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Spotify Vs. other streaming platforms

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The State of Streaming Music Services

CD sales are plummeting, and vinyl sales have plateaued after rising to their greatest peak since the 1990s, but that doesn't mean that people have abandoned music. It's quite the contrary, really. With the rise of streaming music, people are listening to their favorite songs and compositions in their homes, offices, or any other location where their devices can connect to the internet. In fact, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America , US music revenue increased 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, with music streaming services making up two-thirds of that money.

Streaming music services are so vital to the industry that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) now factors music streaming into its Gold and Platinum album certifications. In fact, Kanye West's The Life of Pablo, a rather forgettable hip-hop album, is the first record to go platinum based entirely on online plays, streaming more than 3 billion times worldwide. Like Bob Dylan said, the times, they are a-changing. And for the better. Mostly.

The Music Streaming Features You'll Love

The RIAA's move is a wise one, as streaming music services have become a part of our everyday lives. Most streaming music services have some base-level commonality, such as letting you create customizable channels, but a handful stand out from the very crowded pack due to their unique feature sets. For example, Tidal prides itself on sound quality, delivering a premium Hi-Fi product that boasts uncompressed 1411Kbps FLAC audio streams that surpasses your typical stream or MP3 file.

Considering that most online music services' streams are in the 128Kbps and 320Kbps range, Tidal's audio quality is quite impressive. In fact, Tidal's new Masters Streams are even more impressive, offering studio-quality audio courtesy of the Master Quality Authenticated audio codec. These FLAC-based streams sound absolutely terrific.

Some services, such as Slacker Radio and Spotify, have free options that let you try before you subscribe, while others, such as Amazon Music Unlimited and Tidal, are strictly premium experiences (typically starting at the $10-per-month mark). Many services have lyrics, too, so you can sing along, word-for-word, with your favorite song. In addition, family plans, a relatively recent industry feature, let six household members sign up for a shared premium account for $14.99 per month.

There are many differences between the free and paid streaming music tiers in most services. Free accounts typically limit your ability to skip songs to just six per hour, and they feed you ads in either audio or video form. The free tiers are for more casual listeners or people who don't find it worth spending a dime on music. Premium accounts, however, offer unlimited song skips, on-demand playback, and other goodies. The for-pay levels of service are aimed at customers who really want to explore the depths of what a streaming music service offers.

In addition, each of the reviewed services offers mobile apps, so you needn't be tied to your PC to enjoy tunes. A valuable feature that you'll find in these services' mobile apps is the ability to cache music for offline playback, a feature generally reserved for premium subscribers. This is a technological godsend for folks who are frequently in locations that have spotty signal coverage.

You'll find even greater streaming music diversity should you dig deeper into the space. Slacker Radio, for example, differentiates itself with live ESPN Radio, so you can stay on top of sports happenings throughout the day. The service also has Stories, a hosted program that features interesting tales, ranging from love to horror. Tidal sells concert and sports tickets, and has an expert editorial staff that produces feature-length articles. Amazon Music Unlimited lets you upload your own audio files and stream them along wiht the songs in the company's catalog. Most services have a robust selection of comedy albums.

There's a lot of content to explore beyond simple music. These platforms are quickly transforming from streaming music services into overall streaming audio services.

Some Stumbles

Unfortunately, all isn't swell in this musical wild, wild west. Thanks to-you guessed it-money, some platforms have either gained or lost content. For example, pop idol Taylor Swift yanked her 1989 album from Spotify three years ago due to low royalty payments, and the record hasn't appeared on the service since then. In fact, there have been reports that Swift is pondering her own streaming music service. The issue of artist compensation has always dogged the recording industry, and it hasn't disappeared with the advent of streaming music-quite the contrary, in fact.

Tidal aimed to stand out from the crowd, as a platform built on the idea of properly paying artists. It was also the only service to host Prince's catalog for a hot minute (though that's no longer the case). In some cases, you're unable to play particular songs on demand; those tracks are only available within the scope of a themed channel. Content restrictions and missing artists and tracks are still a problem in the space, though-Swift notwithstanding-the situation has improved markedly in recent years.

Trying to figure out where things live and how you're able to access them can prove quite vexing to the uninitiated. It's one of the entertainment challenges that we face in the digital age.

It's Your Move

Thankfully, you don't need to wade through the numerous services to find the one that best suits your listening needs. PCMag has reviewed both popular and niche streaming music services to separate the musical wheat from the auditory chaff. Below, you'll find capsules that link to our full reviews of 10 streaming services; up top, you'll find a chart that highlights the features you should expect in a high-quality service. Check out the reviews and chart to discover which streaming music services are best suited for your music listening tastes.

If you're curious about why certain streaming music services aren't featured in this story, here's the skinny. It's very likely they've been surpassed by the 10 superior services highlighted here, absorbed by a rival, or gone out of business. For example, Jango isn't very good; AOL Radio is nothing more than a reskinned Slacker Radio; and Rdio sold its tech to Pandora. I expect to see more shakeouts in the space in the next few years, as there are so many players providing broadly similar services.

That's not to say they are the same, however! Read on to find the pros and cons of the best online music streaming services we've reviewed. Put on a pair of headphones or crank up your speakers and explore the options below.

If you're concerned about streaming your favorite tunes over, say, a Starbucks Wi-Fi signal, you need to get yourself a VPN. A virtual private network safeguards your mobile devices from snoopers and, depending on the location of the VPN server, may let you access music licensed to other regions. Using a VPN to get around licensing restrictions probably violates Spotify's terms of service, though, so tread carefully.

Do you have a favorite music service, or is there one that particularly grinds your gears? Let us know in the comments below.

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The Best Online Music Streaming Services for 2019

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CD sales are plummeting, and vinyl sales have plateaued after rising to their greatest peak since the 1990s, but that doesn't mean that people have abandoned music. It's quite the contrary, really. With the rise of streaming music, people are listening to their favorite songs and compositions in their homes, offices, or any other location where their devices can connect to the internet.

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Examining how the emergence of Spotify as a dominant streaming platform has changed the nature of popular recording music for both artists and consumers.

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Best playlists on Spotify

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You can get lost in the vast digital sea that is Spotify's enormous playlist library, and it's worth it. There's a fire playlist for every genre, every era and every mood a human can have. Here are our current picks for the best playlists Spotify has to offer.

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A full breakdown of Spotify algorithms

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On April 7, 2018 at 12:00 AM, Spotify placed Mythological Beauty by Big Thief on that week's Release Radar playlist. It was the first time I was recommended a song from Capacity, the album that would go on to become my favorite of the year. The last time I took a deep look into music discovery was in 2011. That year my favorite album of the year was recommended to me by the clerk at Slowtrain Records, which is now closed down.

Back then, I knew music consumption and discovery was changing, but I never would have guess that in less than 7 years it would change so dramatically. The amount of new music I listen to higher now and the sources of discovery have been overshadowed by algorithmic recommendations. Even music blogs, like the excellent Fuel/Friends, also no longer operating, have been displaced. This time by social media.

Man vs Media vs Machine

I assumed that the prominence of recommendations built into Spotify would dominate my discovery. But to really see if that was true, I needed to dig into the data. Through the course of the year, I tracked ever single music recommendation I received - from friends and colleagues to Spotify algorithms to social media. Side note: In 2011, my data collection was all manual, with pen and a notebook. In 2017, only 8% of the data I collected was done manually. That's the byproduct of music's migration to software platforms.

