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The Hit Charade: On Algorithms and Creativity

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MIT Technology Review:

Just as computers cannot yet create powerful and imaginative art or prose, they cannot truly appreciate music. And arranging a poignant or compelling music playlist takes a type of insight they don’t have—the ability to find similarities in musical elements and to get the emotional resonance and cultural context of songs. For all the progress being made in artificial intelligence, machines are still hopelessly unimaginative and predictable. This is why Apple has hired hundreds of people to serve as DJs and playlist makers, in addition to the algorithmic recommendations it still offers.



More recently, algorithms have begun producing playlists that can feel a lot more nuanced and tailor-made. The world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, which has more than 75 million users, is pushing the state of the art, using vast amounts of data to make personalized recommendations.



Spotify’s deep-learning system still has to be trained using millions of example songs, and it would be perplexed by a bold new style of music. What’s more, such algorithms cannot arrange songs in a creative way. Nor can they distinguish between a truly original piece and yet another me-too imitation of a popular sound. (Spotify’s Chris) Johnson acknowledges this limitation, and he says human expertise will remain a key part of Spotify’s algorithms for the foreseeable future.


Though some consider human curation to be elitist, I feel music fans and listeners welcome and crave it. Who doesn’t enjoy a trusted source giving suggestions of cool new music to discover? It’s been the secret of success for certain radio shows, record store clerks, magazine music reviewers, and music blogs. The whole mixtape phenomenon is built on it. My SoundCloud stream is built on it. Basically, if you’re into discovery, you’re into the trusted recommendation … or, in modern industry-speak, “curation”.

Despite my love of human recommendations, I am genuinely curious about Spotify’s algorithmic ‘Discovery’ playlist and want to dig more into it. (There are some technical issues I have with Spotify’s OS X app that keep me from using it more which I won’t go into here.) The team at Spotify seem very confident in what the technology is able to do, and anything that encourages listeners to check out new music is all right by me. But I can’t help but wonder if a human / tastemaker guided algorithm – a mixture of computer recommendation and ‘music fan’ supervision – might be the way to go. From this article, it sounds like this is where we are headed.

An area that I find frustratingly overlooked is the realm of the Pandora-like ‘sounds like’ radio stations. These don’t work for me, not on any of the services, and this ‘radio’ would be my most accessed feature if they did. Pandora drove me crazy because (as an example) I’d program a Joy Division station, and then would hear “Love Will Tear Us Apart” every single time I chose it, but didn’t necessarily want to give it a ‘thumbs down’ and banish the song from its repertoire. I might want to hear it now and then … but not every single time. Of course, I’m not picking solely on Pandora here as none of the services get this radio feature right. If I create a ‘station’ based off Brian Eno’s “Lizard Point” – a beatless, droning composition opening his album Ambient 4: On Land – I’m sure all the services will give me large doses of ’70s art rock instead of the ambient music I’m looking for.

Apple Radio – the one pre-dating Apple Music – tried to address this to a degree with a slider allowing the user to choose if he/she wanted to hear more of the ‘hits’ or, with the slider all the way to the right, to choose an adventurous discovery-oriented path. It wasn’t perfect, but the concept was solid and I would have loved for Apple to fine tune it rather than ditching it altogether in Apple Music at present. Regardless, we’re a long way from computers getting it right (and potentially achieving music snob A.I.) but it’s a fascinating study to see the aims and attempts to move us closer. And, once again, all this effort going into helping listeners find new independent artists is a terrific thing.

The Price Ceiling For Music

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Hypebot:

Most streaming services keep their price fairly low—Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal have all set the bar at $9.99 per month—which, considering what comes with that subscription fee, isn’t actually too bad. That may be the case, but for many people, it’s still more than they want to pay. The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) reports that at the height of the music business in 1999, the average music-buying person in the world spent around $64 on recorded music per year. Re/code points out that the $64 figure is only taking into account those who actually bought music. When adding in the millions of adults who never contributed a dime to the industry, that figure goes down to a surprising $28 per person.



