It's an interesting article, but the essential information is buried in the middle:
In my experience, it’s only when I get on an editorial playlist that my songs get heavily featured on algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly.
So how do you get on editorial playlists? I sincerely have no clue. I've been on editorial playlists 16 times but I have no idea how to replicate that.
I find that this is true of many of these "I made X dollars per month doing Y!" articles: somewhere in the chain of events, there is a fateful intervention out of the control of the author that propels them to a higher tier of income than their peers who are otherwise following the same procedures.
Another thing I found interesting is that he earns $800 / month from a total of about 3 million listens. I wonder how this compares to the royalties from a radio play from a popular local radio station?
Comparatively, my dad has a moderately successful youtube channel, his most popular video has 18m views, and the next 3m. He has 66k subscribers. In an average month he'd earn ~£300 or so. Though usually quite a lot more around Christmas.
True, but an indie artist is nearly always the songwriter and publisher (no one else owns the publishing rights, hence “independent”). So it’s a fair comparison, and unfortunately, all else being equal, streaming woefully underperforms to radio to the point of tears.
So a radio play gets $0.12 and goes out to 10,000 listeners. Amazon Music Unlimited pays $0.012 per stream, or $120 for 10,000 listeners. Spotify pays $0.00318 per stream, or $31.80 per 10,000 listeners.
Maybe radio does haven't that many listeners? But by my math, if your radio play goes out more than 265 people, you are getting less per listen than on Spotify.
The real loss is the $15 10 track CD, which someone would have to listen to 471 times to reach Spotify pricing.
Terrestrial radio isn’t paying based on the number of listeners. The radio station is paying for a license to broadcast the music (so that people listen to the ads in between, just like TV), a portion of which goes to the songwriter(s), and the publisher(s), and so on. Audience size has nothing to do with it.
Embedded in what you’re saying is the expectation that radio plays/streams/etc are primarily for “exposure.” It’s a tired argument and not one any professional musician cares about past a certain point, especially considering that, yes, radio plays ideally drive album sales. But in the world of Spotify, streaming replaces both. What matters is that a [radio station | streaming company] is licensing my music so that they can have something to attract people to in order to expose them to ads. Without the music, the model doesn’t work. Sure, some people pay to not have ads — I don’t care. That should only raise, or at best have a neutral effect on, my per-stream rate.
You’re right that the real loss is the CD purchase. Radio plays used to not only pay me and THEN lead to that further CD income, but now Spotify has replaced both and pays far worse than either.
“But Spotify pays $31.80 for 10,000 streams while radio only pays $0.12 for the same exposure!” I hear you saying. Wrong. Spotify pays $0.00318 per stream while radio pays $0.12 per “stream” (broadcast), and that’s the only number that matters (due to the aforementioned way in which radio works). So, not even counting the much larger cost of CD sales, Spotify has reduced my income by nearly 38x. This is all fuzzy math, but that checks out with my anecdotal experience and talking with older folks who were selling gold or platinum records pre-Napster.
Streaming is NOT okay where it is right now. As a music listener I can’t argue that it’s not a better product, but as a music creator having my income slashed by at least 38x isn’t worth it.
To give you an idea of a still-decent avenue for income making music and how far it’s fallen, I’m primarily a composer for film/TV, and broadcast royalties for a single broadcast of a single minute of underscore can pay between $0.99 to a few dollars for broadcast, cable, terrestrial TV. On the other hand, an entire yearly quarter’s worth of earnings for that same minute of music on a streaming service (untold thousands of streams) rarely pay a single dollar — usually more in the single-digit cent range. Do the math — it’s worse than 38x. On a recent royalty statement I calculated that streaming services paid 70x worse than cable. And to top it off, some streaming services are outright refusing to pay legally mandated writers’ royalties (the portion I’m supposed to retain and get paid for, no matter what, by law). It’s moved to cable, too — Discovery tried to pull a stunt last year where they just decided “no more royalties.” They walked it back, thankfully, but we all took it as a warning shot.
Imagine your coding salary getting slashed from $100k to $2k, and imagine never having benefits in the first place, and having had all the costs associated with doing the job shifted from the company to you over the last twenty years, and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to be a working musician or composer nowadays.
breath
To further clarify my point about streaming:
Radio and albums were how people consumed music in the old days — the deal was that if you want something on-demand, you gotta shell out and buy the thing. Otherwise, endure ad breaks while waiting for the song you want to come on, listen to it once until who knows when, and hopefully you like all the other music along the way. Right?
Now, we can listen to any music we want at any time, on demand. Album ownership is pretty much moot. And that’s great! Again, as a music listener, I love it. But this means that we’re getting the benefits of album ownership in the format of radio. What do people demand more — the benefits, or the format? Obviously there’s a bit of intertwining between the two, but I’m sure most people would say “I care more about being able to listen to what I want when I want” than “I care about being able to stream music” (even though obviously the latter enables the former). This is why piracy was so great for music listeners — it enabled the former. Now, for a small fee, we get the convenience of radio and the benefits of not only album sales, but also piracy, which we now have to compete with. They’re basically the same thing, though: you “own” the album and can thus listen to it whenever you want.
At the end of the day, though, we’re paying for the more important of the two (album ownership) with the payment model of the lesser-valued (radio). Radio licenses worked for stations because they were (and continue to be) distributed amongst a large number of artists and labels, and could be negotiated down via the leverage that radio was ultimately driving album sales.
Now, those ad payments are distributed amongst literally hundreds of thousands of more artists, and instead of a radio station going cheaper with the argument “but this will lead to more album sales via exposure,” Spotify can just use its leverage of “well, fuck you, what else are you gonna do?” It’s a mob mentality. They’re essentially the only game in town and they know it. Furthermore, not all streams are equal — just as radio stations would license in order to play a popular song more often (getting more ears glued to the ads in between), Spotify doesn’t pay Beyoncé and Joe Amateur the same per-stream rate. The lions get the lion’s share and the rest get the scraps divided up between them — but “the rest” is the overwhelming majority of the artists present on Spotify. The curve is exponential.
Consumers are getting a categorically better product in every conceivable way and yet the payment to the actual creators of the product, the reason they’re actually there — to listen to the music - has gone down by such a degree that it’s laughable. It’s an unbelievable amount. It’s disastrous on a scale that is difficult to comprehend unless you live it.
