From the article: “Once Spotify realized how much attention was going to white noise podcasts, the company considered removing these shows from the talk feed and prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify — doing so, according to the document, would boost Spotify’s annual gross profit by €35 million, or $38 million.” That doesn’t sound like it’s costing them $38 million, it sounds like they are speculating they COULD make $38 million. I was confused as to how they would be losing money.
In corporate math any money you’re willingly not making is a loss. No it’s not rational, it’s all about justifying the worst things for profit.
So the problem is that white noise doesn’t compress very easily.
Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that’s extremely noisy it’s really hard to compress because that’s not what the algorithms were designed to do.
This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.
A middle ground would be banning these “podcasts” and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn’t cost any bandwidth at all.
They should just do it procedurally on the fly. because after all there was probably some algorithm that generated those all these and saved to a file. Just cut the file…
I’ve wondered for a while now why so few devices seem to generate it on the fly. Even Google Home and Alexa devices seem to play a 1 hour long file that fades out and in. The older, standalone “sound spa” units played a loop a few seconds long, which bothered some listeners who could hear a pattern due to the loop (maybe due to compression artifacts). I imagine it’s probably just computationally more expensive to generate it on the fly, rather than playing a file, but I also suspect that it’s also just companies pushing out the minimum viable product, and looping an audio file is easiest - especially if the device is already designed to play music, or other audio files like “ocean waves” and “babbling brook.”
I can totally hear a pattern overlaying the white noise sound in my kid’s white noise machine. The sound of the pattern varies based on the level of battery charge, as far as I can tell. I thought it was some kind of unintended noise coming from the circuitry (like maybe bad caps). Given that the underlying white noise sound doesn’t seem to vary based on the state of charge, I am still not sure that the sample length is what causes the pattern, but now you’ve got me super curious to tear the damn thing apart to test the caps.
It’s not just actual “white noise.” It’s many kinds of background noise like nature sounds, etc. Has to be recorded and often edited.
It’s a legit product that makes sp0tify more valuable. They should embrace it but they’re fucking morons who hate both their artists and their audience.
Fuck sp0tify a million times. I really hate them.
What do you recommend to me so I can easily download and discover music that’s not spotify. You hate them but it seems they’re the top of the game right now
pandora has a really good recommendation algorithm. but for downloading? I recommend Deezer. you can download music with deemix-gui to download to mp3, wav, flac
Bandcamp has recommendations
Allmusic.com has “similar artists” and browse-by-genre and -style (and mood and theme etc)
Everything you listen to on YouTube sends you down a new rabbithole
Discogs.com has recommendations
Allmusic is 100% my favorite place to find new recommendations. I get to actively hunt instead of being fed by an algorithm (though they have too many ads now).
If you absolutely must be a $p0tify zombie who is mentally unable to find recommendations literally everywhere else in our music-obsessed world then you can still buy the albums you like to actually support the artists instead of basically pirating through a big tech app.
Can’t Spotify make their own in-app white noise (generated locally rather than streamed), and push it to the top of their own search results for “white noise”?
They are using the term “white nose podcast” as an (intentionally oversimplified) term to include all podcasts that people use as a background soundscape. This includes sounds of nature, cafes, etc.
If they block the stuff people like, won’t they lose the revenue brought in by those people?
Fuck corpo
“Creators of a broken system upset that people have found a way to actually profit from said system”.
Spotify has one of the highest quality services and a monthly price that’s barely gone up in a decade. This shit just leads to them having to raise the subscription rate again if they can’t fix the issue with people clearly undermining the payment model. What the hell is it that you people want?
People want the CEO to keep his mouth shut instead of publicly demonstrating his disregard of the art form,
as well as pay artists that create actual music more, and people abusing the system (see the OP) less.Your comment seems to be about the user/listener experience. The comment you responded to had NOTHING to do with the user/listener experience.
the highest quality services
What’s you’re definition of quality? Spotify is dramatically less useful than it used to be. So many options taken away shuffling is useless, garbage gets slipped in as a “suggestion”, etc.
Spotify has one of the highest quality services
spotify is a great service for spotify
spotify is a great service for the consumer
spotify is a godawful exploitive pile of manure for artists
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I love YouTube music. I get all the same songs as the other big services, plus free YouTube premium. Between my jam and habit and my quixotic quest to teach myself woodworking, I watch a LOT of YouTube videos.
Spotify has some terrible externalities though.
What the hell is it that you people want?
Keys to Paradise and a new Bentley. Preferably the ones they use at LeMans…
i want mp3’s i can put in my car
I find it so weird that some people stream white noise over the internet. It seems like a huge waste of bandwidth.
You mean that magical unlimited thing that just flows freely from the walls?
People don’t think about the energy wasted to do that
I usually only do it when I’m travelling and have to stay at a motel or something. At home I just have a box fan for white noise and air flow.
My wife and I play white noise to my son via Spotify to help him sleep.
Weirdo me just put a cheap fan in our son’s room.
