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Inside the Booming Black Market For Spotify Playlists (dailydot.com)
The black market for Spotify playlists is booming. It's cheaper than you might expect to hack the system -- and if it's done right, it more than pays for itself, the Daily Dot reports. From the article: It's impossible to overstate the value of Spotify playlists. The company dominates the streaming music market, with 159 million active users and 71 million paid subscribers -- nearly double Apple Music's subscription base, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. More importantly, Spotify has made playlists its defining feature. [...] The rising value of Spotify playlists has spurred a new form of payola -- the decades-old illegal practice of paying for a song to be broadcast on the radio -- with massive amounts of money changing hands behind the scenes. An August 2015 expose by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for "$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists." Spotify responded by updating its terms of service to explicitly prohibit "selling a user account or playlist, or otherwise accepting any compensation, financial or otherwise, to influence the name of an account or playlist or the content included on an account or playlist." But the practice of paying for placement, as with other forms of payola before it, hasn't died out. It's just been remixed.
In a matter of minutes and for a mere $2, you can pay to have your song considered by one of the 1,500 curators working on SpotLister, one of several new services that sells access to prominent Spotify users. The site was founded by two 21-year-old college students -- Danny Garcia, a guitar player at New York University, and a close friend who requested anonymity due to unrelated privacy concerns. They started a "private-for-hire" PR company in 2016 that offered "pitching services" to generate buzz on SoundCloud and, later, Spotify. The two would take on anywhere from 15 to 20 clients a month, each paying anywhere from $1,000-$5,000 to secure prominent placement on playlists.
In a matter of minutes and for a mere $2, you can pay to have your song considered by one of the 1,500 curators working on SpotLister, one of several new services that sells access to prominent Spotify users. The site was founded by two 21-year-old college students -- Danny Garcia, a guitar player at New York University, and a close friend who requested anonymity due to unrelated privacy concerns. They started a "private-for-hire" PR company in 2016 that offered "pitching services" to generate buzz on SoundCloud and, later, Spotify. The two would take on anywhere from 15 to 20 clients a month, each paying anywhere from $1,000-$5,000 to secure prominent placement on playlists.
If its a violation of the terms of service to do this stuff, then it should be fairly easy for Spotify to get SpotLister and these other services shut down (maybe make use of the overly broad overly vague CFAA to do it)
They replace many of their titles with sucky live versions.
or Spotify should buy SpotLister.
(See the vertical integration in radio markets nowadays).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I truly had no idea this was still a thing, but modernized for a different delivery method. People truly will find any possible way to make a buck.
If it's in violation of the TOS, it should be easy for Spotify to knock out the big guys, at least in theory. Smaller or quieter operations though... Whack-a-mole? Needles in a haystack?
Personally I cannot see the attraction of saved playlists, and never use them. I will create one-time playlists by queuing the albums/tracks I want to listen to at the time. Does the popularity of saved playlists mean that many (or most) people just want to listen to the same tracks over and over? Spotify has such a large catalog that I am sure that there is sufficient for almost everyone to listen to tracks that they like without playing the same track more than once or twice a month. Finding new music is quite simple, use Spotify's or Last FM's similar artists or use Spotify's radio.
It's impossible to overstate the value of Spotify playlists.
One Trillion Dollars
QED not impossible
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
In the Radio spectrum is limited and licensed and it was the only free content delivery system for the masses. Since a few people got to be gate keepers, we needed rules to make sure they do not abuse the defacto monopoly status given to them by the government. On the internet, with unlimited opportunities for all players to pitch music, there is a dire need for someone to provide editorial services, find good music from obscure and unexpected sources, draw attention to it and develop a reputation of being a good play list creator. And people will pay for a good play list. It is no different from being an editor of a literary magazine.
It is high time spotify recognizes it and makes it official. Let thousand playlists bloom, market will shake out those who sell out.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
means...
A playlist is a list of songs the user has selected that they wish to listen to in the order they have selected.
From context, that is not what they mean. I don't use Spotify, in what manner did they mangle the word playlist and what do they actually mean when they use it?
17 posts so far. I'm the third to wonder Who Cares about a few lines of text listing tracks to play.
1) Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond
2) LED Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love
3) Queen - Another One Bites The Dust
4) AC/DC - Highway to Hell
Am I missing something? How much will I get paid for spending 30 seconds putting those in a row? Aren't there people on the youtubes that do this? Better than me, I'm sure.