Music is rapidly becoming a field that only the already-extremely-rich can do professionally.
"Terrestrial radio isn’t paying based on the number of listeners."
I know this. However, you are acting like a terrestrial broadcast to n listeners is equivalent to a Spotify non-broadcast to one listener. If n > 265 you are making more money with Spotify per person listening to the song. If 10,000 people are listening to it on a radio broadcast, you are getting $0.12. If 10,000 people listen on Spotify, you are getting $31.80. Even Spotify pays better than radio, in most scenarios. $0.12 per stream is not a viable model for music.
The better argument you make is that Spotify shouldn't be compared to radio, because it is "on demand". It is more like a CD purchase. There is some truth to this, and it should probably fall in the middle pricewise (and it does) it's just a matter of which direction it should move. It shouldn't cost as much as CD, because you have to keep paying every month for access and have no resale option. You don't own it, you're just renting for 4 minutes. I did a lot of CD trading- spent way too much time and money in used CD stores which paid the artists nothing, but meant you could a least capture some residual value from a CD you purchased.
Having streaming access has really changed my music listening patterns. I hardly ever listen to an album on repeat. There's so much more to listen to, but I listen to each thing less. Patterns of consumption may have changed for others as well.
I don't know how to best try to get more money. You still have some artists selling directly, not putting all material on Spotify, only putting it on the higher paying places, putting it on well after release, treating it as a sample shop.
Try reading your first paragraph again. You’re contradicting yourself and are completely missing the point.
You say that you “know” that terrestrial broadcast isn’t based on the number of listeners, and then go and make the same argument that Spotify pays better than radio based on “radio plays with n listeners.”
> You are acting like a terrestrial broadcast to n listeners is equivalent to a Spotify non-broadcast to one listener.
Yes, I am, exactly! Please tell me you understand the difference between 10,000 people individually seeking out a song on Spotify vs a radio broadcasting a song one time to n people (and sure, n can equal 10,000).
I like how you say “$0.12 per stream is not a viable model for music” while somehow pushing that $0.00318 per stream is. You’re right, though —- $0.12 per stream isn’t a viable model for music without the album sales those streams used to lead to. Spotify, if it’s to replace both radio and CD sales, needs to pay at least comparably to both. I’d say $1 per stream with a small bonus on top if someone listens to an album from start to finish all the way through would be a decent model.
Your last paragraph betrays your ignorance of the subject. The situation in which an artist voluntarily choose to not put their music on Spotify is so rare I’m not sure it’s even statistically significant. A more common reason is due to the publisher refusing for some sort of money reason, but those situations are eroding all the time. Spotify is the de facto king.
And it’s not like “some artists sell directly.” Everyone does! They do so because they have to recoup the utterly disastrous rates paid by Spotify somehow. So yes, by all means pay for music directly. But it’s not a better product than Spotify, because both allow the listener the same experiencing of “owning the album” (due to the benefit of “on-demand access”), so direct music purchases are just a “nice to have,” nothing a musician can actually depend upon. In other words: who cares about the edge cases when the majority use case is so shit and is actively pushing edge cases even closer and closer to the edge. Direct music sales are not a remedy to Spotify’s abhorrent per-stream rate and overall effect on the music selling landscape. Only one thing is: negotiating better per-stream rates. Period.
> You say that you “know” that terrestrial broadcast isn’t based on the number of listeners, and then go and make the same argument that Spotify pays better than radio based on “radio plays with n listeners.”
What I am saying is that even though the $0.12 isn't based on the number of listeners, there is a number of listeners (n). So that $0.12 should be divided by that n in order to calculate how much money is paid per listen. If that n > 265, then Spotify is paying more per listen. I agree that the on-demand nature means Spotify should cost more than radio. Still, the argument that Spotify does pay less than radio per listen is wrong, and it makes your case a lot weaker if insist on that, because it's contrary.
When I said $0.12 a stream isn't a viable model for music, I didn't mean because it paid the artists too little, I meant it cost too much! Paying the artist and songwriter $0.12 per stream means charging the user about $0.15 each time they listen to the song. (Which doesn't seem right when compared to the purchase price of a song, unless people listen to music they purchase fewer than 8 times on average.) If they stream 25 hours per month, at average song length of 4 minutes, that's about 375 songs per month, or about $56/month. For heavy listeners, it would be a lot more. I don't think many people would sign up at that level. It definitely couldn't be covered by advertising. That said, you could probably get a lot more than Spotify is paying. Still, it does indicate some room there to get more than the $0.00318.
It is surprising to me that we don't see more exclusivity with music like we do with video content, where subscriptions to various services end up being necessary if you want to watch a particular show. The consumption patterns are quite different. However, given the number of competing platforms out there and the low switching costs associated associated, probably the best strategy is for a whole company with a lot of publishing rights to pull their content from the lowest paying services. Something like what Disney did to Netflix.
You are still completely missing my point w/r/t the number of listeners with radio, but I’m not sure how else to get you to see it, so I’m gonna duck out. Best of luck to you.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I found it interesting.
It's a shame, because realistically the last 20 years should have been a golden age for small music production. You can now produce professional quality music with nothing more than a PC. I remember going with my dad's band to a recording studio and them recording onto an 8 track tape.
You can take your recordings and publish them on the same platforms that the professionals do, all from the comfort of your own bedroom.
Funny enough, I remember by dad's friend produced an album and, in the early days of CD recordings, convinced the manager of HMV to let him sell it directly from the counter in the store. My dad burned every one of them on our 2x CD burner. Man that cut into my flightsim time.
If I wanted to listen to some of the music you where involved in what would I search for?
Amazon paying over 1 cent per stream is wild. $0.012 per stream is 666 streams at $8/month. (Now that I look at the numbers, I shouldn't have needed a calculator for that...)
No wonder some musicians complain loudly about Spotify's rate.
I think the comparison goes somewhat like this: selling one CD puts X dollars in the creator's pocket. How many times need a track be played on Spotify to generate the same number of dollars? The answer is 471, I think.
Yeah, I was saying if you bought a CD you would pay $15 for 10 tracks, or $1.50 per track. You would have to listen to that CD 471 times for the cost per listen per track to reach what Spotify pays the artist per stream.
