James Gunn has posted up Spotify playlists for characters from the upcoming Superman movie. I think this mean’s it’s now canon that Superman knows who Butch Walker and Nightmare of You are.
Read More “Hey Superman, Just Do Your Best (Just Do Your Best)”
Has an AI “artist” topped 474,000 Spotify monthly listeners (and counting) in just weeks? It sure seems that way, and the development is raising new questions about machine-generated tracks’ streaming prevalence.
Word of that presumably AI-powered “band,” The Velvet Sundown, appears to have started circulating earlier this week on Reddit. There, multiple users said some of the relevant tracks had arrived in their Discover Weekly playlists.
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Deerhoof have pulled their music from Spotify in response to reports that the streaming platform’s CEO, Daniel Ek, serves as chairman of Helsing:
We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech. Spotify only pays a pittance anyway, and we earn a lot more from touring. But we also understand that other artists and labels do rely on Spotify for a bigger chunk of their income, and don’t judge those who can’t make the same move in the short term.
The billionaire, who primarily lives in Stockholm, just led a €600 million investment in Helsing, a 4-year-old, Munich-based defense tech company that is now valued at €12 billion, as first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed separately by TechCrunch. The deal makes it one of Europe’s most valuable privately held companies; it also highlights Europe’s scramble to build its own military muscle as the world grows messier and the U.S. turns inward. […] But what started as an AI software company has grown much more ambitious. Helsing is now building its own strike drones and aircraft and said it’s working on a fleet of unmanned mini submarines in order to improve naval surveillance.
According to figures Spotify shared with The Hollywood Reporter, streams on all of the original versions of her older albums at least doubled on Friday, May 30, compared to the albums’ average daily streams from April 1 through May 29. (Spotify didn’t disclose specific streaming numbers themselves, only percentage changes.)
Spotify Technology SA shares tumbled on Tuesday after the streaming company gave a muted outlook for profit and subscriber growth in the current quarter.
The Stockholm-based company forecast gross profit margins of 31.5% in the second quarter, missing analysts’ average estimate for 31.6% according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Spotify sees monthly active users rising to 689 million, less than the 694.4 million analysts expected.
Spotify is back online after a widespread outage.
The outage seemed to have begun around 6:20 AM ET, with outage reports appearing to peak after 9:30 AM ET, with around 48,000 people reporting issues. Spotify said it was “back up and functioning normally” by 11:45 AM ET. In the early afternoon, around 1,500 outage reports remained. Users across the US and parts of Europe appear to have been affected.
While Spotify did not specify what might have caused the outage, the company was quick to stamp out rumors that a security hack was to blame. The Stockholm-based streamer says reports of that nature are “completely inaccurate.”
The Graduate were finally able to get Anhedonia up on Spotify.
Read More “The Graduate Comes to Spotify” These machine-made spots, which Spotify demonstrated in a brief video, are currently live for advertisers in the States and Canada via the Ads Manager. Rounding out the multifaceted announcements’ key takeaways, Spotify debuted bolstered measurement tools designed to help connect adverts with specific users.
Spotify Technology reported its first ever full year of profitability, fueled by record user growth and austerity measures after years of heavy spending on growth initiatives such as podcasts.
Its fourth-quarter earnings are a sign that the company has been able to wean itself off years of intense investment and transform from a music-streaming service with tough margins to a full-service audio company.
Shares in the company rose 10%, and are up about 29% on the year.
“It only took 18 years for us to get here, but we’re here,” Chief Executive Daniel Ek said in an interview.
Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine:
For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
And:
Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material. Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like and not have them stand out?’ ”
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative data stories that it typically offers — like those that identify your music personality, match you to a town that shares your musical tastes, describe your “audio aura,” or turn your listening history into a game you can share with friends, among other things. Others are upset over the lack of more detailed stats and the exclusion of information they’ve come to expect, like top music genres and top podcasts. Spotify declined to clarify how they decided which features to include.
Spotify’s Wrapped is now live, as is Apple Music’s version called Replay. As a longtime Last.fm user and evangelist it’s always interesting to see how these stats compare to my extremely diligent scrobbling. Apple Music got my “most played song” completely wrong. But I do find these “top artist/albums” by month graphics pretty cool (but, still not correct when compared to what I scrobbled). I shared my stats below, and I’ll post the actual numbers after the year’s over in our end of the year feature.
Read More “Spotify Wrapped & Apple Music Replay Now Live” Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:
To understand how this works, you need a sense of the mechanics. Streaming platforms like Spotify don’t work like your Facebook page — Mena and other artists aren’t logging in and adding albums to their accounts directly. Instead, they go through a distributor that handles licensing, metadata, and royalty payments. Distributors send songs and metadata in bulk to the streaming services. The metadata part is important; it includes things such as the song title and artist name but also other information, such as the songwriter, record label, and so on. This is crucial for artists (and others) to get paid.
But this whole process effectively works on the honor system.
And:
“It was super weird,” says Marcos Mena, Standards’ lead songwriter and guitarist. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is something Spotify will take care of.’” After all, Standards has a verified artist page. But when a fake album was posted on September 26th, it didn’t budge. Mena emailed Spotify to tell them there’d been a mistake. The streamer responded two weeks later, on October 8th: “It looks like the content is mapped correctly to the artist’s page. If you require further assistance, please contact your music provider. Please do not reply to this message.” As of November 8th, the fake Standards album was still right there under the band’s verified, blue-checked name. It was finally removed by November 11th.
Cool, I definitely don’t see this continuing to be a massive problem.
Lilly Allen revealed that she makes more money per year posting pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify streaming royalties:
{T]he 39-year-old singer-songwriter said on X Friday (Oct. 25) that her side business has been more lucrative than the streams she earns on one of the world’s biggest music platforms. “imagine being and artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet,” she wrote.
Allen’s remark came in response to someone who’d negatively commented on a post advertising her OnlyFans account. “Imagine being one of the biggest pop stars/musicians in Europe and then being reduced to this,” the fan wrote, to which the “Smile” singer added: “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”