I combed through the data to measure the efficacy of the different sources. I cross-referenced the data with my streaming history to identify additional patterns and correlations. I categorized the recommendations I received throughout the year into three groups - people I knew personally, media sources like music sites or podcasts, and algorithm-driven playlists in Spotify - to see if once type had unique success.

One of the clearest differences between the different types of sources is the rhythm in which I receive them. There is a daily onslaught of recommendations coming from media sources in large part thanks to my social media follows and habits. Recommendations coming from machines have a steadier and predictable cadence. People have an asymmetric flow of recommendations to me but their presence remains constant enough to be influential throughout the year.

Machine driven recommendations came with reliable consistency. But the fact that there was little friction between receiving the recommendation and listening to it (all I had to do was press play), led me to believe that Spotify's algorithmic recommendations would be the most dominant. They did dominate in terms of quantity, but quality was a harder metric to measure. I received the most recommendations for my favorite albums of the year through media sources. By percentage, people were the most successful with 10 of the 117 recommendations given for top ten albums.

For me, recommendations are also about discovering things I've never heard before. There were 162 new artists that I listened to through recommendations. By quantity, more came from media and machine sources. By percentage, human sources were more successful at introducing me to things I wouldn't have otherwise heard. The best example was Vince Staples' album Big Fish Theory. I had no record of listening to Vince Staples prior, but Big Fish Theory became one of my favorite albums of the year after being recommended by a friend.

This Machine Makes Playlists, Playlists Make Me Listen

After years of believing that I was an album listener, in 2015 I discovered that playlist listening had an equal presence in my listening behavior. We are squarely in the era now of the playlist, thanks in large part to Spotify. I wanted to see if the ease of listening to recommendation playlists somehow gave them an advantage. Those songs were only a click away whereas other recommendations required a little more work.

134 songs were listened to the same day they were recommended. About half of those were from playlists. In looking at the recommendations I listened to versus those that went unheard, there was no noticeable discrimination between types of sources. It seems as if playlists didn't have too much of a built in advantage after all.

Product vs Magic

Many tout the machine learning voodoo at the core of the Spotify recommendation algorithm. The product rules appear to be just as important. They take the magic and make it useful. I was able to to infer a few product rules from analyzing the Release Radar playlist:

Post to the playlist at midnight, in time for the next day's listening.

Keep the song on the playlist for up to 4 weeks if it hasn't been listened to.

Favor artists that I have listened to before.

Use remixes and Spotify live recordings when new music runs thin.

Try all types of songs to keep the playlist fresh and exciting.

The Missing Piece

Algorithmic recommendations in Spotify are easy to get to and pretty much in line with my current tastes. As I looked deeper into the data, I saw that they didn't do much to get me out of my comfort zone. I realize that if the playlists were full of artists I didn't know or didn't normally listen to, I would probably ignore them. So it takes more than just exposure to drive discovery.

When people would recommend music, they had a chance to say why they thought I would like it. They could qualify the recommendation, which is something missing from playlists today. Those explanations also induced a type of social pressure. I felt like I had to listen and I had to pay attention so I could talk about the music later.

The Next Seven Years

Music discovery will continue to change. Adaptation is already happening. Historically influential sources of music discovery, like Pitchfork and other music blogs, have adapted to the era of playlists. They now have their own playlists that they update weekly. Evolution is beginning with the integration of Spotify in Instagram Stories. Music podcasts, the saturated music festival landscape, and smart speakers are providing additional avenues for finding new music.

As long as music is a social currency, we will want to find the best new music. If the last seven years are any indicator of how fast things can change, by the middle of next decade music discovery will look a lot different than today.

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I Decoded the Spotify Recommendation Algorithm. Here's What I Found.

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On April 7, 2018 at 12:00 AM, Spotify placed Mythological Beauty by Big Thief on that week's Release Radar playlist. It was the first time I was recommended a song from Capacity, the album that would go on to become my favorite of the year.

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Some are trying to litigate the issue of royalty payments in court

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One side gave birth to headlines that were literally untrue. The other side was accused of engaging in "fake news." All this for a 119-page, footnote-packed ruling by a little-known panel of federal judges? Welcome to the no-holds-barred legal battle currently pitting trade groups for songwriters and music publishers against the major streaming services.

The drama heated up in January 2018, when the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board decided to boost the royalty rate that Spotify, Apple Music, and similar streamers must pay songwriters and publishers. Flash forward to last week, when Spotify, Google, Pandora, and Amazon revealed they were each planning to appeal that ruling. The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) blasted the move, claiming that Spotify and Amazon had chosen to "sue songwriters." Perhaps fueled by this incendiary wording-which a NMPA spokesperson tells Pitchfork is "shorthand for the technical legal process of them appealing"-backlash against the streaming services quickly spread among songwriters and industry figures. This week, Spotify responded to the criticism with a blog post noting the complexity of the situation.

Music publishing companies, meanwhile, maintain that the situation is quite simple: The CRB raised songwriters' pay, and Spotify opposes it. But the legal ruling itself-stuffed with such pithy phrases as, "Several direct licenses between [REDACTED] and music publishers base royalties on a straight, uncapped 70 percentage of TCC, with no 'greater-of' prong"-certainly seems pretty complicated. We put together a non-legalese rundown of what's happening in Big Tech's battle with songwriters and publishers.

Why This Ruling Happened

The CRB is a panel of three federal judges appointed by the Library of Congress. Under U.S. law, these judges meet regularly to set the rates for mechanical royalties, the type paid to songwriters and their publishers when their songs are sold or streamed. In a 2017 legal proceeding, the CRB heard the Nashville Songwriters Association International and the NMPA make a joint case against Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, and Google. Though one judge dissented, the CRB ultimately reached its decision to raise rates, over a five-year period, from 10.5 percent to 15.1 percent- reportedly the biggest single increase the CRB has made since it was created by Congress in the mid-2000s. "In this market, with the evidence before them, the Judges have attempted to establish royalty rates and terms that compensate songwriters and music publishers and offer to licensees appropriate returns and incentives for continued development," Judges Suzanne Barnett and Jesse Feder wrote.

Who's Fighting It

Spotify, Google, Pandora, and Amazon have all signaled their plans to appeal. The first three companies said in a joint statement that the CRB increased royalty rates "in a manner that raises serious procedural and substantive concerns." If left intact, they claimed, the decision would hurt both streaming services and songwriters.

Where Apple Stands

Apple is not taking part in the appeals. As such, the NMPA and other industry figures were quick to praise Apple as pro-artist. That said, if the appeals succeed, Apple could conceivably have its cake and eat it too, enjoying the benefit of lower rates without the ire of coming out in favor of them. Apple's vast phone business and huge cash reserves also mean it's more insulated from higher costs of doing business than Spotify would be.

How Songwriters and Publishers Responded

"Instead of accepting the CRB's decision, which still values songs less than their fair market value, Spotify and Amazon have declared war on the songwriting community by appealing that decision," NMPA head David Israelite said in a statement. "No amount of insincere and hollow public relations gestures such as throwing parties or buying billboards of congratulations or naming songwriters 'geniuses' can hide the fact that these big tech bullies do not respect or value the songwriters who make their businesses possible." Bart Herbison of the NSIA added, "You cannot feed a family when you earn hundreds of dollars for millions of streams."

