This is happening with Airbnb, Amazon, Shopify, and now Spotify? We pay a cut to be in the platform, then we pay for marketing on the platform. It's obvious who holds the cards.
Our feudal lords now have catchy names.
I will also say that the issue is mainly human nature - any platform that gets critical mass will likely see people interested in money bubble to the top and eventually monetize.
The barrier to entry is too low. The competition, outside of mega pop and hip hop acts and the like, is functionally infinite.
Before, there were all these hurdles and gatekeepers sure, but this meant if you were stubborn and lucky and talented you had a halfway decent shot at getting somewhere.
Now it is closer to absolute random.
If you were any good, I'd say it was the opposite.
You could get signed and live off of 50-100K records sold per year (from Indie labels where you got a bigger share of your sales revenue) globally. You didn't have to compete with anybody in the world that had a guitar or some synth and an audio recorder, only comitted musicians with deals.
The "company screwed me" stories of that era come mainly from suckers that got signed as starry eyed 17 year olds or something into major labels with crappy deals. And even those stories were somewhat overblown when it came to big bands (the company did made millions, but they did get plenty in advances too, enough to buy cars, houses, and support constant parties and a few drug addictions).
Any small indie band/musician in the 80s to 00s has found the mp3/streaming era much worse with regards to industry income.
Sometimes you get free marketing without any effort.
But most times you need to put the work into to be noticed. This includes paying for services that help get the word out.
Last I checked for a vacation, VRBO still was a viable alternative for renting people’s homes. Then there are tons of other location specific real estate companies specializing in renting vacation homes.
If you think there is no alternative to these big tech companies, you haven’t looked very hard.
The all of a sudden some awful explicit song starts playing, nothing to do with ABBA, not even in the same genre.
Reported the playlist for being deceptive. I note today it has a different song in there now.
Spotify need a setting to avoid this stuff otherwise they’ll start losing passive customers like myself who pay £15pcm to listen to music that we want to listen to without thinking about it.
Give me a setting to avoid all “social” things like public playlists or watch as your revenue goes to Apple or amazon.
It means I have to use my decision making part of my brain, which is not what I want to do when listening to music, and as that’s the part of my brain which will decide to cancel, it’s not something Spotify want me to do either.
I thought we all learned this when people started to have 50% of the bookmarks from the 2000s dead by now, but seems we still have generations that need to learn from the precariousness of content on the internet.
I listen to albums and don't as much care, but that really is their product differentiation.
Payola, in the music industry, is the illegal practice of paying a commercial radio station to play a song without the station disclosing this information
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
I'm not a big fan of how tech companies have and continue to ignore existing regulations and legislation simply because "on the internet" or "it's an app" is somehow perceived by them as different.
By analogy: like we have analogue drug laws that deem substances prohibited even before they're invented, we should have analogue services law where a fucking taxi company is a fucking taxi company regardless of what technology underlies it, and a radio service is a streaming service etc.
You don't get to ignore broadcasting rules just because the delivery tech is Internet Protocol based rather than radio.
Whether or not one agrees with the existing legislation on either of those particular matters is beside my point here, so let's skip straight past that distrsction please.
Internet streaming doesn't fit into that "finite resource" model.
Of course you do, the whole purpose of the Payola law has jack shit to do with music. It’s about sponsored airtime being transmitted over public frequencies without being identified as such. It’s very specifically a property of how the FCC wants public radio incentives disclosed.
Payola doesn’t apply to MTV and it certainly doesn’t apply to a TCP/IP connection from a browser to a server requesting a song download. Payola doesn’t even apply to Sirius/XM. It’s a property of public broadcast, not music.
My understanding is that the curators are people with public playlists on Spotify.
We’ve probably all seen that drawing of a kid studying to chill music that everybody seems to get recommended on YouTube. They also have that playlist available on Spotify and Apple Music. My guess (with emphasis on guess) is it’s those kinds of playlists by third parties, that OP was paying a middle man to get onto.
Which is even more interesting imho. I’d get there where money exchanged in order to get on Spotify’s own heavy rotation (just like radio). Either by giving Spotify a discount per play or simply by Spotify having cost of a track as part of the algorithm that decides what to recommend.