Maybe it is different in other areas of the country, but even in the nearby metro area, there are at most two or three "indie" stations (that is being generous, since I can only think of one) not counting the university stations that have virtually zero physical reach.
Streaming might not pay much, but at least it is possible to be heard at all I suppose.
What do you mean by the term “indie” here? Are the stations themselves not affiliated with larger corporations? Or are they mainly playing independent artists? Or both?
I’m a professional musician and categorically reject the “but at least it is possible to be heard at all” angle. No. That is bullshit. Spotify is replacing BOTH album sales and radio play, and yet it pays multiple orders of magnitude worse than either.
That's fair; I am not a musician and have no thoughts on whether spotify or youtube or Amazon whatever or physical records are best.
As to your first question, I think in my area it is both, though I was mainly thinking in terms of "stations that dont play top 10 or 40 hip hop / pop / country / faux rock".
It's not that X, Y, Z is necessarily bad advice, just that obviously nobody really knows how to be successful with anything. The closest you get is to know things that improve/decrease your odds.
Great point. And speaking from insider knowledge, I can tell you that there are consultants you can pay anywhere from a little bit up to thousands per month who will get you tested/placed on different editorial playlists. The more you can get on, and the longer you can stay on them (there is no guarantee of staying on, they only keep you on if you gain traction), the more success you will have.
> We want to make something crystal clear: no one can pay to be added to one of Spotify’s editorial playlists. Our editors pick tracks with listeners in mind. They make these decisions using data about what’s resonating most with their community of listeners.
Tom Misch used those for sure. I was only talking about it with my wife the other day. Lost in Paris seems to play evry time I open Spotify. I wish you could blacklist songs on Spotify.
I'm pretty sure that Spotify has this button. It depends on the interface you're using, but it generally looks like a "no entrance" road sign. I used it a few times, and I didn't hear the song again.
I’ve noticed this too. The title has an air of “this is how you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps” feeling that turns into a “just takeover your dads company” when you read the article
Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from getting a new account?
Having absolutely 0 insight or parameter tuning on these recommendations algorithms, from feeds to Spotify playlists, is really a shame. Like imagine you had 0 control on your computer parameters or smartphone, and it was always guessing like “This resolution should suit you”, “I just turned the WiFi off, hope you like it”, or “I just dialed that friend you seem to like to interact with”. It’s not a technical problem, I know there must be advertising incentive to not allow settings, but still the result when you think of it is ridiculous, having to reverse engineer algorithms and create alternate profiles just to emulate lacking UI for parameters.
It’s not just advertising. It gives the organization responsible for curating the feed an incredible amount of power over the consumers of the feed. Currently the most popular way to trade this power for money is via advertising.
I recall some stats from Pandora a few years ago that showed Mumford and Sons were their highest paid artist that year by a decent margin. Also that year, M+S songs would show up in all of my unrelated Pandora stations. How curious.
This is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself.
Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.
I wish we could just "ban" a song from ever playing, that way I won't have to make a new playlist from an existing one just because i don't want to listen to these one or two songs I find super annoying.
I have playlists that work as filters for me, if I'm mass copying a playlist I first put it into the filter playlist, then I press "skip duplicates" now all the songs that are not on my shit list (fiilter list) will end up at the bottom labeled "now" on "date added" then I copy those to the playlist I want to and erase them from the filter.
oooooh I thought Spotify just had a schizophrenic A/B test started every other quarter, I didn't realize the UI changes are contingent on what kind of song list you were listening to.
Just recently they started playing the exact same ads but sometimes they have a few syllables messed up. I think I now have first-hand experience in being gaslit, it really makes you doubt your sanity if you heard the "same" ad but "wrong".
My impression is that Spotify only pays royalties to songs that get streamed for over 30 seconds. Presumably if you skip a song early this is a feature used in its recommendation algorithms. Not as strong as an explicit dislike but I would guess if you keep skipping songs you don't like they'll get penalized.
There are a lot of things I like about tidal but I had constant network issues even with lossy playback. Tracks were skipping and pausing and taking forever to start on the same network that works flawlessly with other services.
See I was doing that, and I guess I didn't do it long enough because it didn't do anything for me. I think that algo is so heavily trained at this point. I think Spotify should really release something that is obvious and UI friendly that isn't some weird hack/workaround to fix this issue.
Maybe being able to mark something as a guilty pleasure which would exclude it from algorithmic use - and ideally from showing it to your friends on facebook if they still do that!
At least with Youtube, you can go through your watch history and delete videos, which makes it as if you never watched it as far as recommendations are concerned.
Removing the source of the recommendation from your history works a lot more reliably. Sometimes the "Not interested" button will allow you to say "I don't want recommendations based on <X> videos", but they're in denial about how that's the only thing their recommendation engine does, so the option isn't always there.
You mean like incognito mode on Chrome? Unfortunately I like most of the bubble I've built for myself of Youtube. It sucks when my recommendation stream of mostly educational videos from smart, quality-driven DIYers and educators gets overwhelmed with 5 Minute Crafts type garbage because I put on one "oddly satisfying compilation" to run in the background while playing boardgames with friends or something.
With the music playlists I just really really want a button that would mark certain songs as "I like them, but not so often". Disliking makes certain artists and styles fall totally out of my playlists, not disliking makes it repeat like a broken record.
@kleer001, click on the options button (the three dots) for any video you’re uninterested in on YouTube and select “not interested.” This should help your generated feed.
You need to counter-train the algorithm to get useful results out of it basically. Keep ignoring those videos, mark them as boring, refresh the page, etc. do content discovery the old-timey way.
LOL! Same shoe; I cannot escape the piano and other instrumentals I played during my wife's pregnancy months. I'm almost at a point of surrender that maybe my time with Deep House and Electronic music has reached an end. The Discovery Weekly was my only way of finding hot indie talent in the electronics world.
Soundcloud is still the place for finding EDM in general. The community sure has slowed down, especially with spotify being such a huge force in the music world, but I still find tons of great content there.
Bonus, you don't have the same recommendation issues that spotify has (I'm in the same boat with non-sensical recommendations, or the same tired songs getting recommended over and over again).
Soundcloud's mobile app has chronic issues. The full screen UI for playing music is beautiful, but the complete lack of discovery, or neglected sorting on an artist's profile is just ridiculous.
I will never subscribe even the paid experience is better.
