>"It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof," Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl told Music Business Worldwide earlier this year.
I guess their issue might be that if people listen to white noise 8 hours while asleep every night and Spotify distributes their monthly fee weighted by time listened, then a lot of their fee will go to the white noise for sleep and thus the total fee distributed to their daytime music would be unexpectedly significantly reduced.
The easy fix would be to cap track time weight, although that is susceptible to an attack of splitting the white noise in many parts and publishing a playlist.
I guess a possibility could be to somehow compute "song variety" (i.e. entropy in a model where the decoder can generate noise/randomness) and weight by that, but not sure if the available lossy codecs are good enough to do that.
The entropy in white noise is maximal, if it's really white noise.
One sample of white noise is indistinguishable from another; so if Spotify can identify white noise, then they can dedup, i.e. serve the same sample for every request for white-noise track.
What I find annoying is that people are wasting bandwidth uploading and downloading an undifferentiated hiss. White noise is trivial to generate locally, without consuming any bandwidth.
[Edit] Real white noise has the same energy at every frequency; the total energy in white noise is effectively infinite. Practical "white noise" is low-pass-filtered, which means it's no longer real white noise.
I wonder if these samples are really pink noise, and Spotify is talking nonsense?
A finite-length sample of the most perfect white noise will not attain maximum entropy. You mention a lowpass filter -- that's accomplished through the sampling frequency. But your proposal is an effective lowpass filter, as any frequency longer than the sample length will clipped to exactly the sample length -- which you'll be able to hear as a distinct rhythm if it's a sub-audible frequency, or a tone if it's shorter.
Well, Spotify serves lossy compressed audio anyway. I don't know much about audio compression, but presumably it's first bandpass-filtered, and then filtered to remove psycho-acoutically unwanted audio components, and then compressed as a bitstream.
I agree with your interpretation, but I'd like to also offer another way to view this phenomenon that Spotify's higher execs also missed: Spotify is lucky and has found a way to monetize a feature that is readily and freely available elsewhere, and they should just be happy to get a bit of profit for it.
I would take the opposite approach and figure out how to maximize the return on the white noise without changing anything for the users; that is, focus on reducing the cost to deliver white noise, work on guidelines for the white noise presenters on how you're going to monetize this without disrupting the fad, etc.
From my perspective, I just can't see how trying to do something special with this fad does anything but immediately kill the fad. There are even FOSS white noise apps, and it won't take long for users to find a free alternative if Spotify messes with the recipe here. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to get Spotify exclusively for the white noise nor that white noise will somehow be a gateway into further Spotify use; I just don't see that the persons who want white noise would use that as an entry point into the service, it's the other way around, with current satisfied users finding out they can also use Spotify to get white noise.
Basically I see this as a happy accident for Spotify that will break if they try to press on it too much. They should treat this like a beneficial fad, and just figure out how to deliver it with the least resource cost, and just enjoy the extra revenue. I don't think it's really going to draw people in except if they play the "yeah, this is legit, we're just gonna get out of your way as much as possible here. enjoy our ads", and ride that money until it dries up.
I hate to say it but certain advertisers might pay more for ads that play while people are sleeping (ie placement during 8 hour tracks of white noise).
This is not a $38m-in-costs crisis for Spotify, this is a revenue opportunity!
I think this is why google really wants to control the brower. Once AI is cheap and on every device, the user has the ability to use it to filter all inbound. Trivial for a local LLM to strip hate speech from a twitter html regardless how much Elon wants you to force you to see it.
Most people don't even use an adblocker, despite how easy it is. I think you will have a hard time trying to get a substantial number of people to install a filter for opinions you/they don't like.
You may want to actually look at the adblock usage. It’s massive unless artificially disabled. Enough for Facebook and Youtube to fight it with escalating countermeasures
Because the value of playing recorded music of an artist some folks enjoy enjoy is microscopic compared to the value of helping people to sleep better. Probably also true for individual listeners, but definitely for society as a whole.
Well, realistically though - and I know your comment was rather sarcastic, but still - some people pay tons of money to go to a live concert, but nobody ever paid for a white noise concert.
So I think it is reasonable to say that pop music is worth more. Let alone the fact that it takes tons more work to create.