But not as sure as I currently am about some vague misnamed feature possibly involving some kind of, er, subscription? Is this like, a podcast thing? I imagine it involves exploiting people who need to be told what to listen to.
We won't even remember it. It'll be like Pets.com and Webvan.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If this had any value it is most likely gone. Now thousands of musicians will sign up for the service and try to get their songs listed on many irrelevant playlists. This might help If you happen to have some really great and very well recorded original songs that fits perfectly in a very high traffic genre. Most people don't.
99.9% of the people that sign up will have real crappy songs that will not go anywhere. People will take your money and maybe even get them on some playlists but users will skip the songs and you will spend more than you make.
Maybe it's because of the story coming out. But they have the following message up:
We are rebranding due to conflict of interest blahblah blah
Channel or station.
Im surprised evil old white men were able to keep blacks away from playlists till the year 2018.
Now that spotify playlists are no longer the exclusive domain of racists, I'm sure their influence will bring in a new age of peace prosperity and free abortions.
It's a playlist as you describe it, but selected for the listener not by them.
In twenty years, Highway To Hell will still be rocked out to more than anything by the latest inmemorable Beyoncé offering.
Why? Because AC/DC crafted a timeless, classic track that will hold up forever. Beyoncé? A plastic, disposable piece of puff "music" one tires of within days. It's the difference between eating steak and cake frosting: one nourishes and satisfied you, the other (while initially appealing at first taste) is cloying and makes you vomit if you have too much.
As you may already know, Spotify deemed our platform non-compliant with Spotify's Terms of Use and while it is true our API Key was deactivated and we had no other option but to shut down the service. In the meantime, many news outlets and bloggers picked up the Daily Dot story and portrayed us as a pay-to-playlist service and cited information that was not only misleading but completely false.
For this reason, we decided to release the following statement and substantiate with actual metrics and facts about our platform:
Firstly, Like Spotify, we reiterate that we are unequivocally against pay-to-playlist. However, this conviction does not negate the music promotion activities that take place each and every day around the globe, including song submissions to playlist curators, a process we decided to build upon and pledged to improve. You see, Spotlister was conceived and developed simply to give rising artists the opportunity to submit their music for consideration to the curator community never to pay for placements on their playlists.
So, here are a few of the fake news that have been circulating around and our response according to the facts:
1) Spotlister has been operating for about 2 years and it was a huge player in the music submission business.
FACT: Spotlister was officially launched in November 2017 after a brief beta phase of 2 weeks. In fact, we were a rather small and upcoming player in the online music submission services arena and we only got to serve a few hundred customers. So we are still at odds and rather confused as to why we were picked as the focus in the Daily Dot article and portrayed as a huge service with in-depth knowledge of the industry with many years of operation.
2) Spotlister was a pay-to-playlist service
FACT: Not once did we ever communicate directly or pay a single playlister for placements on any of their playlists! While it is true submissions prices ranged between $2 and $10 and that Playlisters received $0.24 for their time invested in doing a review, the rest of the money went to develop and operate a fairly new platform looking to make a name for itself in the online music submission business. To put this in perspective, during our short-lived 3 months of operations, Playlisters collected an average of $22 from our platform. As you can imagine, there is little or no influence we could have made on playlist placements.
FACT: During the entire lifespan of our platform (3 months), we had a total of 24714 Submissions, out of which 11631 expired and credits were refunded to artists and 13083 were reviewed and completed by playlisters. Only 8% of all posted submissions resulted in a voluntary placement by playlisters. In contrast, other music submission sites cite millions of submissions and an even better placement ratio.
3) Artists paid up to $2,000 per placement on playlists.
FACT: Our platform allowed artists to buy credits to submit songs to the different playlists available in our platform. Our credit Packages started at $10 and the most expensive package we offered was $100 which provided 75 credits (a $150 value). In average, artists spent $54 while using our service. Again, there is very little an artist can do to influence placements with that kind of budget. We reiterate, there was no backdoors in Spotlister or communications that could have enabled additional payments to playlisters for placements in our platform. Artists submissions were not even read or actively monitored by Spotlister personnel.
4) About our rebranding effort to Jamlister
FACT: The initial Spotify communication cited our name "Spotlister" as one of their main non-compliant issues with our service, they provided us 30-days to cure. Within 24 hours of their initial communication, we halted operations, registered the Jamlister.com domain and started migrating our platform to our new name. The service remained halted while this effort was ongoing for around 1 week after which we responded to their initial request to change the name addressing th