[HN Gopher] The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing an...
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The proliferation of disingenuous music marketing and playlisting
services
Author : pud
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-01-04 11:52 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.distrokid.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.distrokid.com)
| nchase wrote:
| Similar problem, different platform: every time I post music on
| Soundcloud I get likes and comments from bots that want me to pay
| for reposts.
|
| They seem to have a huge problem at SC and it's not clear to me
| that they have any reason to try to stop it. I have been
| reporting this behavior for years and from my perspective it
| hasn't gotten any better.
|
| I have no evidence for this but it feels like Soundcloud is on
| life support and they have zero or near-zero developers working
| on it.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| > I have no evidence for this but it feels like Soundcloud is
| on life support and they have zero or near-zero developers
| working on it.
|
| Well they have been teetering on the brink of collapse for a
| long time, so no, I wouldn't expect them to have tons of
| resources. I'm surprised they're still around to be honest.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I chose bandcamp over soundcloud because I don't have face
| tattoos, but that kind of judginess really just covers for risk
| aversion and perfectionistic failure chasing. I may switch
| based on the rationale that a product is only as good as it
| needs to be and crapiness that persists can be a leading
| indicator of growth. While bandcamp is earnest and comfortable
| for the kind of stuff I do (just a place to share with
| friends), it may be a bit too cool for school if I actually
| ended up producing something people want.
|
| Soundcloud really looked like they were growing faster than
| their ability to handle it. Thinking it may actually be the
| smarter play.
| dyeje wrote:
| They are entirely different products. Bandcamp is a digital
| storefront and SoundCloud is audio social media.
|
| On a related note, their business models are completely
| different. Bandcamp is bootstrapped and profitable, while
| SoundCloud is dependent on investment money and almost went
| bankrupt a few years ago.
| motohagiography wrote:
| > They are entirely different products.
|
| Well, if you have to _say_ it...
|
| Was going through both of them again, and curation-wise,
| they're both landfills. At least on bandcamp I can search
| for genre/city, but for say, electronic music, you have to
| sift through stuff that is literally disgusting to find the
| gems. It's when they mix things that aren't meant to be
| mixed, they create that kind of dread. Good for bandcamp
| being profitable though, that's very good news. I'm
| probably just not their target market.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Could be, but big sites are always more able to ignore fraud
| than I'd hope.
|
| eBay has a "compromised account monetization" bot that has used
| the exact same distinctive fraudulent listings weekly for years
| and they still use a manual process to deal with it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I for one believe a lot of services - also e.g. Twitter,
| Youtube, etc - don't do much about the bots because they earn
| revenue from it. Twitter doesn't care if an ad impression is
| from a bot, they will get paid for it anyway - until the
| advertisers decide to pull out of course. I'm sure they are
| constantly trying to walk the line between too many and not
| enough bot activity.
|
| I mean with email, spambots are always a net negative because
| the services that pass e-mails through do not get paid for
| them. But Twitter does. If you get a bot tweet on your feed, or
| a bot-promoted one, you engage with it and Twitter gets paid
| (in 'engagement', the magical currency).
| fallingfrog wrote:
| The whole premise of the way streaming music is marketed and sold
| is all wrong. In the long term if you want good music to be
| created you have to put a little thought into how you're
| nurturing the community of musicians on the local level who are
| doing the hard work of creating the product that Spotify and
| iTunes are selling.
|
| From the point of view of a streaming service, it looks like
| this:
|
| 1) music is generated from bands via spontaneous generation
|
| 2) we throw that music up on a streaming site without context or
| support unless paid by major labels
|
| 3) profit
|
| That's not how it works. Good music is usually developed in some
| context- a community of musicians will develop in some major city
| in a location where the rent is not too high. They go to each
| other's shows, they support each other, they learn from each
| other, they imitate each other and develop new sounds. Once in a
| while one group becomes popular enough that people outside of
| that community start to hear about them.
|
| But, just as Facebook has become a news aggregator and should
| probably take that responsibility seriously, iTunes should take
| its responsibility seriously to the musical community that
| generates the product it sells. It could start recommending to
| people bands that are local to them- who they could go see live.
| It could tie in promoting live experiences of the bands a user is
| listening to. They could redistribute the streaming profits a
| little to give some financial support to smaller artists instead
| of the top 10 bands who play on a loop at Applebee's. There are
| lots of ways that they could foster the growth of musical
| communities, and they aren't doing it.
|
| One good thing about the old music industry was that they would
| at least somewhat do this for struggling bands- they would
| identify talent, and develop and promote it. iTunes doesn't do
| that. Spotify doesn't do that. A lot of talent is going to wither
| on the vine without support.
| ada1981 wrote:
| Conversely, a kid in a basement with a laptop can for $20 via
| distrokid be listed on Spotify and be discovered within non-
| geographic communities.
