following up on that. Good to see that it did some good for the people.
I‘d still prefer UBI to relief packages that are only available in a crisis.
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100%.
If you ask me, the biggest and most tragic failure of the Covid stimulus is that it was a one-time thing and all the lessons we learned from it were willfully forgotten.
Even after all the good it did, a year later the whole US government was like, “well, I guess that’s over. Thank god we can go back to not caring about poor people again.”
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…goodness, it’s all even worse…
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Forget streaming, we don’t need no water let the m…f… burn
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I wish the modern world wasn’t such a difficult clusterf*ck to survive in, so that people just had more time to do the things they loved without thinking they needed to turn a profit from them. It can be a toxic mindset that gets people into situations where they are easily taken advantage of. Like that stat towards the end of that video where only 27% of the musicians he polled were making more money from streams than they spent on distribution…
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good interview about all the scams, state of music, Ai etc… a good listen. pretty crazy… sort of greatest hits of how shit it all is.
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this video is brilliant! thanks
I feel skeptical about accusing just the Spotify, saying, "jeah they suck, but we don’t have a choice, we have to use the platform, and they are making the rules. "
No, we do have a choice, don’t stream, don’t upload. It is not an easy way, but we cant win that war (for the future of music) with conformism.
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from the interview with Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) :
Your albums aren’t available on Spotify. What do you think of streaming services?
I managed to get everything taken off Spotify. I got a lot of stick for not being on there, because of this notion that there is only one way to do something. But I don’t identify with Spotify. I don’t use it, I don’t feel particularly attracted to it and I decided to opt out. People get in such a flap over saying no to big companies nowadays. But for me, this is quite normal behaviour. I turned down an Apple advert. Nobody says no to Apple but I don’t really care so much. I just need to follow the things that feel right and true to me. I don’t believe that not being on Spotify makes music less valued.
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haven’t finished the video yet but interesting talk so far.
was wondering about the same thing along the video, and actually made me wonder if all these uploading platforms eventually feed the LLMs databases?
I mean, where do these LLMs take their music from? do they buy it from anywhere or just scrape it off spotify? or other platforms like soundcloud/bandcamp/youtube?
because if they do scrape it then well, there’s no safe haven I guess, everything you upload automatically prone to scraping and being fed into these LLMs.
I loved the part about subscribers business model not being sustainable and now they can probably follow Netflix and hide their subscriber numbers, replace all of these auto-generated promoted playlists with self-generated AI material and reduce their expenses to zero while still grabbing all of the subscriptions, and the majority probably won’t notice it anyway…
and what’s stopping Spotify from basically use the “real” music in their catalogue and creating own Suno-like service and just use it to re-generate all of the “real” music into self-generated stuff…
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Yes, what they say in that video, they are playing now, as it seams, a lot of little games ( or not as little ), and at this point it is more or less up to real streamers ; they can pump up the numbers, create artificial identities, but without real world subscribers, who actually pay them for their profit, they gonna have to become interesting and honest.
But i am simple guy, when i don’t like something, i just don’t do it, even if it is killing me 
Anyhow, i think it is very complex cultural situation, and it stretches way beyond the internet, something went wrong somewhere, and in more then one place. …
And it is not just them, it is also about us, and what we do and not ( do ).
There is no “them” without “us”, we have to realize that.
I remember a while back somewhere there was an example of a pop punk song, the singer sounded just like the green day singer. They’re definitely stealing from everywhere. Probably mostly from the major labels but wouldn’t count out Bandcamp etc.
Update:
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