Individual songwriters also reacted with outrage. "This is WRONG," wrote Amber Coffman, the singer-songwriter and former Dirty Projectors member. Pop hitmaker Justin Tranter wrote that without "songs these tech companies have nothing to stream/sell. Shameful." "Spotify please do what's right and drop your appeal," wrote hip-hop producer and songwriter Frank Dukes.

Why Spotify Says It's Appealing the Decision

Spotify in essence claims that all sides want more money for songwriters-they just disagree on how to get there. "The CRB rate structure is complex and there were significant flaws in how it was set," the company said in its blog post. "A key area of focus in our appeal will be the fact that the CRB's decision makes it very difficult for music services to offer 'bundles' of music and non-music offerings. This will hurt consumers who will lose access to them. These bundles are key to attracting first-time music subscribers so we can keep growing the revenue pie for everyone." (Spotify didn't elaborate on what it meant by bundles, but just today it announced a discounted streaming bundle that offers free Hulu with a Spotify Premium subscription.)

Spotify also must negotiate a separate set of royalty rates with record labels, another consideration implied in its blog post: "The CRB judges set the new publishing rates by assuming that record labels would react by reducing their licensing rates, but their assumption is incorrect."

Why the Appeals Aren't Surprising

"On some level this is expected," the artists' advocacy nonprofit Future of Music Coalition noted. "The CRB process by which rates are decided has an inherently adversarial dynamic. At the same time, many listeners and artists don't know that some services routinely, quietly lobby to pay artists less."

How Streaming Services and Songwriters Could Get Along

The CRB fight comes on the heels of a sweeping new music copyright law, the Music Modernization Act-a rare instance when all sides of the music business found a way to cooperate. Maybe there's a way for Big Tech and shoestring tunesmiths to reconcile their differences in this case, too. "The issue is so complex because both sides are right: songwriters need to be paid more, and streaming services need to increase [profit] margin," writes Mark Mulligan, the managing director of boutique media and technology analysis firm MIDiA Research. His recommendation: Raise streaming prices.

Netflix, Mulligan notes, has always managed to raise its prices to stay ahead of inflation. Spotify hasn't. It can't, and its rivals can't, because they don't have Netflix-like exclusive content-listeners could just flock toward the cheapest streaming service. And yet Spotify, the streaming service with the most paid subscribers in an incredibly competitive space, still has only once turned a quarterly operating profit. The music streaming business hasn't yet found a way to consistently land in the black. Charging more than $10/month for a streaming subscription could certainly help, assuming the rest of the music industry is open to the idea. If listeners actually want songwriters to get paid more, they need to be part of the solution.

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A Guide to the Royalties Battle Between Streaming Services and Songwriters

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One side gave birth to headlines that were literally untrue. The other side was accused of engaging in "fake news." All this for a 119-page, footnote-packed ruling by a little-known panel of federal judges? Welcome to the no-holds-barred legal battle currently pitting trade groups for songwriters and music publishers against the major streaming services.

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The strange relationship between Spotify and the publishers

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The music industry held its collective breath on Tuesday as Spotify, the world's biggest streaming music service, made its debut as a public company.

Once maligned by musicians and record labels, Spotify has helped turn around a brutal collapse of the music industry that started in the early 2000s and has only recently begun to reverse. Streaming music services like Spotify now account for nearly two-thirds of the industry's revenue and almost all of its growth, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But as much as the record labels will be cheering Spotify on at its public debut (the major labels are part owners of the company), they will also be keeping a watchful eye that Spotify doesn't get too far ahead of the pack. The music industry needs Spotify to be successful, but not too successful.

"The music labels hate any single player getting too powerful," said Mark Mulligan, a managing director and music analyst at MIDiA Research. "The way the music labels think, they have a narrow focus, so they're already thinking of Spotify being the dominant player. Now, it's how can they clip its wings."

For consumers, it's a test of whether one of the most successful music companies in history can keep its prices low while holding off competition from tech giants - many of which are testing just how little they can charge people to listen to any song, any time, any place with an internet connection.

The industry won't have to do much to keep Spotify from becoming dominant. The company is projected to have 93 million paying global subscribers by the end of 2018, but Apple Music the appears ready to overtake Spotify in the US this summer, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon and Google also offer music subscription services.

Spotify has also never made a profit, though the company projects to begin making money as long as it continues to add subscribers and improve its margins.

Competition between music services will help the music industry retain power to negotiate as well as give consumers options, said Larry Miller, associate professor and director of the music business program at New York University.

"What the music industry and consumers need is a robust competitive situation with multiple services offering music in different ways that appeal with different kinds of premium content," Miller said.

Warner Music's chief digital officer, Ole Obermann, also said that music services have been offering very similar products - and that they need to figure out a way to cater to particular groups of people.

"Musical taste is such a personal thing that it's imperative for the streaming services to differentiate their offerings and appeal to a wide variety of fans' preferred genres and listening habits," he said.

Spotify has been working on that with a combination of personalized playlists - its Discover Weekly playlist has drawn widespread positive reviews - and curated playlists for particular genres, such as "Rap Caviar" and "¡Viva Latino!"

Spotify has also explored a variety of other offerings meant to increase its revenue and attract and retain subscribers. The company continues to experiment with video and recently began streaming podcasts.

Miller said it's still early for Spotify and streaming music in general. Companies are just starting to explore newer ways to deliver music, including connected home speakers and a place where radio is still dominant - automobiles.

"As exciting and heady as these numbers are - and as eye-popping as the losses are - it's really early days," he said.

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The music industry needs Spotify to be successful - but not too successful

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The music industry held its collective breath on Tuesday as Spotify, the world's biggest streaming music service, made its debut as a public company. Once maligned by musicians and record labels, Spotify has helped turn around a brutal collapse of the music industry that started in the early 2000s and has only recently begun to reverse.

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An interesting counter argument to the common complaints

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I grew up with a fairy-tale notion of what the music industry was about: playing shows, "getting discovered" and gaining entrance into some inner circle that would catapult me to stardom like an American Idol winner or Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star. So like many young artists, I spent my late teens and early 20s playing tiny shows to near-empty rooms in New York City and releasing EPs on a shoestring budget. I didn't acknowledge it at the time, but I can see in hindsight that with every song I uploaded on Soundcloud or played on a small bar stage, I was waiting for someone to notice me and miraculously shift my circumstances.

I got a taste of that fantasy in 2014 when a viral response to my first single, "Strange Enough," got the attention of a few major labels. I had $1,000 in the bank, rent was due, and we were days away from signing with one of them when I got the call. The promise of financial stability. The validation of the work. The permission to join this seemingly elite, exclusive club that separates the professionals from the amateurs evaporated in an instant. I remember the crash as I sat in my living room with a subtle anxiety that could (and would eventually) explode into a full panic attack, as I was told the deal had fallen through at the last minute. In the wake of that devastating blow, I had a stark realization that it was my responsibility to build my career. I could not rely on others to have a vision for me. I needed to put my head down and push forward.

Initially, I was operating with the goal of building the hype of my project enough to warrant signing a solid major-label deal and subsequently handing over the strategic, logistical and financial aspects of my project over to this larger entity to handle while I could focus on writing and creating music. Post-revelation, my entire mentality shifted, and the idea of being an artist morphed into being a creative entrepreneur. I realized no one was going to care about my music and my world as much as I did, and this freedom from others' expectations opened up my perspective of what was possible as an initially self-funding independent artist. I began building up areas of my career, block by block.

