Top Spotify Lawyer: Attracting Pirates is in Our DNA (torrentfreak.com) 79
Spotify is not only one of the world's most popular music services, it's also one that's proven particularly popular with both current and former pirates. From a report on TorrentFreak: Today Spotify is indeed huge. The service has an estimated 100 million users, many of them taking advantage of its ad-supported free tier. This is the gateway for many subscribers, including millions of former and even current pirates who augment their sharing with the desirable service. Now, in a new interview with The Journal on Sports and Entertainment Law, General Counsel of Spotify Horacio Gutierrez reveals just how deeply this philosophy runs in the company. It's absolutely fundamental to its being, he explains. "One of the things that inspired the creation of Spotify and is part of the DNA of the company from the day it launched (and remember the service was launched for the first time around 8 years ago) was addressing one of the biggest questions that everyone in the music industry had at the time -- how would one tackle and combat online piracy in music?" Gutierrez says. "Spotify was determined from the very beginning to provide a fully licensed, legal alternative for online music consumption that people would prefer over piracy." [...] Of course, hardcore pirates aren't always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. That is still being achieved today via its ad-supported entry level, Gutierrez says.
The way they talk about pirates (Score:3)
you'd think the pirates would have killed the music labels and music artists back in the tape days, yet here we are 2017 and music is going strong...
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you'd think the pirates would have killed the music labels and music artists back in the tape days, yet here we are 2017 and music is going strong...
So they survived despite the piracy? Let's ramp up the Piracy!
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Re:The way they talk about pirates (Score:5, Insightful)
The cycle is simple.
1. Labels start gouging customers.
2. Customers turn pirates.
3. Third party offers a service that doesn't gouge customers (the stage where Spotify currently is).
4. Pirates turn customers.
5. Labels notice that most people are paying for music.
6. Rince and repeat.
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1. Labels start gouging customers.
2. Customers turn pirates.
3. Third party offers a service that doesn't gouge customers (the stage where Spotify currently is).
4. Pirates turn customers.
5. Labels notice that most people are paying for music.
6. Rince and repeat.
Pretty much. Those taking the worst beating on Spotify though are the fringe artists, because they offer one price per stream even though the niche might be willing to pay more and if you're not on Spotify you'll miss most the market so it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss. For the life of me I can't understand why artists didn't organize some form of non-profit client where you could plug in subscriptions like repositories on Linux. Some could be free. Some could be paid. You could co-operate on ho
Re:The way they talk about pirates (Score:4)
If they get paid per stream, then those fringe indies are making a lot more money off me than they used to.
I tend to go out exploring similar artists or searching for new music using Spotify and often end up at brilliant artists with just a few dozen followers.
A flat rate makes it so the artists can compete on the product, not the marketing.
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You're correct in that at least
Re: The way they talk about pirates (Score:2)
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I tend to go out exploring similar artists or searching for new music using Spotify and often end up at brilliant artists with just a few dozen followers. A flat rate makes it so the artists can compete on the product, not the marketing.
Not really, there's an awful lot of power in deciding what songs are in the playlists they promote and what they put in your discover feed. For every one of you there's probably a hundred using it as a quasi-radio streaming mainstream artists over and over again. I did it this Christmas, just tuned into some pre-made playlist and that was what was playing. Which means all the classics got another stream or five, regardless if I like every particular one. I'm not going to be annoyed enough to get up and swit
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The cycle is simple.
1. Labels start gouging customers...
OK, let me just stop you right there. For years now, my preferred method to listen to music and perhaps in some small way support the artist was to buy their music CD. 30 years ago I was paying anywhere from $10 - 15 to obtain the music I wanted. And today, decades later they still charge anywhere from $10 - 15 to obtain the same damn thing, in both physical and electronic (iTunes, et al) format, with the only exception being hipsters who don't even know what a fucking record player is paying 3x for viny
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You say that they're not gouging because they off the same digital product today for the same price that they did 30 years ago.
How would you feel about paying $30 - $60 a month for a 2400 baud connection to a mainframe that happens to have internet access?
Technology has evolved to make a better product. And we pay $30 - $60 per month for relatively the same product today as a result.
Other than Autotune abuse, technology has done nothing to make a better singer, and this discussion was about the industry protecting against piracy in the face of legal distribution channels providing the same content for free, which tends to invalidate the entire you're-stealing-my-shit argument.
Your analogy does not really apply at all here.
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Yours will likely not be a popular post, but it is entirely valid. CD in 1985 - $15. Equivalent cost in cash in the US today (used an inflation calculator at saving.org) - $36.35. I may (and do) hate DRM, rootkits, mistreatment of artists, and all of the other things we point out about media companies, but the price of albums on CD isn't something we can honestly complain about.
Nor should an obscenely wealthy industry complain about piracy somehow "ruining" them or their clients.
Come to think of it, I see the entire action of ramping up a pointless legal army to "combat" music piracy justified as a business expense and therefore a tax write-off. Nothing more.
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TL; DR - Explain how labels are gouging customers when media prices have remained the same for decades, and YouTube exists.
I'd say the labels gouge their clients far more than the customers.
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TL; DR - Explain how labels are gouging customers when media prices have remained the same for decades, and YouTube exists.
I'd say the labels gouge their clients far more than the customers.
And as a result, their narcissistic clients flaunt their millions on social media, so we can see just how much they suffer?