I think Spotify would do well to allow users to set a label of some sort on their listening. Like, there are times when you listen to your music for yourself in the car, and there are times when your phone is being used to power the speakers at a gathering. I don't know what the internals of the system looks like, but it seems like allowing users to maintain different profiles would be simple.
I'd be happy with just a simple Incognito mode. Not so much that I'm embarrassed about listening to some things, as I am "I wonder what that sounds like" but don't want my recommendations poisoned.
Click the link and you'll see that yes, as opposed to appearing on your public activity feed. Perfectly reasonable name for the feature. Not sure what's Freudian about it.
Spotify's awful discovery, and shuffle features for playlists are what keeps me firmly with Pandora.
Now that Pandora lets you make your own playlists, or listen to individual songs, and download for offline playback (on airplanes for example), I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Spotify these days.
Anecdotal, but Spotify's Discover Weekly feature has ridiculously good recommendations for me and I usually end up adding half of each week's playlist to my library. The recommended music is fantastic, obscure stuff I would never have known about otherwise. My experience with Spotify recommendations couldn't be more different to yours.
I'll absolutely agree with this. The Discover Weekly playlist seems to know my musical preferences better than I do myself, and i'm certainly not sticking to just a couple of specific genres that I listen to
I enjoyed Discover Weekly at first but over time got sick of only hearing suggestions from inside my own “bubble”. I’ve switched to human curated radio and the variety is so much better. haven’t looked back.
Fair enough. Have you tried Pandora's for an extended period and are able to compare?
For me, Spotify ended up just playing the same artist, same album even, over and over. Same problem with their Shuffle feature - I could have a playlist with 500 songs from various artists, albums, genres and more... but I'd get the same artist, same album back to back to back far too often. So often, it didn't feel random at all. Just anecdotal though.
The best song randomizer I've seen described generates a permutation of songs, then "plots" them in n dimensional space with closeness being closeness being a weighted distance of closeness in the playlist and whatever metadata you have about them. (artist, genre, year, mood). Then you iteratively break the clumps until you can't find any or the number stops decreasing. If you still have clumps then you raise the bar for what is considered a clump and repeat until you hit zero.
However, I've used Spotify since 2014 and still experienced the same Shuffle behavior. Strange, perhaps I'm looking for it now, and introducing some sort of bias.
It is interesting, however, that a music playlist company took so long to realize people wouldn't like their original Shuffle implementation. I don't think any device or software I used before Spotify had such a remarkably bad Shuffle experience - including the original iPods and other, much older software and devices.
True. It's just that I don't think I've ever experienced Spotify's take on Shuffle anywhere else before, so it's shocking and frustrating, leading to a lot of "next, next, next" skipping.
I think that Pandora's recommendation results are far superior to Spotify's, thanks to the Music Genome Project. I think Spotify does some basic "A likes X and B likes X, so if A likes Y, B will like Y" processing. My ideal-new music-discovery workflow gets the best of both worlds: find stuff on Pandora, and use the results to create playlists on Spotify.
Spam seems to be a growing problem too. If you follow (or even listen to) an artist, all someone needs to do is credit them on a song (or just squat on their name) for it to be eligible for Release Radar.
There are weird pockets of the Spotify database for this (e.g. "lo-fi beats" artists that churn out hundreds of tracks with many artists) and no way to send any feedback (they shut down Line-In, their metadata feedback a few years ago). Disliking doesn't work because Spotify will only remember you don't like one of the artists, not all of them.
Uh, I do similar thing. I use narrated let's plays or podcasts on YouTube to go to sleep in the evening and YouTube knows this. It knows my habits so much that even not to recommend stuff I listen every evening, durning daytime. Only when I open my phone in the evening reccomendations are suddenly full of stuff I want to listen to get to sleep.
I use YouTube bc it autostops playing and turns phone off when I'm already sleeping. And funnily enough, ads help me start sleeping faster :D
Late at night, I usually design stuff to 3D print, and I figured I should live-stream some sessions. However, since my wife is asleep at that time, I had to be quiet, and the livestream turned out to be ideal to listen to while trying to fall asleep, which was the opposite of what I intended:
Am I the only one that received an email from Google telling me that Google Play music was going to close soon and that I should transfer my playlists?
Same here. Youtube Music is the replacement and it seems to have the same content and the same bugs, just a different design (which I personally find a bit less intuitive but I might be biased) and a new name. You can even upload your own music to YouTube Music now the same way it was possible with Google Music before. It's just Google making a new product to replace a previous one again instead of fixing/improving what they already have...
It's not exactly the same as your uploaded music doesn't blend with the rest, it's on a separate tab, low quality videos are mixed with the "normal" music and all you're Youtube likes related to music are mixed with your previous GPM likes (for god know what reasons). And more.
You really need to manually transfer the playlists? That's pretty retarded. And does this also mean that in order to do so I need a subscription to both?
Apple Music does the same thing. I spent a week listening to ambient music at work and it has permanently destroyed my recommendations. I don’t get a single “For You” list that doesn’t include ambient music which really kills the vibe.
That was almost a year ago and it’s still recommending ambient artists.
Yeah, so like others recommmend above, you need to create a few playlists and I'm fairly certain you'll be getting different recommendations. Still, I also agree with people here who say that you should be able to 'reset' it whenever you want.
Same. Sometimes my girlfriend uses my account and she is very much into reaggeton, which I hate.
If she listens just two or three songs, I'll get the dreaded reaggeton song in "Discover Weekly" next monday. If she uses the account for a whole day, the playlist is ruined for me.
I recommend a playlist centric approach as a workaround. Seed the playlist with some of your favorite songs, and start listening to things from that playlist. Recommendations for that playlist will be context local to that playlist rather than global. Here's the part I'm not sure about -- is the fact that you made a playlist with recommendations then a stronger signal for what the discovery playlist pulls? Is there a time decay involved (which I imagine there is) based on your listening history -- does it passively (so you'd just have to wait) or actively (so you'd have to actively listen to other songs to clear its presumptions) reset?
Seriously, I REALLY want a music service which gives me control over the discovery algorithms parameters.
Just in general, I'm sooooo worn out from living in a world where nothing revolves around "super users" and everything revolves around... average decent 21st century people.
Unfortunately, it will silently turn un-private after only six hours, so you need to be on top of that, lest you end up in the same boat. I learned this the hard way while listening to focus/study music all day at work.
