My guess would be the idea is to shift listeners from white noise that Spotify pays royalties for toward white noise that Spotify owns. The hidden factor is ads that don't actually play for Spotify subscribers. The general idea behind paying for an ad-free experience is that royalties and revenue are either paid by subscription fees or by advertisers. The free tier gets ads and the paid tier doesn't. If Spotify shifted users to content they don't pay royalties for, then users wouldn't notice the difference, but behind the scenes Spotify can claim the royalties and ad revenue for itself rather than pay them out to a third party.

For example, if Spotify replaces the podcaster who makes $18k month in royalties with Spotify's own white noise podcast, then the immediate effect is that $18k/month doesn't leave Spotify's pockets.

This feels like Amazon selling Amazon products on Amazon e-commerce site.

Which is to bring up Peak Design, and that whole debacle.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22311574/peak-design-video...

Amazon Basics, then?

>white noise that Spotify owns

how can you have copyright on white noise???

Maybe they wash it with a proprietary bluing agent.

> A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones.

"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …'

>unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones

Thanks, I didn't understand what the problem was before, and was thinking "if the white noises still has ads, who cares?"

Anyway, Pandora has essentially "solved" this problem with the "are you still listening?" button that pops ups, so IDK why they don't just do that.

I still don't understand. If people like a background noise while sleeping, they will keep having one, be it chill / lounge / etc ... Music. The issue will remain the same.

but if all the "podcaster" is contributing is white noise, spotify can provide that without paying a "podcaster" anything so as a business it makes no sense to allow it to continue. If you have multiple "podcasters" earning 5 figure monthly off of white noise why pay them if you don't have to?

So I guess no, its not the same.

> I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s

Honestly, there are days when I go to sleep with metal blasting from the ear buds. That can be calming depending on how the day went.

Some black metal bands are very calming and help me to relax and/or concentrate on whatever activity I am doing - Mgla comes to mind first.

Did you mean Mgła?

Yep!