Back then, my concerns were primarily financial. Delaying my releases and plans in search of funding felt like giving up, but the idea of funding the next, elevated era felt insurmountable. I collected myself, asked for minimalistic budgets and hustled to create something out of nothing. I spent the next three months working 50-70 hours a week as a server in Times Square. I didn't see sunlight for over two weeks at one point. I saved all of the money needed to fund my next EP and subsequent tour. Two months later, I quit my job as a server, and I have been running a fully sustainable independent artist project for the last four years.

You may or may not know who I am. You may or may not have at some point listened to my music, actively or passively. I own all of my masters and publishing and have maintained full creative control of my project and remain the sole, final decision maker. I have accumulated over 150 million streams, sell out 250- to 650-capacity venues across the United States, have toured Europe, and write and executive produce all of my releases. I and so many like me are exceptions to the notion that it is impossible to build a healthy career in a culture with a 30-second attention span. For some of us who are coming of age at a time when all access is possible, the ability to make a living somewhere between starving artist and international pop/rock/other star has never been more within reach.

Lately, I've read article after article describing how Spotify's profit-mongering, capitalistic business model is making it impossible for artists to make a living, how it doesn't value creators, how it's ruined the art of album listening. I understand the realities we are currently experiencing in the music industry - how customer valuation of music has been on a steady decline since the early 2000s introduced us to mp3s and Napster, how sheer volume of choice has driven listeners to playlists and other passive-listening mechanisms, and how the expectation of instant gratification has shifted people's expectations and consumption habits. Despite these realities, I can offer a slightly different perspective and perhaps some optimism in a "digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests," as Liz Pelly wrote for The Baffler. I believe that we are in a paradigm shift that, if met with creativity and resilience, can and will yield a new generation of artists capable of initially self-funding, growing, sustaining and even flourishing in this new landscape.

When I started out, I did not know how I was going to make money. I was giving music away for free on SoundCloud and to streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. I was paying for the development of the live show, graphic design, artwork, touring and the production of the EPs with no sense of how any of that investment would afford me a living. I was told Spotify didn't pay, so I disregarded my first 20 million streams as an impressive figure with little practical value. Within a month of taking a horrifying leap of quitting the daily Times Square server grind, I had discovered multiple ways to generate income that would allow me to live, reinvest and grow. First, I was offered to play a college show, which covered the costs of my first tour. I set my manager on getting as many college and corporate shows as possible. I began getting syncs for television and commercials, which ranged from minuscule to lucrative, but initially, I was ridiculously excited for anything that would provide income or eyes on the project. I began writing and pitching songs to others, and lending my voice to demos. I was constantly searching for the next step to keep myself afloat. I was diversifying my revenue streams to be able to survive. While everything I did wasn't necessarily artistically satisfying, I was willing to compartmentalize for the greater good of the project.

I was not considering streaming as a path toward revenue. I knew Spotify paid less than pennies per stream, and I was honestly too busy with my head down, running my project, to complain at the perceived lack of monetary support. Much to my surprise, running on an eight-month delay, streaming royalties began trickling in, and the first sum I withdrew from my TuneCore account was the largest amount of money that had ever been in my bank account. Streaming began to be and remains, by far, my largest source of income, contrary to what is popularly said. Streaming revenue has allowed me to take a breath, strategically reinvest to elevate every area of my project, and confidently move forward knowing I have a channel of distribution that has provided me with a wealth of consistent, engaged listeners I get to convert into real fans.

I understand the idealistic argument that musicians should be paid more. If I made a penny per stream, I would be incredibly wealthy, but I haven't built my project on idealism. I recognize the current state of the marketplace and choose to embrace its realities and use them to my advantage. Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming platforms are currently meeting the consumer where they are - in an insanely oversaturated landscape of overwhelming choice. Spotify won't build your career, nor is that its responsibility. It provides a platform for discovery. It will link your listeners to your merchandise and concerts, and it will provide back-end data for you to locate and analyze your followers. Inherently, streaming platforms exist to appease the passive-listening tendencies our culture has created. They operate in a rapid-fire song economy. It is the job of the artist and their team to optimize the conversion from passive listener to active fan through any means possible. Locate and solidify your tribe to build a solid foundation. Find your people, and work for them.

What I have learned in the past four years is that there are no fairy tales, just diligent, consistent work - one foot in front of another. There is no benefit to arguing with the music industry. Those arguments are detracting from time that could be spent innovating and changing the more challenging realities that artists, both independent and signed, face. Making music for a living is the highest form of luxury. I am not guaranteed or owed an income from pursuing a passion project. It is the job of myself and my manager to have a vision for VÉRITÉ and create a value with those who want to enter the world I create. This new music industry has opened a door for everyone to have the opportunity to make and share their vision with the world, and I am anxiously excited to navigate this new landscape.

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Spotify Isn't Killing The Music Industry; It's A Tool For Enterprising Indie Artists

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I grew up with a fairy-tale notion of what the music industry was about: playing shows, "getting discovered" and gaining entrance into some inner circle that would catapult me to stardom like an American Idol winner or Mark Wahlberg in Rock Star.

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Spotify seems to provide freedom but has massive influence as a gate keeper

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CLOSE

A funny thing happened to Spotify late last month. As part of the streaming service's first-ever total artist takeover, visitors to the Browse homepage were greeted with a massive grid of Drake faces, on the cover of nearly every one of the page's playlists. " Grime Shutdown," " Fresh Gospel," " Indie Party," " Ambient Chill," " Bachata" and, hilariously, " Best of British," all categories that could be only tangentially tied to the artist, suddenly became Drake playlists, as part of a massive ad campaign for the rapper's new album, "Scorpion."

Spotify's Drake-wallpapering job - the streaming service's first-ever artist takeover - foreshadowed a record-breaking streaming week for the rapper. Despite the fact that "Scorpion" actually had a lower first-week equivalent sales total than his last full album, 2016's "Views" ( 1.04 million for "Views" compared to 732,000 for "Scorpion"), Drake's new album broke global first-week streaming records, becoming the fastest-ever album to reach one billion streams worldwide.

The album's success steamrolled the criticisms of Spotify that emerged after Friday's all-Drake takeover, with some users seeing it as an editorial overstep, comparable to U2's infamous album-release debacle in 2014 in which Apple placed a copy of the band's "Songs of Innocence" release in users' iTunes libraries without warning or permission. Similarly, middling critical reviews of "Scorpion" - with the common complaint that it 25-song tracklist was bloated and overlong - clearly didn't slow down the album's snowballing streaming numbers. Drake's music hasn't been groundbreaking for a while, but what is groundbreaking about the release of "Scorpion" is the cynicism of the rapper's formula, in which artists sacrifice quality for streamability and streaming services adopt editorial slants to benefit the highest bidders.

Review:: Drake's double album 'Scorpion' is peak Drake - overlong and self-obsessed, yet still fun

With 25 songs on "Scorpion," Drake has doubled down on the release strategy that enabled his poorly reviewed 2016 album "Views" to nevertheless break virtually every streaming record at the time: an extra-long tracklist that includes all of his successful recent singles. Thanks to the Recording Industry Association of America's streaming rules, which recently changed to factor streams into an album's sales figures and gold/platinum certifications, that formula means that "Scorpion" was platinum-eligible before it was even released, and is well on its way to record-breaking numbers.

