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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)
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?
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
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.
I think this is mostly about playlists that are refreshed every x days.
Say you have a playlist called "Hot Dance Tracks". Fans of the genre can subscribe, and get a new selection of tracks every week.
If you have 400 000 subscribers, some people might be willing to pay to have a track included in next week's hotness.
Channel or station.
They should rebrand as PotLister, and take advantage of all the decriminalization going around.