We have a white noise machine for my son in his room, but having it handy via Spotify is nice for using it in the car.
Not to mention, Spotify is putting ads in white noise content? Kinda…destroys the entire concept, no?
There is so much about this story that makes me hate modern society. How is more of this content still being created? Why are there ads? Spotify can destroy peoples livelihood on a whim?
Although, I did find the part where someone with podcast “didn’t want to call attention to their show” pretty funny.
It’s easy to understand why the content is still being created. The type of people who never have their own ideas, but are always looking for easy shortcuts to riches heard someone was making a lot of money off white noise. So they start recording box fans for 10 hours and a time and uploading it, hoping they can buy a Bugatti. I’m not a fan of these people, but they exist.
Yeah, who says America doesn’t build stuff anymore?! Have you seen our premium content?!
Lol like I said, modern society is a fuckin joke. At this point I’m rooting for climate change
I’m curious about this too. Maybe they are listening with headphones? I have no idea if they make them like this but it seems like an opportunity for white noise machine makers to just add Bluetooth and they would sell more. Maybe?
White noise is literally random numbers. Your machine can do it using approximately zero percent of its available resources.
In a very real sense, any single transistor can do it, and computer engineering is an effort to keep them from doing it.
It seems like headphones with active noise cancelling are basically creating intelligent white noise. ANC works by listening to the should outside, then playing the opposite of that, to try and net out to something that sounds like nothing.
It looks like there are little white noise makers with headphones as well. https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Oasis-Continuous-Non-looping-Tones-high/dp/B06XSQ3WWR/ref=sr_1_3
I didn’t realize that you could stream it. There are tons of apps and downloads that you can use for it. I sleep to white noise cast to my TV from an MP4 that I have on my computer. It does seem like a huge waste of bandwidth.
You know I’d get the whole bandwidth argument IF PEOPLE WERENT PAYING FOR IT VIA THEIR SUB/ADS. Also every argument everyone has presented can be used for actual music too. You can buy the cd/mp3s and play them locally so PlAyInG iT oN sPoTiFy sEeMs lIke A wAsTE oF BaNdWiDtH
You seem to not have the slightest understanding of what I was referring to. I’ll try to break it down into something easier to understand.
Imagine that Spotify is a stream (a real stream of water, not an internet stream). To get to the ocean it has to pass through a concrete tunnel. There are millions of little fish that pass through that tunnel all the time. Suddenly several crocodiles decide that they want to pass through at the same time. The tunnel wasn’t designed for crocodiles. Sure, they can get through, but they fill the tunnel and the little fish get bunched up, slow down, and take longer to get to the other side. If you just gave the crocodiles a road to walk down that was over the tunnel, then they could get to the ocean without slowing down the little fish.
For this analogy, the little fish are songs, the crocodiles are white noise, the tunnel is the internet stream, the road is an FTP server, and the slowing down of the stream is buffering and increased cost.
You say you’re paying for bandwidth. You’re paying for access. Spotify is paying for the bandwidth, and it increases in cost the more it has to be increased in size to accommodate the service. If the company can reduce the demand on the bandwidth, then they can continue to offer the service without having to increase what you pay, while also using that savings to better their services.
The biggest issue with streaming services right now is that they are realizing that what they are charging is not covering the expensive cost of the bandwidth they are using. That’s why most of them are increasing what they charge. If Spotify can find a away to eleviate that issue, then that’s a good business practice.
No I quite understand how bandwidth works, you are paying for it because you’re paying Spotify lol, if Spotify get no monies from ads/subs they have no internet, they have no audio library, they have no technicians, they have no developers, your sub PAYS FOR ALL OF THAT. What even is this word salad of corporate boot licking nonsense? Especially in an age where fiber optics bandwidth is more than enough to push those itty bitty 1s and 0s through their lines to their customers.
You’re literally trying to argue the same as when Comcast and Time Warner intentionally slowed Netflix and other video games because “bandwidth”. Here’s again the issue, you pay for your internet, you pay for Spotify, which pays for access AND their internet. If Spotify can’t survive then they should raise their prices not try to hide behind “bandwidth” when we ve been streaming god damn audio since the 90s on copper dial up.
You’ve obviously never tried to stream multiple things from your own server. It’s not as simple as you make it sound. Why do you think nobody can compete with YouTube? It’s because the cost is so expensive to stream. You can post the same videos to an FTP server with no huge bandwidth issue, but streaming takes a lot more.
Only people with a T1 line could stream in the 90s. Either you’re too young or you’ve forgotten that it wasn’t possible for 99% of people to stream until cable internet started being introduced in the early 2000s.
Lolololololol I’ve had 23 files playing from a Plex server before on my home network. YouTube level? Nope, but what the hell are you talking about? Dailymotion has existed for forever, twitch is a YouTube competitor and has existed forever. you also clearly have forgotten about midi files, those annoying instrumental songs that played on people’s websites? All the rage in the mid 90s. Before you try to condescend you should maybe actually know what you’re talking about.