"Scorpion" is not a very good album, for the same reasons behind its success. The album's 25 songs feel excessive, with neither Side A or Side B coming close to the quality of Drake's golden-age releases "Take Care" (2011) or "Nothing Was the Same" (2013).

Drake's cynical streaming strategy has beckoned plenty of other overstuffed pop and rap albums since the release of the 82-minute "Views," with recent examples including Migos' "Culture II" (105 minutes, 24 songs), Rae Sremmurd's "SR3MM" (101 minutes, 27 songs), DJ Khaled's "Grateful" (87 minutes, 23 songs), Eminem's "Revival" (77 minutes, 19 songs), Lana Del Rey's "Lust for Life" (72 minutes, 16 songs) and, longest of all, Chris Brown's 45-song "Heartbreak on a Full Moon," which was was certified gold in its first 10 days despite its lack of Top 40 singles.

With the exception of albums like Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly" (17 songs) and Solange's "A Seat at the Table" (21 songs), featuring tracklists loosely united around themes that give the lengthy runtimes a purpose, the majority of pop albums with hour-plus runtimes could use editing. Yet, Drake has no incentive to make a quality album, given how much money he's about to make with his 89-minute one. For listeners, if this trend toward overlong releases means subpar music from their favorite artists, well, too bad.

More: USA TODAY's best songs of 2018 (so far)

Of course, it was RIAA's streaming rules that helped encourage artists to expand their new albums to the breaking point. And Spotify's wall-to-wall promotion of "Scorpion" seemed to emphasize the gap between the Drake-level stars, who can drop enough money to rent out the streaming service's homepage, and the smaller fish in the music industry pond, less-established artists who have seen their livelihoods destabilized by streaming's notoriously low payouts.

Found on Spotify's Browse page are the service's most influential playlists, with an appearance on lists such as New Music Friday and RapCaviar capable of boosting a rising artist to stardom, and a slot in Today's Top Hits worth $100,000+ in potential revenue. The symbolism of seeing Drake's face splashed across those top playlists and more on the Browse page, including ones that didn't even feature his music, made an unflattering statement about Spotify's willingness to lend its front-page real estate to an ad campaign, and how democratic success in the streaming age actually is.

In the end, whatever backlash Spotify saw from users made little-to-no difference in the massive "Scorpion" streaming numbers, nor did criticism of the album's middling artistic content. That's good news for Spotify, great news for Drake, and depressing news for music fans, who are left with this conclusion: that Drake engineered his mediocre album around breaking streaming records, Drake paid Spotify to exclusively feature his face on its homepage, Spotify will pay Drake huge royalties, and everyone else will be worse for it.

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Drake's record-breaking 'Scorpion' release shows how broken the music industry is

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CLOSE A funny thing happened to Spotify late last month. As part of the streaming service's first-ever total artist takeover, visitors to the Browse homepage were greeted with a massive grid of Drake faces, on the cover of nearly every one of the page's playlists.

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A good debate on the issues

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The year is 2008. Now You're Gone by Basshunter has spent its fifth week at No 1 and you can't get enough of it. Your options are as follows: head to the shops and buy the single on CD, which doesn't feel very on-demand; buy it as a download, the quality of which is as flimsy as Basshunter's subsequent career; navigate through a labyrinth of occasionally pornographic popups to download it illegally; or sit through Scouting for Girls five times until it comes on the radio.

The year is 2008. Now You're Gone by Basshunter has spent its fifth week at No 1 and you can't get enough of it. Your options are as follows: head to the shops and buy the single on CD, which doesn't feel very on-demand; buy it as a download, the quality of which is as flimsy as Basshunter's subsequent career; navigate through a labyrinth of occasionally pornographic popups to download it illegally; or sit through Scouting for Girls five times until it comes on the radio.

Ten years on, Spotify has erased these costly or frustrating scenarios. You can instantly access not just Now You're Gone, but deep cuts from Basshunter's oeuvre such as From Lawnmower to Music or his oft-overlooked Christmas single Jingle Bells (Bass). And, indeed, the majority of popular music made by anyone ever.

The result is music's most radically democratic era. While adverts between songs jarringly juxtapose the beauty of art with the brutality of capital, it is at least free to listen to them. Thanks to Spotify and YouTube, no one with internet access - 90% of the UK - needs to pay for music, an important and seismic shift from the vinyl, CD and download eras when, for many people, music ownership was a luxury or treat. For £9.99 - the going price of one newly released CD album in 2008 - you can have uninterrupted access for a month.

You can already hear the effects of this democracy on music itself. The global profile of non-Anglophone pop has risen, from K-pop band BTS to Puerto Rican star Daddy Yankee, in part thanks to this levelled playing field; the multicultural hybrid music of stars such as Stefflon Don feels like the natural result of a culture that can access anything, anytime. Critics point out that you don't own the music you pay Spotify for, but effectively rent it, although the "ownership" of digital files was always pretty illusory and underwhelming anyway - and, as anyone who has tried to copy a library of iTunes files from one device to another, a teeth-gnashing faff. As the parallel demise of Blockbuster Video and, er, print media shows, most people value convenience over physicality when it comes to film, news and music. It can also be argued that Spotify's quality is lower than that of a CD, which is true, and the muso in me trembles to think how many people are listening to Spotify on its low, data-preserving quality, which sounds as if the songs have been irradiated. But its 320kbps "high quality" setting will satisfy all but the most sensitive listener.

Spotify speaks to this silent majority of music fans. Audiophiles, object fetishists, anti-capitalists, musicians - these groups noisily protest Spotify, but are marginal compared with the number of ordinary listeners, who never read the liner notes in the first place. For many people, music is just for mood, something to work, exercise or have sex to - situations that Spotify usefully caters to with playlists such as Productive Morning, Extreme Metal Workout and 90s Baby Makers.

It is a badge of pride for musos to say that Spotify's machine-learning algorithms - when you listen to a track and it recommends things you might also like - don't cover their cosmopolitan taste. But there are plenty more people who have relatively narrow taste, for whom - in a world where not everyone has the time or inclination to read up on new music - this kind of recommendation is really cherished. And if you do happen to have catholic taste, or fannish obsession, there are some very deep back catalogues to go down (even, should you so desire, Basshunter's). There are debates to be had over revenue sharing and the acts it chooses to promote, but Spotify's free, total access makes it essentially utopian. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

The case against Spotify

If I compiled the off-record remarks from my interviews over the past decade, the majority would concern Spotify - namely how much artists hate it. "Please don't put that in," they panic after slagging it off. "I really need it to support my new album." And they do: Spotify is a kingmaker.

After the early 2000s doldrums, the recent music industry revenue boom is thanks to the rise in streaming. It is well known that artists don't see much of this. Spotify's royalty rate is notoriously low. The top 10% of artists dominate 99% of streams - as Ed Sheeran getting 16 tracks in the Top 20 after the release of ÷ showed. Still, Spotify's patronage - putting artists in its powerful playlists, which drive streams - is crucial. Musicians can't afford to complain.

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Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, speaking in New York in March 2018. Photograph: Ilya S Savenok/Getty Images for Spotify

At a relatively affordable £9.99 a month for an ad-free subscription, Spotify benefits the consumer more than the artist - superficially. Its exploitative relationship with musicians has trickle-down effects. The most basic is that any artist who can't afford to make music is not going to be making much more of it - or they will have to tour for longer (costing their health and creativity) and find alternative revenue streams to survive. But just as musicians realised they couldn't afford to be sniffy about "selling out", after the puritanical 90s, Spotify undermined that undesirable alternative, too. As critic Liz Pelly writes in an essay for the Baffler, brands don't have to pay to use songs on adverts if they want to piggyback an act's cred - they can put them on branded playlists without asking permission or paying a penny.