I fully acknowledge that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has tried to sleep better by congregating with thousands of similarly-sleep-seeking others into a jam-packed stadium.
I will also point out that, again to the best of my knowledge, extremely little money is made by the music industry on sleeping pills, sleeping hardware (beds, mattresses, pillows) and necessities (covers, duvets), nor on specialised sleeping gear (masks, blinders, apneu machines).
Also: most people try to or need to sleep every night, but can go without a concert for multiple days. If you can sell something on a recurring basis, you don't need to make a ton of profit on each sale to get a nice income stream.
Finally: I think it is harder to improve the sleep of someone struggling with that, than to create entertaining music.
Worth is entirely subjective unless there is intrinsic value in these things. For example - if no one listened to or interacted with either, would we still say there's value in their existence? There is probably very little. Otherwise, the value comes from whatever relationship the appraiser has to the music or sound.
Some people value sleep, others value sounds of nature, others value pop music, and others value money. The take on anything or anyone's value or worth usually tells us more about the appraiser than the subject.
Yes, it is subjective for each person, but we can look at aggregate spending and based on that see that there is a lot of financial value in pop music, with a large industry around it. There’s no such equivalent for white noise.
That Spotify has some issues distinguishing how to pay their providers between the two and has turned into a much more lucrative place to put your white noise than anywhere else is specifically a Spotify quirk, not the consumer market telling a music CEO that music is worth less than noise.
The honestly pretty obvious answer to "why can't Ed Sheerhan's song be worth exactly the same as rain" is that the market demonstrates that there are lots of other places to get free rain noises or white noise or what have you while far fewer non-ad-or-subscription-supported on-demand song playment options.
> "...an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof... -- Warner CEO"
you know, I've been making this argument to point out monopoly pricing for a long time: how come when I go to a theater, all the movie tickets are the same price? films cost a different amount to make, and some of them are good while others are stinkers. In any other business with a range of products like that, sellers compete on price. Movies are price-fixing-ed.
I wonder how this works between the theater and the studio. I think some movies are different prices to show, but maybe studios have some control over ticket price as well?
Poorly attended movies lose screens more quickly and move to cheaper venues (second-chance theaters, video/streaming) faster. Theaters want to get consistent usage of their screens if possible -- offering cheaper seats for cheaper movies would be counterproductive.
They charge less for earlier shows. So the thing they’re selling isn’t the movie, but the seat. And they do get more expensive if the theaters are selling out.
Well when you value low effort content and high effort content equally, you discourage people from making high effort content when they can make money by just recording their roof.
I don't think people will stop making music or podcasts because a tiny sliver of low effort content makes money. There is a cap on how many people can make money by uploading white noise since it's so generic. Plus for a lot of people the money isn't even the primary motivator behind their high effort/quality content.
They suffer from the “DropBox problem”. Streaming music is a feature not a product. Apple, Google and Amazon don’t need to sustain their business based on streaming music. It’s a gesture to make their hardware more attractive.
Heck, this is the market doing its thing, isn't it? You can't say you want capitalism and then complain because the market demonstrates as much demand for the sound of rain falling on a roof as for a particular singer-songwriter. I think WMG is just annoyed the person who uploaded the rain noise doesn't have to pay royalties to the rain and keeps the entire cut.
I'm sure WMG also thinks WMG's contribution to Ed Sheeran's music on the platform is worth the millions they get paid as middlemen. At least the rain is contributing something by making a noise.
because it's about ad money and maybe paying to promote a podcast (idk. if that is a thing)
white noise content is the best example of "user most likely doesn't active listen" so an ad on it isn't worth much
for other podcasts you would assume people listen (through yes they might not, but Spotify has no practical way of knowing that), so ads are worth more
Additionally the ad industry values that their ad is associated with "premium content" (whatever that means) and while white noise is "highly valuable for the consumer needing it" it's not "premium content" as it doesn't has much content. I mean it's literally noise, well fine tuned noise you could call art, but still noise. So highly valuable but not premium.
I suspect it's from people with long covid with sudden onset of tinnitus trying to find some relief during the sleep. I had to do that for a few months if I wanted to have any sleep at all before my neurological symptoms subsided. It looks like Warner has no idea about it.
Why not?