Man, I had about a month of a hardcore punk kick and its not my normal music style at all, however since then (about a year ago now) the discover playlist still suggests all kinds of crazy punk to me - dont know how to get it to stop. At least on youtube there is a button that lets you say "dont recommend this anymore". Spotify needs the same.
You might try selecting a song that you enjoy and listening to the playlist radio for that specific song, it's an alternate take on the discover weekly.
Why not just listen to one of the many curated playlists in the genre you like? Go to music review sites and find a few albums that sound good and add them to your saved playlists? I find myself doing these things more often when I want to discover new music. The discover weekly gives me a lot of stuff I've heard already.
I listen to a lot of ambient music normally and that ends up being seemingly 80% of my recommendations, despite also listening to a bunch of loud angry punk.
Spotify's discovery tends to be pretty iffy for anything at least for me anyway, so I mostly follow labels I like on Bandcamp for discovery instead.
I have some music that I kind of consider slightly trashy but do enjoy on occasions. I have the feeling that Spotify knows that this is a kind of "guilty pleasure", and seems to explicitly not recommend it in my autogenerated playlists. Wonder if this is a fluke or a real thing.
Yes I wish there was a button to reset or stir the pot a bit. Or maybe pay more attention to your more recent playlists. Or discount listens to songs that were recommended to you (to break the feedback loop).
On the point of the feedback loop, if we picture musical preferences as a mountain, with most-listened to stuff at the peak, I've been wondering what would happen if these algorithms (particularly Youtube's and Deezer's, but Spotify's a bit as well) would slide the mountain a little farther down instead of optimizing for the peak.
So to over-simplify, something like instead of saying "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's another RPG soundtrack!" it would say "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's a symphony".
The idea is to lengthen the links of recommendations to encourage more exploration and wider discovery rather than circling the same narrow interest constantly.
I agree, but I also suspect that this falls into the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do. Netflix used to have a huge library of classic and foreign films, but no one was watching them. The monotony of spotify’s recommendations is itself probably a sign that when most people get something surprising they hit skip.
You used to be able to like or dislike songs on radios, but iirc spotify switched it to only favorite a couple of years ago. I don’t understand the reasoning, as it would help tailor their data much more.
Yeah, mine jumps all over depending on what I've recently listened too. Sometimes it's great and I'm like, "wow, this is magic!" Recently it's been garbage.
I don't use Spotify, but a decade ago my Pandora did the exact same thing. It was like the more I tried to tell it which music I liked, the less it played music I wanted to hear.
It costs extra though. Also, the Alexa devices can only connect to one account, which would mean one of us would screw up the recs of the other depending on whose account was tied to the Alexa.
If you had a family subscription, you could use one of the accounts just for shared devices. Then you wouldn't have to worry about music played on your Alexa devices messing up your account's recommendations (although it wouldn't count any music played by Alexa devices that you liked either).
heh I had this problem with the inane music my kids listen to. Those plays poisoned my recommendations and I only noticed when my annual retrospective playlist popped up full of disney garbage.
Solution: use separate streaming service for the kids! I still use Spotify for everything, but kids music happens on Amazon Music.
It's sad to admit but there are enough musicians in the world. The reason wages for musicians is so low is that there are already countless professional musicians making music in every style.
Maybe, but I think it could be better if Spotify paid artists per listen instead of just paying them for being popular.
Also Spotify is definitely missing a lot of obscure music and there definitely aren’t enough live musicians. Otherwise I could afford to have a good band play live in my living room every Sunday morning.
> It's sad to admit but there are enough musicians in the world.
There was a time when you had to have two mediocre gifts to make it: talent and beauty. Or just have one of those gifts, but in spades. It seems like there's a lot more mediocre talent now, since we've evolved to devalue beauty.
Musicians might be the most saturated field but I think this is true for most things. How many millions of artists or photographers put out their art for piddling views and even less money. Even genuinely amazing artists can be absolutely unheard of. Authors also fall into this category.
You can’t have it at $2/year though - my distributor only cuts a check when you reach the $20 threshold. I had forgotten I had music on there by the time the check showed up!
Based on other accounts, this might be the common outcome of publishing on Spotify. While this article sums up the artist's experience very well, it could feed into aspiring artists' survivorship bias.
65,000 listeners a month – $800 in revenue. 1.23 cents per listener per month. That works out to 14.7 cents per year. To earn a modest $50,000, you would need ~360,000 monthly listeners. This doesn't seem sustainable without outside sources of revenue.
Correct, this is why bands tour and sell shirts and other merch, and for most, work second jobs. As an anecdote, friend of mine is in two or three bands at any given time and bartends most nights he’s not playing shows.
Spotify makes it easier than ever for an artist to get their work out there, which is great, but it’s similar to the publishing world, where most authors who self publish do so into the void.
The best way to support an artist you really like is to purchase merchandise, buy their music on Bandcamp, and see them live. For bands I really like, I buy the album on Bandcamp and then just listen to it on Spotify for convenience.
Besides, who doesn't love a good tee with your favorite band's lyrics on it?
He lives in NYC to make matters worse during those earlier months. He's alive and didn't catch it though, so there's that.
Doesn't come from like a super wealthy family, but he'll be fine financially if things never return to normal. We're in our 30s so I do think he's looking for something more structured anyways, this might be a catalyst.
That's $800/month for a tiny artist that would otherwise be making about $0/month.
> I don't tour, I don't sell merch and I'm not on a major label. I'm just a small indie artist making music in my evenings— and Spotify is making that possible.
> I get about 177,000 plays / month. Spotify is 96% of those plays.
> I earn around $800 / month from music streaming. Spotify is 93% of that income.
> And every month about 65,000 people listen to my music on Spotify.
The number quoted was for listeners, and is correctly 1.23 cents per listener per month. If you want to go by listens, then it's ($800 * 0.93) / (177,000 * 0.96) = 0.44 cents per listen.
My mistake, thanks for the correction. I agree this is unsustainable if the average person only listens to three songs a day, which seems extremely, extremely low to me unless there is a distribution issue going on where certain songs are more likely to be listened to frequently or if the majority of listens are people searching for new music until they find one they can loop for a while.
> This doesn't seem sustainable without outside sources of revenue.
