All of the money from subscriptions and advertisements is put into a big pool (minus a cut for Spotify), and every month it is divided up between each rightsholder based on the proportion of plays. So if you have a big chunk of track plays that are just generated noise playing over and over for hours, that’s a big chunk of that pool going to unoriginal/easily reproducible uploads instead of actual musicians. It’s basically a scam gaming the way the system works.
It’s also costly for Spotify. Even if the streams were in the form of, say, podcasts that were not allowed any sort of monetization, it’s still hours upon hours (per user) of data that has to be streamed…and it doesn’t compress efficiently. Compression algorithms seek to avoid noise, and deliberately generated noise will not compress well. So the amount of data being streamed is much higher per second than with music or speech.
Meanwhile, you can make an app that plays white/pink/whatever noise trivially. No waste of resources necessary.
Hard to tell if you meant it this way, but that’s a fault of the system and not of the creators and listeners using it.
If playing audio on a subscription service pays royalties, then creators who make that audio and listeners who pay for it should both be able to do so. It’s ridiculous to say that music is more valuable and deserves more of the money if people enjoy the “easy to make” white noise audio.
How easy something to make does not equate to its value. And many people would consider music easy to make also. It’s just silly for music labels to demand that their audio time be considered more valuable if people would rather listen to white noise.
That said, you’re right that there are more efficient and economical ways to provide that service. This is still a systems problem though. People view Spotify as a place to get audio, if streaming certain audio is wasteful, then Spotify should allow/require the app to cache that audio locally once the requisite length of audio has already been streamed. They can do this but for some reason aren’t.
This is actually a perfect example of “the customer is always right”. You can’t be mad that people want a certain product, instead you should start producing the product people want.
The most complicated factor here is Spotify’s algorithm producing certain outcomes. If people weren’t being suggested certain types of content, maybe they wouldn’t want it and would choose music instead of white noise. But again, that’s still not really any of the music label’s right to demand one way or another.
What do you mean by this? How is audio consumption a zero-sum game?
All of the money from subscriptions and advertisements is put into a big pool (minus a cut for Spotify), and every month it is divided up between each rightsholder based on the proportion of plays. So if you have a big chunk of track plays that are just generated noise playing over and over for hours, that’s a big chunk of that pool going to unoriginal/easily reproducible uploads instead of actual musicians. It’s basically a scam gaming the way the system works.
It’s also costly for Spotify. Even if the streams were in the form of, say, podcasts that were not allowed any sort of monetization, it’s still hours upon hours (per user) of data that has to be streamed…and it doesn’t compress efficiently. Compression algorithms seek to avoid noise, and deliberately generated noise will not compress well. So the amount of data being streamed is much higher per second than with music or speech.
Meanwhile, you can make an app that plays white/pink/whatever noise trivially. No waste of resources necessary.
Hard to tell if you meant it this way, but that’s a fault of the system and not of the creators and listeners using it.
If playing audio on a subscription service pays royalties, then creators who make that audio and listeners who pay for it should both be able to do so. It’s ridiculous to say that music is more valuable and deserves more of the money if people enjoy the “easy to make” white noise audio.
How easy something to make does not equate to its value. And many people would consider music easy to make also. It’s just silly for music labels to demand that their audio time be considered more valuable if people would rather listen to white noise.
That said, you’re right that there are more efficient and economical ways to provide that service. This is still a systems problem though. People view Spotify as a place to get audio, if streaming certain audio is wasteful, then Spotify should allow/require the app to cache that audio locally once the requisite length of audio has already been streamed. They can do this but for some reason aren’t.
This is actually a perfect example of “the customer is always right”. You can’t be mad that people want a certain product, instead you should start producing the product people want.
The most complicated factor here is Spotify’s algorithm producing certain outcomes. If people weren’t being suggested certain types of content, maybe they wouldn’t want it and would choose music instead of white noise. But again, that’s still not really any of the music label’s right to demand one way or another.
Then perhaps it is the system that is broken?
A very good explanation. Thanks!