I just ask my HomePod to do it.
I guess that it might be streaming it?
Which sorta highlights a large portion of the people doing it you’re likely missing: people who don’t even think about it.
I wonder which way Apple does it, seeing as they have white noise (and a few other options), built into iOS. It seem like it would be trivial to stick that on the HomePod.
I do!
Actually not white noise. I find it harsher than brown noise which is more soothing to my ears.
I use Amazon Prime though. I used to just run an app which generated the noise on my phone. Except that my phone is right next to me on my nightstand. It was annoying because one ear would hear it much louder than the other. So I started using the built in background noises that Amazon offers on my Alexa device which was across the room from the bed.
Now I agree with you that it seems like it’s a waste of bandwidth. But when I run it at night I’m not really using the internet for anything else. More importantly, if it was a problem for Amazon serving those noises, then let me install an app or something that would simply generate the noises. The mathematical formula to generate the noises with some sine waves is probably like a 1MB of data (if that) and I’d only need it once. But since I don’t think you can just install apps on Alexa devices then too bad for them. I’ll continue doing what I’m doing.
I always download my white noise or sleep music and place them into Playlist.
Edit: I read the article and it’s not the subject I thought it was. I thought it was about artist/band/podcast making silent tracks to put on repeat while you sleep to boost revenue for the artist
Original comment: I don’t think they all want to listen to white noise, it’s a way to support whichever creator you want to support with your spotify subscription.
They’re paying Joe Rogan $200M to be the exclusive home of his conspiracy disinformation bullshit, and they’re more concerned about forest_stream_with_gentle_rain_3.mp3?
I still like Bandcamp. The creators get more of a cut and I get drm free music. Pretty good deal.
Bandcamp for the win. I definitely have made up for my napster actions in 2000.
Hilarious, they’re getting ad revenue and engagement, that’s all they should worry about and keeping Joe Rogan pumped full of his not-drug drugs so he doesn’t go totally fucking nuts.
Damn here I thought something that makes sense, like me using cracked APKs, was affecting their profits. Good good.
What does the crack APK do?
All the premium features except downloading
If you are an artist on Spotify, you will likely make more money shorting their stock than you will from stream revenue.
Just a fun little fact.
My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it
YouTube revanced works well
They need to incorporate ambient sounds as an app feature (no ads) and then ban content that simply recreates that default feature.
In other news, does anyone recommend any other music streaming platform? Spotify just doesn’t recommend me anything good anymore
Tidal is ok for me
I have used Jango on android for around 10 years. Tonnes of artists, no ads. You just have to listen to the occasional independent artist and accompanying voiceover.
In similar news, does anyone have a good replacement to Stitcher? Only a few days left and I’m really upset. First RiF now Stitcher. It’s been a bad summer.
I’d recommend either Tidal or Qobuz. If you end up buying albums instead I would also recommend Roon (not a streaming service).
Im a big fan of Pandora. I like listening to lots of different genres and discovering random music and the pandora app is pretty good for that. I have channels for everything from bossa nova to classic country to alternative and they do a great job of recommending stuff that I would never find on my own. It runs through android auto and on my pc so I basically have it playing all the time.
128kbps vs Spotify 160kbps.
I think from an advertising revenue pov, it makes sense for Spotify to treat this as a problem. Spotify has an incentive to attract advertisers to spend money on ad space in their ad supported audio content. Part of the value is having ads placed in spaces with a high probability o"viewability" which is basically saying that when the ad was delivered, did it deliver in an environment where someone saw it or heard it. Regular podcasts probably have a high viewability because listeners are more actively engaged. White noise “pod casts” probably have a low viewability because the whole point is for it to put users to sleep and be background noise. So I think there’s probably a challenge for Spotify to increase the value to advertisers by demonstrating white noise machines aren’t eating up their ad dollars. And there’s a challenge with the content producers of non white noise to be compensated fairly for having higher viewership generating content than white noise.
it’s better than most of the stuff on Spotify
Couple of things. What are White Noise Podcasts?. Spotify only started to offer Podcasts (got annoyed them pushing them in the recent UIs) a while back didnt they?. Imagine many people who use podcasts for any length of time actually use another service or app (in my case Podcast addict and now Antennapod). I used to use Spotify premium for music only. Thanks for all the recommendations further down for alternatives but how many offer mainstream music/download purchase etc?
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White noise podcasts are usually an hour or more of literal white noise.
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Many people have been using Spotify for podcasts since they were introduced to the platform in 2015. The app has features specific to podcasts, and why wouldn’t you want all your audio entertainment in one place?
why wouldn’t you want all your audio entertainment in one place?
Because Spotify is known to track and sell your listening habits. It’s fine (for me) that they track that I listen to AC/DC right before Ghostly Kisses. Music is music. A person’s podcasts can get a lot more personal. Politically, emotionally, and religiously personal. I don’t like to be profiled.
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in case bloomberg isnt loading for you heres an archive link [https://archive.is/MaXIb](bloomberg archive)