The reality for most creators, really. There's way more supply than demand and you have to contend with power laws.
The top ~1% of books, movies, games, music, youtube videos, twitch streams, HN threads, etc, always dominate. Capturing ~80% of attention/money. The distribution falls off rapidly with a long tail, which is unsustainable for most.
As far as I know, even famous indie artists you listen to and whose concerts you go to often have to work day jobs. Most are working class. There's not a lot of money being a musician.
I pay for Google Play Music which is similar to Spotify. I wish I knew how much of my money was going to which artists I listen to, but I suspect the result is disappointing. $10 a month is far more than I would spend on music otherwise and if even half of it went to artists I listen to, then I'd be supporting them reasonably well IMO. It should add up decently. I kind of doubt that it does.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit by the artists for the conflict-of-interest the labels have with Spotify. Sony, Universal and Warner Music all owned stakes in Spotify and it was against the interests of artists to offer Spotify content in exchange for razor thin royalties.
He's doing this part time. A full-time music producer could easily make more/better music, especially if she is not touring. For perspective, an electronic artist I admire, Zhu, was once producing an entire song every single week. There is, however, no substitute for 'talent.'
I was thinking about that. Live in Southeast Asia or Costa Rica for half the year, pay a fraction in cost of living compared to the US, and invest the savings.
> Plus I think asking listeners to listen to a full-length album don’t make sense in our attention-starved world. Asking listeners to listen to a single song might just be a more realistic ask.
This is why I love listening to albums, because it flies in the face of throwaway/hyper-consumable media. Spotify, with its algorithmic playlists and singles focus, bolsters the throwaway consumption of music, but many artists also enjoy the long tail of revenue from album streams. If an artist creates an album with lasting appeal, they can smooth out the initial spike of physical sales with a long slow burn of revenue.
> with its algorithmic playlists and singles focus, bolsters the throwaway consumption of music
What is "throwaway" music?
Personally, I tend to listen to genre-focused playlists I curate over time, and often in "radio" mode (so algorithms select similar music). When I find something new I really like, I add it to my playlist. Rarely do I find anything I actively dislike, but there's lots of stuff that I don't add but I don't mind either way if I hear again -- is that "throwaway"?
I think like anyone, I have a gradient of music preferences -- ranging from "can't stand" to "love". The middle ground is huge -- there's a lot of good music out there, I simply don't have the capacity to "love" everything.
By throwaway I mean music that is extremely popular for a short moment in time (measured in months or weeks) and then becomes irrelevant as the next hit single comes out. I don't mean throwaway in terms of musical preference or taste.
I got into vinyl last year and have been buying up albums. The experience is so different than streaming. There is a physical element to it that's incredibly rewarding. You also notice how tracks flow in a good album so much more when you're essentially forced to listen to the whole thing.
> I worried that readers would not trust this arrangement [affiliate links] when I first started. But in practice it hasn't been a big issue. In fact, readers ask me which links to click to ensure I get my commission. Honestly, negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community like Hacker News than it is from my readers.
I made a surprising find on Spotify not so long ago. One of their curated playlists - Techno Bunker [1] - algorithmically mixes from track to track, like a fairly competent DJ, and it does it even if you turn on shuffle. There may be others, but this is the only one I've found so far.
This is amazing, and I'm surprised this isn't noted down in the playlist description, nor anywhere else. It doesn't simply crossfade, it matches beats up much like a human would. This is insanely neat and such a nice find.
I am not hearing this -- I'm hearing 1 to 2 seconds of silence as one song ends and the next song starts.
In my spotify preferences I have "Crossfade" disabled, but there is now a new setting that I haven't seen before: "Automix -- Allow smooth transitions between songs in a playlist". This is enabled.
His comment on albums is interesting. It seems like he's given up on getting press, so albums don't make as much sense for him, but music critics are still the major driver for who gets listens in the non-pop music space. I don't see albums disappearing for that reason. I also enjoy listening to albums much more than singles, but that could just be me.
You can imagine my astonishment when someone I know, a deejay and producer, came to me several months ago, at a club, with the very unexpected answer of 'how to run more Ubuntus on one box' ?!
Because... he wanted to have them subscribe and then click and play a list of alter-ego-monikers of himself, who release to unknown probably ghost-audience in Spotify
Making money in the way - without releases, without gigs.
And it is exactly 600-800$ per month he cited as the amount he made from one alter ego with several albums.
Somehow I'm sure there are others out there doing the same.
I'm leaving for folks here to imagine and comment how relevant would soon Spotify be for indie artists that will be competing with such Spotify click-botnets...
With great power comes great responsibility, Spotify Data Scientists.
If discover weekly is truly that impactful a decision made by a model to include or not include a song could determine whether or not an indie artist can pay their rent that month.
Not quite iris dataset classification.
Edit: I should clarify that I only mean that this impact raises interesting questions and DSs (I am one) should pay close attention to the impact of their models.
Spotify's responsibility is to cater to its users' preferences. But preferences don't exist in a vacuum. They are a consequence of a society's values. If a society cares only about a few winners taking it all, then yes, indie artists should have no expectation of getting paid. But if a society cares about cultivating art and not just about profits, it would want to incentivize a wider group of people making a living from creating art.
I think you missed my point, obviously you should get paid for your monthly listens but it's not Spotify's responsibility to drive listeners to your music. You are obviously free to market and promote as much as you can, hitching your success or failure to Spotify including you in Discover seems like a sure way to fail to make a living.
Imagine saying this about a CD store a few decades ago. It would be ridiculous to say that a store was responsible for promoting indie artist CDs. If you want to get listens or sales make good music, it's pretty simple.
On the other hand, money earned from streaming vs money earned from CD sales (especially a few decades ago) is completely incomparable.
If selling CDs through a store could earn you (using simple but realistic numbers here) $100k per year, and Spotify streams to the same audience size earn $1k per year, it’s not unreasonable to expect that Spotify should add a hell of a lot more value on its end, perhaps in the form of driving listeners to artists — especially if Spotify possesses the means to.
It would be nice if you cared about things beyond $$$ and worked on code for the sake of code.
Try listening to only amateur musicians for a month while you work. You might come back with an appreciation for just how much effort and money is required to produce the art you personally care about.
> ... just how much effort and money is required to produce the art you personally care about.
