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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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How do record labels make money when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free? I don't understand why Spotify has revenue. Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I pay for spotify and when I find tracks I like I buy the flacs from the artists. I'm mostly paying Spotify for convenience (playing music I don't listen to for other people/events) and for access to the algorithm, which has found a lot of incredibly nice artists that fit my incredibly niche tastes.

Nearly all of those songs are on YouTube channels that send their ad revenue to the record companies.

Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?

I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.

Isn’t YouTube lower quality? Also for $10 a month the library that follows you everywhere, can be streamed or downloaded anywhere and has pretty much every song in the standard version directly available is pretty convenient.

Maybe so, especially if it's one of those youtube videos that was uploaded 13 years ago by the Peruvian fans of a Finnish band with some random anime stitched onto it... but that's part of the charm IMO! https://youtube.com/watch?v=_HAuXWVLyW4

  1. for many people "download songs and put them on your phone" is a hard challenge to overcome.

  2. many people prefer to listed to some prepared playlist rather than hand-curate and build music library

  3. for many people Spotify is cheap enough to round it to "free" - or at least considered cheaper than investing time into (1) and (2)

"when every song I can think of is available from youtube for free" - well, not every (the same goes for Spotify)

(Spotify is doomed to have no real profits, but that is a separate problem)

Shockingly most people browse without an adblocker. They couldn't figure out how to download a video if you put a gun to their head. Spotify, sells convenience and a clean conscience that you're not stealing from your favorite artist.

Convenience is an interesting factor here. People my (our?) generation had a vague sense of anxiety, that our kids are going to run circles around us with regards to technology the same way we did around our parents, only for it to turn out that growing up with "streamlined" software made them effectively technologically illiterate.

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