That $64 figure was at a time when people had to spend a premium to get the music they wanted. There was no iTunes, and even singles could cost several dollars. If a person was a fan of a certain artist, they were much more likely to rush out and purchase the album before the creation of digital downloads and online piracy. Now that we’ve gone to the end of the spectrum where songs were $0.99 and nobody needed to purchase an album, it’s tough to convince many to fork over $120 a year—twice what they were paying just a decade and a half ago.


I feel a stumbling block is the burden of presenting streaming services in the context of traditional formats (singles, albums, featured artists). The author above notes that $10 “isn’t actually too bad” considering what one gets, and I am sure he’s referring to the convenience, the wealth of choices, and (depending on the service he’s using), a ubiquitous access to the music. These points should be stressed so much more by the services rather than available artists and albums … and we’re starting to get there. Though Netflix is now pitching original content, initially there weren’t specific examples in their offering that were pushed to get folks on board. What sold it was the overall concept, its library in total that was assumed to be massive, and the convenience of loading up a new movie at any time. The value for the service was perceived by many as appropriate to its fee. Of course, movies are very different from music (with movies seen as more valuable), and pricing them equally – or not, as Netflix right now is $7.99 a month – may be problematic.


Linked in the piece quoted above is this interesting 2014 article from Re/Code:

So, the data tells us that consumers are willing to spend somewhere around $45–$65 per year on music, and that the larger a service gets, the lower in that range the number becomes. And these numbers have remained consistent regardless of music format, from CD to download.



Curiously, the on-demand subscription music services are all priced the same at more than twice consumer spending on music. They largely land at $120 per year. This is because the three major record labels, as part of their music licenses, have mandated a minimum price these services must charge. While it may seem strange that suppliers can dictate to retailers the price they must charge end users for their service, this is common practice in digital music. The services are not able to charge a price they believe will result in maximum adoption by consumers.



My experience with the major labels when I was CEO of eMusic was that they largely did not believe that music was an elastic good. They were unwilling to lower unit economics, especially for hit music, to see if more people would buy. Our experience at eMusic taught us that music is, in fact, elastic, and that lower prices lead to increased sales. If the major labels want to see the recorded music business grow again, I believe the price of music must fall.


Getting streaming to the point where a lot more people are hooked, and artists exploit this using their own independent revenue streams, is sounding like the place to be.

Spotify Data Reveals Boom In Sleep And Relaxation Albums

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The Guardian:

Spotify’s fastest-growing music category is the newly named “environmental/sleep/relaxative” – in the last week alone, 282 albums from the category were added to the music streaming service’s catalogue, many times more than other genres including hard rock, latin pop and dancehall.



11.6% of all new albums on Spotify that week fell into its sleep and relaxation category, with collections including White Noise for Baby Sleep, Zen Spa, Beach Sleep Sounds and Spiritual Guitar Chillout.



Earlier in 2015, Spotify said that its users had created more than 2.8m sleep-themed playlists of their own, with Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud the most popular track among those collections.


Not surprising. I have recommended that clients aiming to boost their streaming income look into creating some ‘chill out’ tracks or albums. Streaming is especially suited for mellower moods, be it as a background for work, studying, relaxing … and, of course, sleeping. These are all activities where music is often used in the background, and playlists are repeated if found to be effective (sometimes in the same evening, in the case of a sleep soundtrack). Admittedly, it’s not necessarily exciting to create music to be used as a drowsy backdrop (unless you’re Eno, of course) but it might end up a pleasurable artistic detour that capitalizes on one of streaming’s inherent advantages.

Mixcloud’s Place In Digital Music’s Brave New World

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Cuepoint interviewed Mixcloud co-founder Nico Perez:

The thing that would set a podcast apart [from Mixcloud] is that you would actually download it to your phone. To do that legally is incredibly difficult, as you have to obtain clearances for all of the songs and clearances to download. That is something that we’ve steered away from, conducting the streaming model. Because of that, we got the licenses needed for streaming and we pay royalties to the artists listened to in the stream.



We’re slightly different in that we are a radio service and you can’t come to Mixcloud and select a song that you want to listen to and hit play, unlike the Spotifys and Soundclouds of the world. That said, a subscription service that would make sense could be of interest to us, it’s just question of working out the economics and make sure that they work for everybody. Something not too expensive, not the ten dollars you would pay per month for Spotify, because at the end of the day you’re not going to have access to 30 million songs on demand. It’s a different sort of service.