Oh yeah, I can really fucking tell that artists today are barely making ends meet because of all that gouging...
2017? (Score:3)
We're still in 2016! Wait, are you from the future? If so, then what is 2017 like? :P
Re: 2017? (Score:2, Funny)
Much like 2016 was, just with far most celebrity deaths, more lawsuits, even more people moving to streaming to get away from buying content in physical form with even more laws put in place to alienate consumers. Just like 2016 was, really.
Thanks for asking. 2018 wasn't much better.
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So the future is suckier. :(
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It's great until now. We will see, who's going to die.
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Great? How so?
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Streaming video services could be doing the same thing if Hollywood pulled its collective head out of their MPAAss.
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While true, I can't help but suspect Spotify (and the like) are the Steam of the music world - simple and easy to the point that they compete with the convenience of piracy.
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Astroturf much? (Score:1)
Since when did SlashDot become the dumping ground for corporate fanboi advertising cloaked as a story? This just sounds like a Spotify promo, not journalism.
Oh, silly me I forgot the last decade for a moment...
Fuck beta.
A small number of tone combinations are pleasant (Score:1)
Re:A small number of tone combinations are pleasan (Score:5, Insightful)
'There's only a finite number of letter combinations that our eyes find pleasant'
'All the words have been written already at least once so there's no original works of literature anymore'
Your point is not valid because it's not true.
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The small amount of them makes not a single difference to your argument being wrong. Even if there were only 2 possible tones in existence, it would be possible to create endless original/unique combinations with these tones.
That is, the amount of new/original songs is not limited because the amount of tones is limited.
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The same way a Go game has a "finite number of combinations?"
"More than the number of atoms in the observable universe" sure is an interesting way to define "small"
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How? They're doing their best to navigate the landscape of music business. They have to pay the record companies if they want to stay in business, and getting the price per play higher means increasing the price of their service which at this point will drive away customers to other similarly priced services further leading to reduced revenue and thus even less money for the artists,
What they should do is allow people to voluntarily pay more to support the artists. I've be
Slashvertisement? (Score:2)
Linux (Score:3)
Well, they do have a download for Linux. But it is unsupported. It needs to either be supported or open source so we can self-support (like we do for so much other stuff). So, clearly, I am not in their intended market. So, clearly, they don't expect money from me. So, how can they make a valid legal case that me not paying them means they are losing any money (that I have deprived them of anything). FYI, I do pay for my music that has a cost attached, like at Magnatune [magnatune.com].
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There are open source linux clients for Spotify. You just have to be on a premium subscription to use them.
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You act like all of the Radiohead buyers and app buyers are hardcore pirates, and treat those donations as being 100% attributable to pirates.
Yet, you offer nothing to prove that this is case. You simply make that assumption and run with it.
Your argument is terrible, and the only reason it sounds vaguely appealing is due to an unstated and highly debatable premise.
Spotify- better than I ever thought it would be (Score:2)
I have to admit that Spotify is exactly what we had needed for years prior. Huge music collection, reasonable pricing, free alternative with non-over-the-top advertising, great audio quality, clients for all kinds of devices (phones, tablets, web, amplifiers) and works great with Firefox under Linux with no software required.
I have even noticed when I searched for a few albums that were missing over the last year.... they were eventually added. So they even seem responsive to what people are trying to fin
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Even so, I have discovered lots of new music through Spotify with their recommendations. And that is something Spotify could improve- they need to allow users to directly rate songs (like Pandora does) so it can learn what we like and offer more recommendations. And the other is a better "radio station" type mode, like Pandora has.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Spotify developer, this is just from reading around forums, pissed off at some features not working on Spotify as expected. Here is what I've learnt and it may be inaccurate. Take with salt:
Spotify sort of do the rating mechanic when you click the thumbs up/thumbs down on a song as it is playing (at least on my Android app). "Thumbs up" will add it to a Liked playlist connected to your account.
Now this Liked playlist influences your Discover Weekly playlist. But here is where Spotify
Whipping the Llama's Ass (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite sure why streaming now a fancy a 'new' technology. Shoutcast [shoutcast.com] is still going strong with 67,814 stations (as of right now). Created in 1998. It has almost every type of station you could want to listen to. Works on any device that can play a stream and you can even rip it to disk if you want.
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Instead of having to pick from the 67,814 stations, you get to select the exact song out of tens of millions that you'd like to listen to right now, and slowly curate your own library to listen to whenever you wish. It's a far more flexible mo
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Maybe it's just me but the people that 'pick' what songs they want to hear spend more time picking songs than listening.
I want a radio station to do that job for me. I don't want to be a DJ while I program. It also allows me to listen to other music that I may not have heard without listening to my own echo chamber of music.
It's free, most stations don't have ads and it works on all devices. My 'stereo' in college was a cheap 386 laptop I found for $10. This is when the iPhone and Android were relatively ne
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It just feels like you cling onto Shoutcast mu
How to stop being taken seriously: a simple guide (Score:3)
Who has to pirate anything anymore? (Score:2)
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Sure (Score:1)
no-cost? (Score:1)
"Of course, hardcore pirates aren't always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. "
this statement confuses me, if pirates are making money then why would an equivalent be a no-cost?
the answer of course is because pirates don't make money, sharing content isn't about making money but having the content how they want it and usually for free.