Setting aside the issue of money, these playlists have fundamentally changed the listening experience. Spotify prides itself on its personalised recommendations, which work by connecting dots between "data points" assigned to songs (from rap, indie, and so on, to infinite micro-genre permutations) to determine new music you might like. Its model doesn't code for surprise, but perpetuates "lean-back" passivity. There is no context on the platform, merely entreaties to enjoy more of the same: "You like bread? Try toast!"

It limits music discovery and the sound of music itself. Singles are tailored to beat the skip-rate that hinders a song's chances of making it on to a popular playlist: hooks and choruses hit more quickly. Homogenous mid-tempo pop drawing from rap and EDM has become dominant: New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica regularly disparages this sound as "Spotifycore".

The algorithm pushes musicians to create monotonous music in vast quantities for peak chart success: hence this year's tedious 106-minute Migos album, Culture II, and Drake's dominance. Add in Spotify's hugely popular artists with no profile outside the platform, widely assumed to be fake artists commissioned by Spotify to bulk out playlists and save on royalties, and music appears in danger of becoming a kind of grey goo.

Spotify looks like a neutral platform but behaves like a gatekeeper. It faced a backlash this year after censoring R Kelly and XXXTentacion for their alleged acts of violence against women (only to grossly promote XXX after his murder). Why were only black men censored when many white male rockstars have violated women?

'They could destroy the album': how Spotify's playlists have changed music for ever

It continually perpetuates such inequality: a report by Pelly found that despite the "woke optics of playlists like Feminist Friday", women are underrepresented on its most popular playlists. (Meanwhile, Drake benefited from Spotify's first "global artist takeover", his face and music appearing on every editorialised playlist when he released this year's Scorpion.) These function as echo chambers, popularity begetting more support, the antithesis of musical democracy.

Look: I pay my £9.99 a month. I use Spotify to make playlists for friends' weddings and to compile 80s curios I discover on TOTP reruns. The genie isn't going back in the bottle. But we can be responsible listeners (I buy albums I listen to more than five times) and hold Spotify to account because the people it is meant to benefit can't. Any platform that intimidates the creators that underwrite its business is truly dystopian. Laura Snapes
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The year is 2008. Now You're Gone by Basshunter has spent its fifth week at No 1 and you can't get enough of it.

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Learn how they create those personalized playlists

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This morning, just like every Monday morning, 75 million Spotify users received a great new mixtape: 30 songs that feel like a gift from a music-loving friend, who might once have made a cassette tape with your name scrawled across the front.

But these playlists, from Spotify's Discover Weekly service, were cooked up by an algorithm.

Automated music recommendations are hardly new, but Spotify seems to have identified the ingredients of a personalized playlist that feel fresh and familiar at the same time. That's potentially a big advantage over competitors like Pandora, Google, and Apple, which largely have the same bottomless catalog of music but take very different approaches to picking the best songs for each user.

Users seem to love Discover Weekly. Since the service quietly launched in June, songs from its playlists have been streamed 1.7 billion times, according to the company. When a technical hiccup delayed the release of new tracks one Monday in September, many were distraught.

"We now have more technology than ever before to ensure that if you're the smallest, strangest musician in the world, doing something that only 20 people in the world will dig, we can now find those 20 people and connect the dots between the artist and listeners," Matthew Ogle, who oversees the service at Spotify, told me recently. "Discovery Weekly is just a really compelling new way to do that at a scale that's never been done before."

The quality of Discover Weekly's picks is so consistently good, it's a bit uncanny. After I received several excellent playlists in a row, I couldn't stop thinking about how Spotify had figured me out, along with 75 million other people. Answering that question led me down the rabbit hole of how the system works in the first place-and how an algorithm can delve into the deeply subjective realm of music to predict the songs that will make my pulse race and my head nod.

If you're a Spotify user, you can see what songs Spotify has picked for you this week by logging in here -when you come back to this page, your playlist will appear below. (If you don't have Spotify, or haven't logged in, you'll see my most recent playlist.)

Understanding how the process works will give you a peek into how music fans will be discovering new music in the future, long after the idea of an actual mixtape has faded into the past. (I've also compiled a list of pro tips for existing Discover Weekly users, which you can find at the end.)

It's based on other people's playlists...

The main ingredient in Discover Weekly, it turns out, is other people. Spotify begins by looking at the 2 billion or so playlists created by its users-each one a reflection of some music fan's tastes and sensibilities. Those human selections and groupings of songs form the core of Discover Weekly's recommendations.

"Playlists are the common currency on Spotify. More users knew how to use them and create them than any other feature," said Ogle, who previously founded This Is My Jam, a startup that asked users to pick one favorite song at a time. It shut down earlier this year.

Spotify considers everything from professionally curated playlists like RapCaviar to your cousin Joe's summer barbecue jams. It gives extra weight to the company's own playlists and those with more followers. Then it attempts to fill in the blanks between your listening habits and those with similar tastes. In the simplest terms, if Spotify notices that two of your favorite songs tend to appear on playlists along with a third song you haven't heard before, it will suggest the new song to you.

...and your own taste profile

But the recipe for your Discover Weekly playlist is a lot more complicated than that. Spotify also creates a profile of each user's individualized taste in music, grouped into clusters of artists and micro-genres-not just "rock" and "rap" but fine-grained distinctions like "synthpop" and "southern soul." These are derived using technology from Echo Nest, a music analytics firm that Spotify acquired in 2014, which learns about emerging genres by having machines read music sites and analyze how various artists are described.

I asked Spotify to show me what my own taste profile looks like. I have no idea what "chamber pop" or some of the other genres might be, by the way, but according to my Spotify listening data, I'm a big fan.

Algorithms bring it all together

The connection between data from 2 billion playlists and your personal taste profile is made by Spotify's algorithms. This is the secret sauce, and it gets complicated quickly.

Spotify engineers shared many of the technical details in a presentation earlier this year. Their approaches include collaborative filtering, most commonly seen in Amazon's "customers who bought this item also bought..." feature, and natural language processing, which is how Echo Nest understands music blogs and the titles of playlists. The company uses the open-source software Kafka to manage the data in real-time.

But you don't need to understand any of that. This is how Ogle described the process to me in layman's terms:

"On one side, we've built a model of all the music we know about, that is powered by all the curatorial actions of people on Spotify adding to playlists. On the other side, we have our impression of what your music taste is. Every Monday morning, we take these two things, do a little magic filtering, and try to find things that other users have been playlisting around the music you've been jamming on, but that we think are either brand new to you or relatively new."

Finding music to jam on

Spotify is also using deep learning-a technique for recognizing patterns in enormous amounts of data, with powerful computers that are "trained" by humans-to improve its Discover Weekly picks. That builds on work by Sander Dieleman, once a Spotify intern and now a research scientist for Google's AI subsidiary, DeepMind.

"We've been experimenting with different approaches with deep learning and neural nets, and it is one of the most important features for what generates Discover Weekly," said Edward Newett, the lead engineer for Discover Weekly.

On a recent Monday, this is what Spotify thought I might-in a phrase Spotify employees are especially fond if-be likely to jam on.

