4/23 Spotify

[Niveous]

There are probably a ton of reasons that have been talked about ad nauseum on the board already but it's a new day and every day brings fresh perspective. So, here's the question:

What isn't your music on Spotify?

There are a lot of Songfight bands who just aren't. And I like making Spotify playlists and I can't add Songfighters and it's frustrating. So why?

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Quality?
Laziness?

That being said, I have unlimited distribution for a year so I'll probably put up a couple of albums worth of material in the near future. Some of them might even be songfight songs.

[Niveous]

Is Spotify a play for only quality music. Somebody needs to tell them that, if that's the case, because there is a whole lot of subpar stuff on there.

[fluffy]

So for what it's worth, Spotify usually costs money to get your music on it, but amuse.io is free and is so far working pretty okay for me.

All of my released albums are on Spotify, but I want to polish and often rerecord my stuff before I consider it album-releasable because I want to polish it a bit first.

Ironically, just as this thread was being posted I was writing a rant which touches on this.

[Niveous]

Thanks for the heads up about Amuse.

[Lunkhead]

None of my Song Fight music is available on any streaming service except SoundCloud.

I think the thing you want is to have your own music library in the cloud. Sorry, for weirdos like us who want stuff like that, we're just going to have live without it, because we're too small for any company to give a crap about and because all attempts at such a thing have been sued into oblivion because of piracy issues.

[vowlvom]

Some of my music is on Spotify, but I've been wary about adding more because... well, I really don't like Spotify, and overcoming that dislike for the sake of the four or five plays per year that I might feasibly pick up doesn't seem worth it. I've started using it more for listening recently but it feels like a necessary evil and that kinda makes me hate it even more.

[fluffy]

Some of my music is on Spotify, but I've been wary about adding more because... well, I really don't like Spotify, and overcoming that dislike for the sake of the four or five plays per year that I might feasibly pick up doesn't seem worth it. I've started using it more for listening recently but it feels like a necessary evil and that kinda makes me hate it even more.

Yeah absolutely this. Spotify is garbage, SoundCloud is garbage, but those are the only two places people ever listen to stuff anymore. if I send someone an ordinary web link to some mp3s or whatever they literally have no idea what to do with it. And they don’t want to buy my music on bandcamp because they don’t want “too many accounts” or whatever.

I hate it but it’s the only way people are willing to listen to stuff anymore.

[Lunkhead]

Hey, watch it. People also use Apple Music, OK? Seriously though, they do, and also while no one I know would think it's true, Pandora is still the most used streaming service in the US. But whatever.

Why don't I release "real albums" and distribute them? It's cheap to free. For me I think the single digit spins per year any of my tracks might get, it just doesn't seem worth the effort. I know Glenn Case feels like you do Niveous, and I know you guys would listen, but ... there is no real other upside in it for me as far as I can tell. It's like the modern day equivalent of having a crate full of records/CDs your band put out years ago. You had to have 500 pressed/made because they only make them in bulk but you could only sell/give away a couple. (Anybody seen "Inside Llewyn Davis"? He's couch surfing and toting a crate of his records around with him, as is another fellow he meets like himself. And I know a lot of people with boxes of their bands' CDs from the 90s/00s in their closets.)

[fluffy]

I mean I don’t think anyone here is evangelizing for the production of physical albums anymore. I’m certainly not. But I definitely prefer buying my music on a download service (Bandcamp, Amazon MP3, iTunes Store) rather than renting the ability to play it on a streaming service. Most of it is because I want to directly support the artists as much as possible, but a lot of it is also that it allows me to listen to music the way I prefer - choose an album at random and play it all the way through, with the musical progression that usually involves as well.

I listen to way too many genres of music for shuffle-by-track to work at all well for me, and some forms of music simply *can’t* work that way.

And that’s also why I don’t personally use Pandora - in my experience it overfits on a specific song and then plays another dozen songs exactly like the first one. It gets boring fast.

Lots of people do like listening to music that way and it’s totally fine if they do, but it’s absolutely not for me.

And the reason I prefer to produce an album at a time is that it makes it a lot easier for me to wrap my head around the mastering, because I don't have to worry about how well a song sounds in isolation when I can make it sound together as a cohesive unit. Plus, the streaming services require per-release cover art and I'm not about to make a different piece of cover art for every single.

(And at least according to my distrokid stats, by far the most listeners I get are on Spotify, and anecdotally that's where everyone asks if they can find my music. I'm not just making shit up there, literally I've had good friends tell me that they'd only listen to my music if it's on Spotify. They never mention any of the other streaming services.)

[thirdcatmusic]

love Spotify as a listener, I'm pretty much like the people you guys are talking about who only wants to listen to music on Spotify. I have a huge mp3 collection from over the years, but I prefer just using Spotify, it's a cleaner experience and it's cool how you can make playlists easily, go to play full albums, play radio pandora style, it's got all of the features I'd want really and find almost anything instantly.

I have helped some people get their music on there. One free way that even lets you put up covers (the covers come with a fee, I think $10 per cover, but originals are free) is http://www.soundrop.com (I think the catch is they take some % of royalties... but unless you're getting a lot of spins that's pocket change anyway.)

[Lunkhead]

Yes, many people have decided that it's Spotify or nothing for them. Other services may as well not exist. Personally I always thought the user experience on Spotify was pretty poor. I think what people really love is access to nearly any music they want, which frankly every service offers now. I don't think Spotify has much to any content or feature differentiation anymore. And those folks will never buy or download music again. I can relate to that a little more, even though having your own music library on all your devices (and available _offline_ even!) is pretty trivial these days.

(By the way, Pandora has Spotify style on-demand, playlists, etc., completely for free, with the full feature set on desktop _and_ mobile. You just have to watch the occasional video ad. We've also just launched the first change to our radio product in many years where you can put it into different "modes" to deal with the kinds of issues folks have with the radio product like what you're describing, fluffy. But we're still US only and we have even less "long tail". )

I make fun of people who I see only releasing their music on cassette. But I guess it's all relative. One person's "I'm never going to listen to a cassette again" is another person's "I'm never going to listen to anything but Spotify again" I suppose. :/ I think for me the goal is to make the music. I have no real expectation of it getting heard outside my circle of friends, if that. So again it just boils down to it not even being worth the minimal effort and cost. I'd rather spend the energy making more music.

[Niveous]

Hey I'm more than willing to try out Pandora.

This question is really less about Spotify specifically and more about why someone chooses to put their music in some places and not others? Why limit the places where people can find your music?

[Lunkhead]

I guess I don't see a point in it for me personally, I don't see how it would make it so that I enjoy making songs any more or less.

Conversely, why does someone choose to only consume music from some places and not others? Why limit the places where you can find other peoples' music?

We're all weirdos with our own weird random preferences that we justify however we need to, IMHO.

[Caravan Ray]

I like Spotify. It is how I listen to music now. I have a few songs on there (distributed by CDBaby), ones that I have polished to the point that I consider “finished”.

I don’t think pandora is available in Aus.