|
| It's not all bad, but these are cool ideas.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't have hard data, but from listening to interviews with
| musicians it seems to me like the difference is that the
| power distribution has become even more skewed. For every
| star discovered on Spotify you used to have 10 bands that
| could at least eke out a middle class living in their
| city/state touring and selling albums.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I suppose, economically this might be an example of an
| externality? Seems like a lot of industries are piling up
| externalities right now in terms of their effects on
| society, wages, political discourse, the environment, etc..
| AlexandrB wrote:
| As with food delivery and "ghost kitchens" the next step for
| streaming services seems to be "ghost bands"[1] that produce
| unobjectionable music meant to fill playlists for smaller
| royalties than a "normal" band.
|
| Both of these trends put traditionally local restaurants and
| small bands under increased pressure to compete with the likes
| of VC-funded Spotify or DoorDash. The pessimist in me sees a
| future where these local business are largely gone, kind of
| like how Walmart and other big box stores replaced many small,
| local retailers.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961416/spotify-fake-
| art...
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Spotify is already starting a promotion service where artists
| get boosted by giving spotify a cut of the already minuscule
| royalties. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/03
| /spotify-a...
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| I agree. For a small artist, With streaming coming in with tens
| of thousands of songs per day [1] but the proceeds go not from
| me who is paying to the artist I play songs from, but to some
| average calculated where the money goes to the big artists, I
| don't see this being much better than the piracy that went
| before it.
|
| [1]
| https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/nearly-40000-tracks-a...
| pud wrote:
| Hope you find my Medium post thought provoking.
|
| Incentives in the music industry are setup such that any company
| offering promotional services to artists (ad agency, PR firm,
| promoter, radio promo, marketing department, etc) can quietly go
| to fiverr.com, buy 100,000 bot streams for $20, then take credit
| for their client's rise in popularity---getting the artist to pay
| again.
|
| Which, because of how streaming services pay, steals from artists
| who have real/organic streams.
| [deleted]
| itronitron wrote:
| Are there any music curating channels on YT or elsewhere that
| can filter through that mess? I guess the challenge there is
| keeping the curator honest and not 'sponsored'
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| I'd like fixed price per play to get replaced by something
| closer to splitting a users subscription fees based on the time
| they spent listening to a particular song/artist.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| this 100%
| slothtrop wrote:
| https://resonate.is/ has a stream-to-own model
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I might be wrong but I think Youtube Premium uses that
| pricing model. At least their FAQ seems to imply that's
| what's going on:
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en
| WhoCaresLies wrote:
| ad people hate it when they become useless
|
| american companies still hate the success of spotify
|
| the music industry is bad
| [deleted]
| fullshark wrote:
| Are artists necessarily innocent in this scenario, or are they
| totally fine with artificial streams to boost discoverability via
| Spotify's recommendation algorithms?
| thewebcount wrote:
| This seems like a huge problem with online ad supported services
| in general. I wonder if this sort of thing happens on Apple Music
| and other for-pay-only services since you'd have to pay to have
| an account for your bot?
|
| But this is more troubling than it seemed at first to me.
| Couldn't something like this also happen: So I could put my song
| on Spotify (or YouTube or any other ad-supported service) and
| some business can come along and set up a bot to open Spotify and
| play my tune and several others. Spotify will also play ads and
| probably show ads on the page during playback because it's not a
| paid-for account. Now Spotify determines that this stream was
| sent to a bot. They remove the play counts from my tracks and any
| others played. Do they return the ad revenue from those ad
| impressions? If not, what's stopping Spotify from just making up
| numbers, charging the advertisers and discounting my revenue
| without there really being a bot stream? How can any of these ad-
| supported businesses be held accountable? This seems insane.
|
| I'm not saying they're actually doing the above. I assume they
| are not, but it makes me wonder about how you would even know? It
| could even happen accidentally due to some error in their
| software. That seems less than ideal.
| severak_cz wrote:
| This is the thing I don't like on Soundcloud. Whenever I upload
| there some low effort cat-walking-on-keyboard stuff, some bot
| came around with: "Hey, this is so cool song. We can promote
| it..."
|
| So many scams are targeted to musicians.
| andygcook wrote:
| So nefarious people could potentially DDoS artists they don't
| like using bot plays to get their tracks removed. I can't think
| of a real economic reason to do that besides perhaps offering the
| only cover version of a popular on Spotify that gets removed,
| which would juice your own plays.
| muloka wrote:
| In the same way nefarious people can also DDoS Twitter and
| Instagram accounts with fake follows to get accounts suspended.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Finally a way to stop hearing that bloody Mariah Carey
| Christmas song all the time in every store I go to...
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(page generated 2021-01-04 23:01 UTC)