Oh FFS.
And Apple does those yearly playlists. And you can use last.fm as a neutral platform for tracking your listening habits. (I’ve been using it since 2004.)
Some people….
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Funnily enough the music industry is less reliant on new talent than it ever has been. Time has flattened and music listening focuses more on old music than ever in the history of humanity. It is no longer as helter skelter forward focused and innovative as it was. Older artists are also in an unusual position of strength which the streaming services should be worried about: they’ve made their money and they get buttons from streaming. The record companies have been absolutely coining it recently (Universal CEO became the highest bonus in UK CEO history recently IIRC) because streaming has grown the spend and they are literally, certainly, stealing this money from the artists. They give royalty rates for a physical product rather than licensing rates. I know the industry is historically based on theft from artists and accounting fraud (as well as mixtures of both such as “third shift” CD production where the money went straight to the execs until Sarbannes Oxley meant they could go to prison for that), but this is a level above the usual amount of sleazy treatment the business does during a tech changeover.
Well done Joni! My family is resisting the change (just convinced the elder child who came into the room) but I think i’m done paying them. I’ve had it since it was available to get here.
ETA I’ve told my family I’ll tech support them exporting their playlists. I’m not going to import mine I think. Most are, and I have hundreds, essentially “to listen” lists when I read or hear about stuff that sounds interesting. I have about 4,000 liked songs which I might export but I like the idea of going into a service with some kind of algorithmic purity.
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very cool
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Another popular podcaster for Spotify, apparently stepping back to join the growing protest.
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Yoink! I made a lot of mixtapes back in the day, along with “album plus enough singles to fill each side” tapes. I’ve since digitized some of the LPs that went into those mixtapes (when I hadn’t already bought the CD).
You know you’re living in the future when you can fit your entire music collection with massive room to spare on a pinky-fingernail-sized memory card.
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Rock musician Nils Lofgren, best known as a member of Crazy Horse and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, on Saturdaybecame the latest artist to join a protest kicked off by Young, saying in a statement that he, too, would “cut ties with Spotify” and urged “all musicians, artists and music lovers everywhere” to do the same. Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell also said she plans to remove her music from Spotify in solidarity with Young “and the global scientific and medical communities.”
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Too little too late.
Spotify Adds Covid Notices in Effort to Stop Rogan Boycotts
Spotify published internal rules Sunday governing what content is and isn’t allowed on its service, and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek said in a blog post that the company will add an advisory to any podcast episode that addresses the coronavirus. That advisory will direct listeners to a hub offering more information about the pandemic.
The company is trying to end a mounting insurrection among a vocal minority of users and musicians without alienating its most popular podcaster. Folk singers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their music from Spotify last week in protest of Rogan, a popular podcaster who has hosted several outspoken skeptics of the Covid-19 vaccines.
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Rogan apologizes and ignores the problem while promising to be fair and balanced:
“I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view,” Rogan said. “I don’t want to just show the contrary opinion to what the narrative is. I want to show all kinds of opinions so we can all figure out what’s going on and not just about Covid, about everything, about health, about fitness, wellness, the state of the world itself.”
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I was noticing this - the Damn Kids These Days listen to music from everywhen, because it’s all there for them. The date of release means very little to them. It’s pretty mind-boggling stuff when you didn’t grow up with it.
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Wow. So much [deliberate?] point-missing about why people are pissed.
It’s not your diversity that gives people the shits, Joe. It’s giving a huge and uncritical platform to fringe whackos whose views are getting people killed.
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I have no doubt it’s deliberate.
Giving a legitimizing platform to controversial harmful shit-spuoters is completely on brand for him. And, as the boycotts and such have made clear, for Spotify too. But it’s a bit of a bridge too far for both of them to come right out and say so.
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Um…you’re the problematic voice Joe. The guests reflect your views. And you reinforce their messages.
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Despite this, Rogan claimed his intent was not be “controversial”
Uhm, isn’t that his whole thing?
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The Grey Lady weighs in.
Spotify’s Joe Rogan Problem Isn’t Going Away
The controversy is different, in many ways, from the other conflicts between online stars and the companies that give them a platform.
No paywall version:
Users of these services have learned, by observing dozens of backlash cycles over the past several years, that a sufficient amount of pressure can get a tech company to do almost anything. They understand that the companies’ rules are fuzzy and improvisational, and that what chief executives mostly want — no matter what high-minded principles they profess to hold — is for people to stop yelling at them. They also know that if a company won’t take action based on listener complaints alone, there are other ways to turn up the heat.
Spotify may think it’s gotten past the worst of the Rogan backlash. But we know from recent history that what looks like the end of a content moderation controversy is often just the warm-up act.
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I am assuming by balanced he is of course refering to the classic equal pairing of one crackpot (supported by a small group) vs one expert (supported by an entire field).
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I listened to some of his video. He said have one crackpot on- then have a non crackpot at a different time.
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