You'll notice that there's an artist named Susie Tallman way out there on an island by herself in the lower right. She sings children's songs, and I have a toddler who likes to hear "Wheels on the Bus" over and over again. The system is smart enough to know that it should exclude those songs because Tallman is an outlier.

Personalization can be a little strange

The results, as many Spotify Discover users can attest, are a little unearthly. "How the hell did they come up with that?" one friend exclaimed to me after a deep cut from the '90s alt-rock band Dinosaur Jr. landed on his playlist.

"One of my favorite things is how weird Discover Weekly is," Ogle said. "We can build this huge system, and it's taking millions of preferences and crunching them, and instead of music beige coming out, it's throwing out a lot of left-field stuff."

My playlists vary from week to week, presumably reflecting my shifting musical preferences. On a typical Discover Weekly playlist with 30 songs, I'll find about 15 songs I love, 10 that are meh, four that I could do without, and one that I become totally obsessed with.

One day recently in my favorite cafe, the soundtrack coming over the speakers sounded awfully familiar. Many of the tracks were on the mixtape that Spotify's algorithms had made just for me . But these were coming from someone else's Discover Weekly playlist: Homero, who works as a barista when he's not playing in his own band, had been given a nearly identical mixtape that week.

"You thought you were alone in the universe until you realize there's a guy just like you, musically at least."

How did Homero and I get the same songs? Did two billion playlists filtered through a complex algorithm really churn out identical results for the two of us? Are Spotify's human editors putting their finger on the scale and promoting certain songs?

"Some people have said, 'Oh, all three of us had this track on our Discover Weekly, did someone put it there?'" Ogle told me. "And the answer is yes, someone put it there: other Spotify users who were playlisting, which means that something is happening in music culture, in the world."

He said Spotify never intentionally seeds the playlists with particular songs, despite repeated requests from artists and their labels.

"The answer to the labels is, have your artists release some awesome music, and get genuine music fans to share it, and it will end up in Discover Weekly," Ogle said. "There are a lot of ways to say, hey, here's some music you should check out on Spotify; we think DW should remain firewalled from that sort of thing."

Taking a trip into someone else's head

It gets even weirder when you listen to someone else's Discover Weekly playlist, as I encountered that day in the cafe, or in the weeks since when I have cajoled other Spotify users into sharing their playlists with me. It feels a bit like taking a momentary trip-both the geographic and psychedelic kind-into someone else's head. There's a strange feeling of unease that comes with listening to a mix that is optimized for someone else's subjective tastes and unconscious preferences.

"When I was young it was a very independent thing, you go home, throw on your CD collection, and that helped identify who you were: I am this type of music," Newett, the engineer, told me. "But now you may realize, you thought you were alone in the universe until you realize there's a guy just like you, musically at least."

The moment that Ogle realized that Discover Weekly was going to work was during a very early internal beta, when his team was testing on the recommendation engine with themselves as guinea pigs.

"Whatever just served this song needs to be out in the world."

"It was the first or second playlist Ed made for me, and the first track was by Jan Hammer, he's famous for writing the Miami Vice theme," he says. The song was "Don't You Know," from an album first released in 1977.

"It's hilariously smooth, I realized that all of Air was basically them ripping off this one song," Ogle says. "It starts off with this poppy thing, then the strings...when the vocals came in, I thought, holy shit, we have to ship this feature. Something snapped, and I thought whatever just served this song needs to be out in the world."

Pro tips for using Discover Weekly

As good as Spotify's picks can be, they're not perfect-my playlists usually contain one or two songs that I absolutely love (" Tiger Phone Card" by Dengue Fever, " Lady You Shot Me" by Har Mar Superstar), a half-dozen that I like a lot (" 1960 What?" by Gregory Porter), and a few stinkers (why do I keep getting so many Neil Diamond songs?).

I asked asked Ogle and Newett how users can fine-tune their results and get the most out of Discovery Weekly. Their suggestions, along with a few tips from other heavy Spotify users, range from the very simple to the very nerdy:

Add songs you like to a playlist or your Spotify library. "If you save a song to a playlist or your library and then start jamming on it on a regular basis, it will really influence what we understand about you," Ogle said.

Skip the songs you don't like. If users fast-forward within the first 30 seconds of a song, the Discover Weekly algorithm interprets that as a "thumbs-down" for that particular song and artist.

Go down the rabbit hole on new artists and genres. "If we recommend you something and you click through to the artist and start exploring their discography, it will pick up on that as well," Ogle said. "The more exploration and streams you do outside DW, the more likely you are to influence what we pick for you."

Be patient. The algorithm is designed to ignore sharp, temporary spikes in new listening activity because many people share their Spotify logins, so any new listening activity may not result in an immediate change to your playlist. "We're safeguarding you from a friend using your account for a while," says Newett.

Use "private mode" if you don't want Spotify to pay attention. "Maybe your girlfriend is really into death metal," says Newett. "We just ignore those [private mode] track plays." Spotify also ignores the songs you listen to within Discovery Weekly. "We've seen a lot of anxiety, like, if I only listen to Discovery Weekly, will the snake eat its own tail?" says Newett.

Some genres are mostly filtered out. Spotify does make some editorial decisions about what users are likely to want, so parents with young kids won't get a million songs from The Wiggles, Christmas songs will mostly disappear after Dec. 25, and people who listen to rain forest soundtracks while they sleep don't have their playlists swamped with "Afternoon Thunderstorms Vol. 2." "For the most part we try to approach those as guardrails, rather than absolute, because people reserve the right to be human, and we try to respect that," Ogle said.

Experiment with musical telepathy. Perhaps the best tip for getting more out of Spotify's recommendations is to listen to other people's Discovery Weekly playlists. Got a friend with great taste? Ask her to share a link to her playlist. They are private by default but can be shared by the user.

Save your weekly playlists with IFTTT. One downside to Discover Weekly is that the playlist is wiped clean every Monday. You could save the songs into another playlist manually, or you can use the free IFTTT service to automatically save your weekly list into a separate archive playlist.

Use Spotify's "Radio" feature. If you want to hear some new sounds and absolutely can't wait until Monday, right-click on Discovery Weekly and select "Start Playlist Radio." The service will do its best to serve up an infinite list of songs in a similar vein to your weekly playlist.
Playlist integration and graphics by Nikhil Sonnad.

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The magic that makes Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists so damn good

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This morning, just like every Monday morning, 75 million Spotify users received a great new mixtape: 30 songs that feel like a gift from a music-loving friend, who might once have made a cassette tape with your name scrawled across the front. But these playlists, from Spotify's Discover Weekly service, were cooked up by an algorithm.

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Artists are now unwittingly "selling out" helping sponsor corporations without a say

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Spotify is now offering brands the option to sponsor Discover Weekly, its signature customized playlist that updates every Monday for each user. It is supposedly one of the most popular features among both the platform's 87 million paid subscribers and 109 million ad-supported free users.

The new ad type, as reported by TechCrunch, gives brands the ability to "own the personalized listening experience" and gives them access to a particularly engaged audience, as Discover Weekly listeners spend twice as much time on Spotify compared to users who don't. Microsoft will be the first brand to partake, with an artificial intelligence-related campaign called "Empowering Us All" - mostly made up of ad breaks that discuss the impact of AI on education, healthcare, and philanthropy.

But what does it mean for Spotify to sell Discover Weekly? It feels, pretty simply, like yet another example of a tech company creating a highly personalized product in seemingly warm partnership with its users, then realizing that it can trade on this goodwill to make money. Companies have to make money, as the line goes, but do we need to so intimately assist them?