I wholeheartedly agree with the “effort” part and I also think, the comparison of music to code is very apt.
However, wouldn’t it be fair to say that the money investment for creating the music (i.e. a mastered WAV or whatever format) can be incredibly low these days? And even distribution is incredibly low cost.
So barrier to entry for recorded music has been lowered to almost zero (for music as well as coding) compared to the days of vinyl and mainframe computers.
Also, since it’s so incredibly difficult to make a living making music, I find that many professional calibre musicians are indistinguishable from amateur musicians if you go by music income.
I honestly expect these days I could listen to very good music for a month by people who aren’t making a living from music (i.e. amateurs). But I’d argue that actually is the problem.
Unfortunately I don’t know how to tell those musicians from the one’s who are making a living with music (professionals) on the major streaming platforms, so I can’t put this to a test.
You are incredibly uninformed on the lives of pro musicians. Trust me, I am one.
Labels are dead. Studios are dead. The onus to procure the gear and space to make music is entirely on the artist now. Yes, costs for some gear have come down, but to do truly professional work you need to invest at least a couple thousand in a computer and software (DAW, plugins, etc), another thousand minimum in speaker monitors, another thousand minimum in acoustic treatment, plus let’s call it another thousand or two for various misc stuff (display, keyboard, mouse, a few instruments, a decent mic and audio interface, midi controller(s), cables, etc etc etc). I’d say dead bare minimum you need $6k, and that’s ignoring the fact that so much music software are going to subscription models. You can easily add another zero to that.
Plus you need the space where you can actually make a decent amount of noise, the time (and money) to learn to produce, mix, and master your own music — all lifelong and singular skills in their own rights with their own masters, totally apart from actually writing and performing anything.
Add on distribution fees (which aren’t quite as low as you think in order to get to any sort of “professional” echelon), business and legal fees, etc etc etc, and things get expensive fast.
The important distinction here between coding and music is that the cost has entirely moved from a label/management firm to the artist themselves. No one really makes music in a studio with a console anymore. Yes, it happens (I’m a film composer writing orchestral music, so I’m still doing it — yes, we typically pay for the orchestral recording sessions, whereas in the past film studios took on that cost, and that alone can cost well over $100k), but all in all music is made on a computer. Just because that’s the same tool you use to code, don’t think it’s at all the same to you buying your laptop compared to the days when IBM built its own mainframe (and of course businesses still routinely give out laptops to their employees). Coding can be done even on a shit $300 Acer with free VS Code, but you’ll have a hard time making any professional music on that same computer with free software.
There’s a lot more wrong with your assumptions (such as amateur and pro musicians making the same income) but I’ve typed enough for the moment.
Apologies for not answering sooner - I had detoxed from HN for a few days.
Further apologies for not making it abundantly clear that I'm on your side on the topic that professional musicians deserve to be paid like any other profession including programmers.
So inadvertently my GP post probably come across as disputing your right to earn money with your music. That's the opposite of what I was trying to say.
My post was more an (obviously misfired) attempt to guide the argument away from the equipment and distribution expenditures side of making professional calibre music - since that's trending significantly lower and lower compared to the 70s and 80s. Therefore I believe professional musicians are doing themselves less and less favours by mentioning that argument.
I think the more successful leading argument would be the investment of talent and time. To me talent is a continuing valid argument, since as a music consumer I hate to lose the most talented musicians to being average in some other profession at the cost of them not developing that talent to the best it can be, and to publish their work for the benefit of larger society (including me). -- I'd also hate so lose the most talented programmers to other professions etc.).
And to maximize their musical talent, that talented individual needs to have the time and energy to invest by getting paid for making music. The required cost of gear only adds to that need, but I'd say that your time and energy is much, much more valuable than your gear with today's equipment. For example over 5 years, I'd say your time should be at the very least 5 to 10 times more valuable than your gear - quite possibly more. (That ratio was very different in the 70s and 80s with lower cost of living and higher equipment and distribution costs).
And hell yes, you should get paid - and my heart bleeds for you and so many other high caliber musicians, who are finding it increasingly difficult to make even a modest living with creating outstanding music.
p.s. I can't profess to be knowledgeable about your arm of the professional music business. I have however reasonably deep familiarity with other parts (assuming your definition of a professional musician would also include those parts). For what it's worth, I count a sibling, a sibling-in-law, and a nephew as current full-time professional musicians in performing live, producing, arranging, musical direction and such. And we are close, so therefore talk a lot. And it may not count anymore, but I also made my living with playing live music for a while before bailing out to become a software developer. Which in turn over the years funded my reasonably nice home studio - so I know the costs of acquisition, maintenance and continued upgrades quite intimately.
Agreed, I can become a developer for quite a bit less money in gear - but as I said above, the equipment cost pales to a rather small percentage in comparison to the time and energy investment while needing to eat, while keeping dry and warm/cool, and even more so when you're trying to support a family.
But above all: My very best wishes to you in trying to survive and hopefully find or continue your niche to thrive in the generally grim environment facing professional musicians - only made worse by the pandemic.
It would be nice if landlords provided shelter for the sake of providing shelter, and grocers worked for the sake of feeding people, too.
And somehow, I've never seen anybody suggest that since Daniel Ek and his team love music so much, they should forego worldly possessions and work for the sake of bringing music to the people.
Speaking of carving out a niche on Spotify.... If your kid ever asks Siri/Google/Alexa to play the poop song a few cents of royalties goes to Matt Farley aka the Toiletbowl Cleaners. It’s quite fascinating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Farley
> According to Farley, one song that contains only the word "poop" repeated over and over generates $500 in streaming revenue every month as of 2018, likely in part because children request it from Alexa or other devices.[4][5][6] Farley earned over $23,000 in 2013 from his song catalog.
I feel Spotify makes it hard to listen to albums. I can queue up a song to play and it’ll then get back to my playlist, but if I play and album eventually it’ll reach the end and quit playing anything. Then I will have to stop what I’m doing and find something else to play.
I feel the UX could be improved and it might change listening habits similar to Discover Weekly
There's a setting to have it play related songs after it finishes an album. On the desktop client, it's in hamburger menu > edit > preferences > Autoplay > Autoplay similar songs when your music ends.
What, you don't appreciate an ad between the Happiest Days of our Lives and Another Brick in the Wall part 2 or 2112 Overture and The Temples of Syrinx?