Mixcloud is party to its own legal maneuvering in providing DJ mix content, as observant US-based users may have noticed. In this country, track lists are not available until the mix has been played in full (though skipping ahead sometimes makes them visible), and mixes containing the same artist more than four times are blocked. There’s also the inability to scrub backward in a mix, and of course the ‘no download’ thing (though, of course, that applies globally). These are all restrictions in place due to royalty and licensing laws here – as regulated by SoundExchange – in an attempt to keep Mixcloud free of major label meddling and out of SoundCloud’s present hot water. I feel the Mixcloud-as-radio-station strategy is a good one, and reportedly the service aims to strengthen the radio association by adding live ‘broadcasts’. Some may balk at these restrictions, but users need to realize that total freedom of content access comes at a cost to the services (especially with regards to DJ mixes) and isn’t sustainable. Mixcloud has its flaws, but they are thinking ahead and implementing these restrictions in ways that aren’t sudden and antagonistic to its users. They’ve also worked out a way to pay out some royalty to rightsholders, keeping them at bay (for now). SoundCloud should take note.

The Wild West Days Of The Web Are Over

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The Verge:

(Josh Greenberg) had violated the tenets of intellectual property law, of course, but there was precedent for that. Nullsoft’s Justin Frankel had coded Winamp without licensing the underlying mp3 technology; YouTube’s Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had looked the other way as users had uploaded thousands of infringing videos; Napster’s Shawn Fanning had acted as if the entire concept of copyright was obsolete. Greenberg resembled them. He was a scion of middle-class America; he’d attended a state school; he was young, and male, and comfortable with the internet’s culture of appropriation. The template was to move fast and to break things, and to let the lawyers figure out the repercussions once you’d earned your millions.



If Grooveshark had debuted in 2003, or maybe even 2005, he might have gotten away with it. Like a claim-jumper in the 19th century, Grooveshark could perhaps have emerged from the era of digital lawlessness with enough leverage to force the music companies to the negotiating table, and borrowed enough expertise from the venture capitalists to become a functional business. With a little luck, the company might have outmaneuvered Spotify, and Greenberg would have been a business icon.


I had a link to this month-old article hidden in one of my recent posts, but I think it deserves its own place as it’s well worth a read. The author shapes his piece as more of a commentary on changes in the Internet / entrepreneur industry – he believes the days of the budding teenage tech billionaire have passsed – but, of course, it’s all intertwined with developments in the music industry. The required move over the past decade from ‘digital lawlessness’ to legitimacy enlightens a bit about SoundCloud’s recent troubles, as well as how smart Spotify has been from the outset. The article also reminds me how it’s a deep shame that we won’t get to see what Josh Greenberg will come up with next as there was some seriously brilliant idea-making behind Grooveshark.

The Discovery Dead End

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Cuepoint:

“Discovery” has certainly been the buzzword for the last few years, but the problem is that we still haven’t figured out the next steps after someone hears a song. I listen to music all day long but not much of it sticks with me, just because I get no direction from streaming platforms. I have to manually search for artists I like when I’m listening at home, and I have to actually remember to go back through a playlist and search for an artist if I hear something I like when I’m out. And I’m someone who cares about music more than most people.



There are a couple of possible remedies for this. One, streaming services could offer more links out to follow artists on other platforms. Spotify and Apple Music both have their own internal platforms, so I certainly understand why they want to keep people in the services — the problem is that both these internal platforms kinda stink.



In the end, just being “discovered” on a playlist doesn’t mean much to an artist. If services truly want to help artists monetize and build careers, the least they can do is direct listeners to other opportunities to follow, engage with, and support the artist. But artists also have a role to play, by making sure that their content is worth engaging with.


This harks back to an earlier post regarding the social Internet unwisely evolving into a series of closed ecosystems. The author’s points are valid, and keeping an artist’s fans within a closed network (and one that’s not that great, i.e. Apple’s ‘Connect’) doesn’t cultivate a positive experience for the user. An excited fan wants access to it all – the band’s social networks, websites, maybe even a Bandcamp link for purchasing the music (of course, I understand why Apple may not consider that last one). This not only helps the artists but I feel a richer, well-rounded fan experience will make users more enthusiastic about the streaming service they are using. This more than makes up for the trade-off of potentially sending users to an external site … they’ll certainly come back knowing that their requirements as music fanatics will be catered to.