But paying for 3rd party playlists one way or another hadn’t struck my mind at all.
How is it better for a radio station to monetize by airing commercials than to monetize by airing music?
That is literally my understanding of the term "influencer". What is your definition?
Anyone with a big following of people who want trust them in some way is an influencer.
If you want to try submithub out, be ready to pay with a card, regardless of what the UX seems to imply. It seemed like a good service, but now I don't see myself dealing with them.
When going through the submission process you'll see it prompts you whether you want to use your standard (free) credits or premium credits. If you don't have any premium ones -- and don't want to buy them -- make sure you stick to the 'standard' path.
The core idea behind SubmitHub's "model" is that for decades it's been near-impossible to catch the attention of bloggers/playlisters/curators/whatever. Our system dangles a carrot (~$1) in front of them to guarantee a response+feedback about your song (with the ideal outcome of course being that they share your song - no additional costs involved).
For pro musicians who are committed to your product as a promotion path, perhaps they don't care about that credits ambiguity because they go in with a marketing budget and know what they're going in for. For me, I will stick with making music for fun. I wish your team success at their mission.
There is an interview with the founder on a podcast somewhere that's quite informative. I'll link to it if I can find it.
I had never heard of Soundcampaign though. Will have to check it out.
Link?
I operate e-commerce businesses, and I'd throw at least $500-$2,000 on testing something new before I call it quits.
There comes a point where you need a minimum amount of money before you can tell if something is working. If you spent 10 cents on advertising, that would be pretty meaningless.
Related to that, what about the playlists themselves? Did the author of this blog post feel that they were grouped with artists of a similar enough genre the audience would appreciate them? Were those playlists all new/upcoming artists sourced from services like this, primarily popular/established artists with a few select artists mixed in, or a mix of both?
The psychology of what music people choose to pursue is fascinating and brutally frustrating. Details like the ones above could tell some very different stories about the author’s experience. It’s possible that a different artist would have a vastly different experience on these services.
Of course, having said that, I would have been blown away if this experiment yielded any significantly positive results. This is the newest face of pay to play events and compilation CDs run by labels and marketing companies. There are no shortage of people eager to exploit the enthusiasm of artists.
There will always be things like this.
Based on the effort required even after submitting and getting approved on some of these sites (I also didn't know these sites even existed! very cool to learn about that), the author had to do some sifting and understanding of what they were getting into (ex. getting into a playlist of 500 songs and being #500 seems like crap). Sounds like investing more and getting on more lists might help with your odds of getting good placement/good playlists but ultimately requires a linear scale of time invested.
It also seems like the author got exposure to labels for what I think feels like a low price (especially if you aren't well connected in the industry already).
At the end of the day, crappy music ain't gonna sell no matter how much you pay for streams. A hit will rise to the top and it seems like it is the biggest factor in if influencers/playlist makers will pick it up!
Also Spotify should have some way of distinguishing services that have paid playlisting and not - the same way youtubers(or any other influencer) has to disclose if they're doing a sponsored spot. It feels a little scummy that they're doing this.
[0]https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/01/spotify-just-purged-...
This is just paying to get added to playlists with high followers. Plays are not guaranteed.
You're basically saying: "Hey, if you give me 3 minutes of your time to listen to my song and let me know what you think I'll give you $1."
For reference, roughly 1 in 5 submissions end up getting shared. So if you send to 100 playlisters, 80 of them will say "thanks but no thanks" and roughly 20 of them will add it to their playlist for no additional cost.
The money paid is for the convenience of contacting these bloggers, I don’t believe they get a cut of it. Also, it’s mostly a flat rate. You can’t pay an arbitrary amount of money to guarantee anything other than the blogger giving your song a fair listen.
And in the end, the author spent $130 on sketchy marketing and got 10 followers.
But honestly, $130 doesn't really sound like that much money, it doesn't really sound like this was exactly super targeted, and it was super short term (repeated exposure is important in marketing). Maybe the conclusion is that this was just a poorly done marketing campaign, which unsurprisingly got poor results.