You could queue up an album in the same way you queue a song then it will go back to your playlist afterwards. As many others have already mentioned there is an auto play feature.
> Albums are big statements. Some of the most iconic releases in popular music have been albums.
On the contrary, most of the greatest contemporary hits was singles. I can't remember really bold and moving statements in the form of albums, except maybe "The Wall". Classic composers never wrote albums,their large forms were symfonies and opera - whole pieces of separate parts.
Albums was invented by vinyl/CD music industry and will die with them.
> Classic composers never wrote albums,their large forms were symfonies and opera - whole pieces of separate parts.
Albums, in the idealized form (there are, of course, lots that are collections of basically disconnected singles, too) are “whole pieces of separate parts”, like symphonies or operas (or, I suppose, soundtracks.) People who lament losing albums aren't talking about package-of-convenience collections of singles, they are talking about pieces where, while the individual songs may stand alone the same way each planetary theme in Holst’s The Planets can, but they also form a single thematic work with an arc and movement across the whole body.
The Planets is a later piece (beginning of XX) and may be inspired by sheet music industry, which worked the same way and has same limitations - it was too expensive to manufacture and distribute "singles". I beleive the term "album" itself was inherited from there.
US terrestrial radio only pays out to the composition side (whoever wrote the song) and not to the master side (who performed and recorded the song). Internet and satellite radio pay both sides. Non-interactive radio uses rates set by statute across the board; this is all separate from on-demand streaming like Spotify.
> In my experience, major label artists have an easier time getting on editorial playlists. ... But major label artists also only typically get 13% - 20% of streaming royalties… so there are still plenty of reasons to stay indie!
This is just like the tradeoff startups make when they choose to take VC.
Will giving up 80% of the company lead to the company being at least five times bigger? If so, then it seems worthwhile.
Very interesting read. I have never made any music but I am compelled by the idea of starting some time in the future. I have always thought that releasing music on Spotify was nothing that could ever bring in any revenue but it seems I was a bit wrong on that.
I just listened to "Lullabies For Little Crimes" and "Circles", it was great! I'm really happy Spotify found a way to surface artists like this who deserve attention!
Agreed. After an initial listening, it's clear Steve's really talented. Which admittedly probably helps with the earning money part of the article.
It's kind of like that PG quote:
"What Customers Want - It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?"
I can think of many restaurants with really good food that went out of business... that's a terrible analogy. Certainly a very helpful ingredient, though maybe not even the main one.
I agree that it's definitely not a foolproof analogy. But good food (like good music) is usually a table-stakes ingredient for a successful restaurant. Again of course again, there are exceptions there too.
I didn't recognize his name but went to listen to "Circles". Turns out it was on my Discover Weekly a few weeks back, I recognized it immediately. Pretty catchy song. Will have to check out some of his others.
It may be that causality on this works backwards, but I’ve also noticed that artists that perform concerts together (Spotify does keep track of concerts and who performs at them) tend to be very algorithmically associated. At the very least, I think it’s a huge factor in “Related Artists”.
Does anyone still buy albums on iTunes? I haven't done that in a while, but I have to say I prefer to physically own the music I listen to often. If I can't get a physical media like CD or vinyl, then iTunes store was second best aside from illegal options.
I really like to buy on Bandcamp. They've been running promotions and either forgoing their 15% commission or donating it to Covid/BLM efforts. I think it's one of the best music platforms and I've discovered so many fantastic artists that aren't on Spotify or anywhere else.
I do. I enjoy the entire album experience, and tend to enjoy artists that make fully connected albums more than others. Tool, Arcade Fire, and Pink Floyd are great examples.
I don’t need the physical media though.
Why? Probably something about renting vs. owning that’s always driven many of my decisions on spending money.
I buy digital music from Bandcamp whenever possible. (Otherwise I buy it from Amazon MP3 or pirate it from Soulseek.) I like to build a collection and I can't stand the notion that some streaming company or copyright holder can just decide I'm not allowed to listen to an album anymore.
Make sure you backup your Bandcamp purchases. I know of at least two artists whose Bandcamp accounts were deleted. The artists claim that Bandcamp never notified them of any copyright claims or policy violations.
There is an album I purchased which no longer appears in my collection. I am only able to listen to it via mobile app because it's still cached on the device.
In the course of writing this response I realized that I had not contacted customer support so I now have.
I have such a hodgepodge of purchased music. I have a giant library of old pirated MP3s. I have 30ish MP3s I bought from Amazon years ago when I was trying to avoid iTunes. And then I have about 15 tracks bought from iTunes, mixed with some mixtapes that were free but imported into iTunes.
I listen to none of it now. I was a Pandora customer, now I'm a YouTube Music customer. In the car, it's SiriusXM.
I buy albums on Bandcamp when it's an artist I love. Bandcamp is also where my band makes the majority of our sales, a combination of digital purchases and merch. It seems like a growing number of people really enjoy supporting artists directly and Bandcamp is the best platform for that.
I love your songs :) Thank you!! <3 And you defnitly popped up on discover weekly :D. I usually star songs that I like there, and / or order them in my custom playlists.
Note that this is all applies only to easy listening music suitable for the background (I checked the author's playlist at the end). Not something emotionally intense or overly energetic that demands your full attention. Spotify is optimizing for muzak, and artists who thrive in this ecosystem are muzak.
I could (and soon will) go deeper to prove my point, but Liz Pelly already did a lion-hearted job covering the problems with streaming platforms and Spotify specifically — they have a catastrophic effect on music.[1]
Spotify is the No. 1 enemy of music culture and artistic expression.
I think this is a pretty valid point—in fact the effect of Spotify's approach to promoting music with this hegemonic quality has been documented pretty well, even resulting in something people call "The Spotify Sound":
Not to mention they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar a number of times, promoting their own fake artists "algorithmically", and it was such a good game that Sony got in on it as well.
In my experience, it’s only when I get on an editorial playlist that my songs get heavily featured on algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly.
So how do you get on editorial playlists? I sincerely have no clue. I've been on editorial playlists 16 times but I have no idea how to replicate that.
I find that this is true of many of these "I made X dollars per month doing Y!" articles: somewhere in the chain of events, there is a fateful intervention out of the control of the author that propels them to a higher tier of income than their peers who are otherwise following the same procedures.