How ‘Playola’ Is Infiltrating Streaming Services

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Billboard:

Like social media, playlists are viral in nature: A track’s streams will spike after it’s added to a popular playlist; listeners will add the song to their playlists; their friends will do the same. Getting a song onto a hot playlist almost ensures awareness will spread from one social network to another.

Multiple insiders allege that the major music groups have paid influential curators to populate their playlists with their clients’ music. Some third-party users are known to request money to include songs on their playlists. Pay for play “is definitely ­happening,” claims a major-label marketing executive, one of several who say that popular playlists can and have been bought.

According to a source, the price can range from $2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists. And these practices are not illegal, although it would be difficult to find an official policy in the fine print.

In a statement to Billboard, Spotify head of communications Jonathan Prince says its new terms of service, hitting the United States next week, prohibit selling accounts and playlists or “accepting any ­compensation, financial or otherwise, to influence … the content included on an account or playlist.” Yet policing, let alone enforcing, these terms could be difficult.


Everything old is new again, eh? But then how is aggressively promoting an artist to a playlist different than, say, promoting that artist – through bribery or otherwise – to a music blog? Playlists are sort of becoming ‘the new music blogs’ to streaming fans, so it makes sense. A blog (or a radio station in the ‘old days’) that relies on promoted or paid content gets noticeably watered down in its taste-making reputation, but that probably doesn’t matter to the mainstream targets here. Pay-for-play stinks, but as it is nearly-impossible to enforce (though not difficult to spot by savvy music fans) it’s probably going to be a permanent thorn in the side for these services. When it used to affect your local radio station you didn’t really have elsewhere to go … at least with playlists and blogs there are many other alternatives out there to turn to when the ones you are following start suspiciously including the same lackluster songs at the same time.

The Argument For Streaming Services To Adopt ‘Subscriber Share’

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Cuepoint:

If you subscribe to a subscription music service such as Spotify or Apple Music you probably pay $10 a month. And if you are like most people, you probably do so believing your money goes to the artists you listen to. Unfortunately, you are wrong.

The reality is only some of your money is paid to the artists you listen to. The rest of your money (and it’s probably most of your money) goes somewhere else. That “somewhere else” is decided by a small group of subscribers who have gained control over your money thanks to a mathematical flaw in how artist royalties are calculated.

There is a better way to approach streaming royalties, one which addresses all of these problems, and it’s called Subscriber Share.

The premise behind Subscriber Share is simple: the only artists that should receive your money are the artists you listen to. Subscriber Share simply divides up your (subscription fee) based on how much time you spend listening to each artist. So if you listen to an artist exclusively, then that artist will get the entire (share of the fee), but if you listen less they get proportionately less.


I bet a lot of music fans – and artists – will be surprised that this is not how streaming royalties are presently calculated. Indeed, the ‘money pool’ method that’s currently in place divides the money that’s available among total plays for all artists. Thus, a hair salon running Spotify on ‘random’ 24/7 decreases the amount paid out to the independent artist who gets repeated plays from dozens of diehard fans.

Sharky Laguana makes some great points in his article – as well as in this earlier article he wrote for The Kernel which I think explains Subscriber Share even better – but I’m wondering how the ad-supported ‘free tier’ that Spotify relies on to attract new adopters complicates things. Would Spotify be able to maintain two tiers of royalty calculation: the pool for ad-supported plays and Subscriber Share for subscribers? Is that necessary?

Of course, the question is whether the services would even consider this change. Sharky is correct in that once music industry folks have something set in stone it’s going to take some really big chisels to get it changed. His idea for ‘Silent September’ proposed in the article is interesting and worthy of conversation, but unfortunately seems a bit quixotic. The idea’s purpose of poking at the major labels carries one big truth: the majors will have to be on board for Subscriber Share to become a possibility. Regardless, I’ll probably still participate to some degree … I’m mainly listening to independent artists anyway.