The way Discover Weekly works makes it dependent on personal information, which users have fed it for years

Discover Weekly is a little over three years old, and was hailed upon its debut as "cracking human curation at internet scale." It's a mix of human and algorithm, created after the company acquired the music-specific data and AI startup the Echo Nest in 2014. Spotify explained the process to The Verge in September 2015:

Spotify has built a taste profile for each user based on what they listen to. It assigns an affinity score to artists, which is the algorithm's best guess of how central they are to your taste. It also looks at which genres you play the most to decide where you would be willing to explore new music.

The algorithms behind Discover Weekly finds users who have built playlists featuring the songs and artists you love. It then goes through songs that a number of your kindred spirits have added to playlists but you haven't heard, knowing there is a good chance you might like them, too. Finally, it uses your taste profile to filter those findings by your areas of affinity and exploration.

Spotify's major project of the past several years has been culling the data created by its hundreds of millions of users and improving the recommendations of its signature playlists. In a sense, each person's individual taste is another data layer, one that tells Spotify a little bit about what that particular user wants, and quite a bit more about what a user who is slightly different than them might want in the future.

Spotify's major project of the past several years has been culling the data created by its hundreds of millions of users

A representative for Spotify tells Vox that the user experience of Discover Weekly will not change - e.g., Nike can't buy the playlist for the week and serve everyone a Frank Ocean song - and reiterates, "Discover Weekly is, and will remain, a powerful means of artists winning new fans. Ten billion times a month, listeners across both Spotify and Spotify Premium stream a new artist they had never heard before. That means ten billion discoveries every month; ten billion chances for artists to win a new fan."

Buying Discover Weekly means, merely, a logo within the playlist, an ad in every ad spot for free-tier users, branding on the homepage, and some other odds and ends pertaining to the playlist's promotion on Spotify landing pages and mobile layouts. It's more or less the same as any other branded playlist on Spotify - the platform has long offered companies the option of "exclusively sponsoring Spotify's top real estate, our owned [and] operated playlists."

Spotify is openly trading on your trust, and your "boosted happiness" during the discovery experience

There is something just a little bit invasive about allowing brands to sponsor the super-personalized playlists that Spotify users have - both carefully and without thinking at all - put years of their personal history into. The difference between this and a typical sponsored playlist, maybe, is best explained by a page of Spotify's advertiser informational site. It's called " Trust Issues," and outlines the value of buying ads against human emotions like trust and joy, both of which come directly from discovery.

"It turns out that the best way to show someone you understand them, is to give them something they want that is unique to them," the corporate copy explains. "People are okay with sharing their personal data, according to research by the Harvard Business Review, as long as they get a personalized experience that is useful to them."

"Our in-app environment is a place of safe discovery and we are willing to extend that premium eco-system with brands that share our values"

The page also cites Spotify's own research to prove that "discovering new music actually makes [people] feel good." Seventy-one percent of surveyed users said discovery improves their mood, 72 percent said it boosts happiness, 66 percent said it boosts their energy levels, and 76 percent said it helps them learn something.

"The act of discovering music has particular emotional resonance," Spotify writes. And, because of this, 92 percent of surveyed millennials told Spotify that they trust it - both to provide a good listening experience and to protect their personal information.

This relates to advertisers in that it can be sold:

In this era of fake news and data breaches, consumers are no longer so easily trusting. If companies or brands want trust, they have to earn it. They can earn it by showing customers they really get them. Spotify has won the trust of 191 million fans by offering music customized to give them joy and delight. Our in-app environment is a place of safe discovery and we are willing to extend that premium eco-system with brands that share our values. Join us in the circle of trust.

Brand playlists are styled as editorial, but are actually ads. This isn't an innocent conflation.

Liz Pelly, writing about the broader phenomenon of branded playlists for the Baffler in 2017, commented on the way that artists were being affected by that earlier iteration of "corporate personhood, where paid-for brand accounts can create their own profiles and make playlists in the manner of the platform's regular users."

In the pre-streaming era, Pelly pointed out, companies who wanted to use a piece of music to promote their brand would be compelled to approach artists with negotiable licensing deals, money, and most importantly, a choice. In the Spotify arrangement, artists may not even know their music is being used this way, and the company's brand playlist guidelines only make a tepid suggestion that brands try to steer clear of picks who might stir up trouble. ("If you have a reason to believe a specific artist may have a problem with your brand, it's probably smart to stay away from that artist.")

"We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid," Pelly writes. "Brand playlists are advertisements, even if Spotify strives to imbue them with so-called editorial integrity. Such uncompensated advertorial playlists are harmful in that they offer artists no option to opt-out, but also because they undercut what can sometimes be a valuable source of revenue for artists."

Interestingly, the Spotify representative who answered my questions about how Discover Weekly sponsorships will work added, without a prompt of any kind, "Spotify's ad-supported tier is much better for artists and labels than terrestrial radio in many markets. In the US, on the radio, only songwriters get royalties. Artists don't get paid. Labels don't get paid. And no radio station has the tens of millions of listeners that Spotify has."

This is a too-elegant way of describing the manner in which streaming royalties are divvied up among musicians who put their music on Spotify, and (somewhat bizarrely) argues that Spotify has replaced radio stations and not, say, physical media. But more important than what it elides is what it hints at.

The stakes are high for Spotify - it needs to figure out a way to sell more ads against people who want to stream everything for free

Spotify is valued around $30 billion, yet its IPO was pushed back time and again. It ultimately debuted on the stock exchange in April 2018 with a direct listing - in large part because its financials still don't make a ton of sense to Wall Street. That's fine, for now, but the company obviously wants to get a place of stability and wide profit margins eventually.

For the past several years, Spotify's attention has been focused on converting its ad-supported users to paid subscribers - both because about 90 percent of its revenue came from subscriptions and because it improved its public image in a music industry rightfully suspicious of the streaming profit-share model.

But the company spent 2018 pivoting away from this strategy and prioritizing more alluring options for advertisers. Possibly because, as TechCrunch points out, the discounted student and family plans Spotify had been offering in an attempt to convert free accounts to paid ones were actually forcing it to take a hit on its average revenue per user (down 6 percent year over year, as of last quarter).

Spotify in 2019 will be more interested in ad money than in getting more paid subscribers

Somewhere along the line, ad money started to look like a better bet, and all the better for advertisers if Spotify can offer brands the cultural clout of a Cardi B song without the rightfully astronomical price tag of Cardi B.

So, in April, Spotify redesigned the user interface for free users and offered them new features that made their accounts more similar to the paid ones. Some of those features look, now, like obvious stage-setting for expanding the role of branded playlists - such as removing restrictions that meant free users could listen to promoted playlists only in shuffle mode and adding full-page art for promoted playlists.

Now, a representative tells Vox that, after "ensuring success" of branded Discover Weekly, Spotify will consider offering up its other proprietary personalized playlists, including Release Radar and Daily Mix. The company also recently patented a "system for integrating advertisements into music based on mood." Soon, the marketing of our emotions and trust will all be seamless.

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Spotify's most personalized playlist is now for sale to brands

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Spotify is now offering brands the option to sponsor Discover Weekly, its signature customized playlist that updates every Monday for each user. It is supposedly one of the most popular features among both the platform's 87 million paid subscribers and 109 million ad-supported free users.