I feel the best way a change like this could come about would be if a new service adopted this royalty method and made their policy overtly public, attracting artist support and in turn shaming the other services. I assume Tidal uses the ‘pool’ method of calculation … for all their talk of supporting the artist, this would seem like pushing on an open door for them. What about the newly launched Baboom? This service names their payout method Fair Trade Streaming … “we want your fan’s subscription to go directly to you” is a sentence found in Baboom’s press material to potential artists. I assume this means they are adopting some form of Sharky’s Subscriber Share method. I’ll look for confirmation, and this story will certainly continue to develop.

The Album’s Place In A Streaming World

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Music Business Worldwide:

You wouldn’t know it to earwig most modern label conversations, but physical album sales alone actually accounted for 53% of 2014’s total sales/on-demand streaming cash haul. It’s therefore something of a worry to consider the shabby treatment the LP is currently being subjected to around these parts – and the recklessness with which the language and mathematics of streaming are being imposed upon it.



First we must recognise that streaming will claim the majority of music consumption in the future. But that doesn’t prevent us from asking a vital question: What do all of streaming’s measurements of success – its billions of plays, its viral playlists and its carefully-branded ‘memberships’ – actually mean in the context of traditional, unit sales-based album successes?



The truth is, we have no idea… and we probably never will.


There’s some valid food for thought in this kinda snarky piece, and the author is right to point out that physical sales remain (comparitively) strong. That’s certainly not gleaned from all the ink and fanfare given to the streaming economy. And I share the writer’s frustration with those in the music industry who try to contextualize and measure new technologies through traditional formats.

Regardless, I’m not beholden to the ‘album’ … I feel that as that concept loosens the artist has a lot more room to creatively play with how his / her music is presented to the listener. Don’t get me wrong – great albums are great. But so are are series of EPs, or ten single songs each released weekly, or any other permutation that’s possible now. How, and with what frequency, an act’s music gets released can now be part of the game, rather than just being expected to have a sixty minute set of songs ready each year or so. As a (sometimes) recording artist, I find that inspiring.

Data To Date: The Rapid Rise Of Social And Streaming

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Next Big Sound has released a fascinating industry report on the current state of social media and streaming:

Streaming is fast becoming the primary way we consume music, whether that be through the more interactive on-demand services, algorithmically-driven lean-back experiences, the increasingly popular format of human curation and playlists (think Beats One radio or Spotify’s discovery feature), or some combination of the above.



What really blew our minds when tallying these totals was that the number of online plays in just the first six months of the year far exceeds what we tracked in all of 2014, even before the addition of Pandora’s data. Let’s take a moment to consider what impact this could have on the music industry at large. For musicians, their piece of the streaming pie will only continue to grow.


It would seem streaming is here to stay. Is this the final step in the format wars? I mean, what could possibly come after streaming as a music delivery format? Honestly, I’m sort of open to the idea of a combination of streaming, downloads (if you gotta have it), and vinyl or deluxe physical packages as our musical diet from here on out.

The Next Big Sound report also has some news about SoundCloud that would normally be encouraging for them. Instead, it will probably just add to the pressure they are receiving from the majors:

SoundCloud’s play counts continue to climb at a steady rate year over year. Next Big Sound tracked close to 5 billion plays on the service in May 2015, which is twice that of the same month a year before, and five-fold the year prior. At the same time, unless you’re living under said rock, you know that the social streaming service has long been in ongoing negotiations with labels for direct licensing deals, reportedly with the intention of launching a subscription service.



If slow and steady wins the race, SoundCloud could plausibly compete with more mainstream platforms such as Spotify or Rdio. However, SoundCloud provides a valuable niche service in that it is optimized for content such as mix tapes and DJ sets. If striking direct deals with rights holders – integral to legitimizing the service and monetizing content – means they are essentially strong-armed into charging users for a service they were once offered at no cost, they’ll want to see that growth rate remain as stable as it has been.


I sincerely wish them the best of luck with that.


There’s some further dissection of Next Big Sound’s report from Forbes:

You read that right: one trillion streams. That’s the number tracked by Next Big Sound in the first half of 2015 across YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud, Vimeo and Pandora. In other words, the average Earthling has streamed more than 140 songs over the past six months. There should be no doubt not only that streaming is here to stay, but that it offers the music industry a level of reach never previously seen in human history.