Spotify To Cut Back Promotional Spending on White Noise Podcasts

Spotify is cracking down on white-noise podcasters, reducing the advertising support for programmers that provide little more than soothing sounds like rain or chirping birds. From a report: In an email to creators Friday, the company highlighted changes to its Ambassador Ads program -- promotional spots for Spotify that podcasters read. The company pays hosts to read ads to encourage more creators to make shows and join the platform. As part of the change taking effect Oct. 1, white noise podcasters will no longer be eligible for such support, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company is also raising the audience threshold that conventional podcasters must meet to qualify for those ads to 1,000 unique Spotify listeners over the past 60 days from 100.

Seemslike a silly concept for a podcast

[93 Escort Wagon]

There have been white noise machines for decades... and phone apps that provide that same functionality for about as long as smartphone apps have existed.

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[herberttlbd]

Every machine and app I've tried had audible loops that are distracting. For 8 hours of white-noise, nothing beats a recording of 8 hours of white-noise.

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[guruevi]

You can program an HTML page with JavaScript that will generate uninterrupted white noise until the heat death of the universe. There should be no need for tracks to generate noise.

Simply: for (let i = 0; i https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jbu...

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[guruevi]

I should preview my comments:

In JavaScript:
for (let i = 0; i < bufferSize; i++) {
            output[i] = Math.random() % VolumeLevel;
        }

Or in C:
https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jbu... [fsu.edu]

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[herberttlbd]

You can get a sample of what it would sound like at random.org. Most people are going for something that has a more natural range of frequencies which is why machines and apps use recordings of real-world white-noise on a loop.

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[guruevi]

There is no such thing as natural frequencies in white noise. White noise is by definition noise which has the same power density randomly distributed across all frequencies. In the case of an audio app, I would say 10-24kHz, because anything outside that is definitely outside human realm.

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[alvinrod]

I for one was genuinely excited to see how that URL was going to be used as a loop condition for generating white noise. The Internet is full of entropy after all. Alas my wild dreams were dashed upon the rocks to discover that Slashdot had merely eaten your post.

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[allcoolnameswheretak]

The heat death of the universe is an unproven hypothesis. Why do you claim such a thing is possible without evidence?

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[Anonymous Coward]

The reference of the post is to indefinite length. Why you do insist on pedantry without relevance?

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[Anonymous Coward]

The heat death of the universe is an unproven hypothesis.

Only math has proofs, not science.

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[e3m4n]

Sounds like a job for AI. Lol

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[thegarbz]

If your white noise has an audible loop then it is not white noise but rather a white repeating pattern.

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[XXongo]

There have been white noise machines for decades....

For some reason, the article's definition of "white noise" seems to include "soothing sounds like rain or chirping birds".

Chirping birds are not white noise.

Re: Seemslike a silly concept for a podcast

[Midnight Thunder]

Replace âoewhite noiseâ with âoeambient soundsâ and this is pretty much what we have. These are generally low effort audio recordings, unlike music or a spoken podcast, where someone had to spend a like more time and effort to make real?

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[MBGMorden]

They're probably just referring to the "sleep sound" type things. Birds, forest sounds, thunderstorms, ocean waves, rolling creeks, crickets, etc. I'll admit that I use them a lot but on Youtube (since I have premium and don't have to worry about ad breaks there). Just set the TV on one of them then set a 2 hour auto-off timer. I just have trouble falling asleep if its totally silent.

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[e3m4n]

I bet they rope that ASMR shit into there too.

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[BishopBerkeley]

What happened to the futurama quote? wtf?

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just very confused by who the market is that both wants hours of calming ambient noise but is also okay with it being interrupted by advertisements.

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[tlhIngan]

It is. However, if Spotify is paying you money for your podcasts, then a white noise podcast makes complete sense.

In other words, it costs practically no effort to make a white noise sound file that lasts for 8 hours. You can do dozens of them in a few minutes. But at the same time, you're raking in money because each Spotify user that listens gets you a few cents.

It's just taking advantage of the fact Spotify decided to invest tons of money into podcasts, getting special exclusive content creators and offe

Oh no

[know-nothing cunt]

Ad-free rain and chirping birds. How shall I ever cope?

content shaming, Spotify, really?

[mysidia]

Why don't they just set a viewership criteria or something?

It's pretty cool that such Podcasts exist. And dumb for a platform to arbitrarily judge and pick on whole genres regardless of implementation - for sponsorship programs that are wide open otherwise.

Very possible for some rich, high-quality ASMR Podcast many people could be interested in, with good sponsorship integration (Actresses and actors reading sponsorship messages along with their own content in ASMR voice over whitenoise), to be deemed "white noise" and thus excluded from deals there's no rational cause to exclude them from - Just because some white noise podcasts might be total garbage and not be viewed....

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[NFN_NLN]

> Why don't they just set a viewership criteria or something?

"1,000 unique Spotify listeners over the past 60 days from 100."

Done.

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[mysidia]

I already know they did that. What I am saying is that should suffice, and
they shouldn't need to add on top of that humans manually painting a broad brush stroke over different genres and making subjective arbitrary judgements based on opinions of worthiness.. Remember... Staff person X calls white noise regarding a specific program is Not necessarily what the world thinks about it -- As in the cast May be White Noise + Something else, but a dumb white noise policy is going to come in and screw ove

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[e3m4n]

Evolve

Oh, the bandwidth!

[bill_mcgonigle]

This seem terrible for two reasons:

One, the bandwidth usage is atrocious to send noise down the line when a local generator or sample on loop would work just as well.

Two, imagine trying to nap to a lulling noise stream when AG1 starts shouting at you about getting your daily nutrients!

Wild.

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[Anonymous Coward]

kilobytes per second, the horror with my 1Gbps symmetric connection

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[bn-7bc]

You are right the one stream going to you, or to any other individual ,is not the issue. The issue is , as always, the aggregate when 10k 100k etc are listening to these streams at the same time it turns into a significant amount rather quicly, fortunatly not as much as those 4k hdr fireplace steams but the principal is the same: 1 sream, no problem 10k streams.. well it should be no problem but why consume all that bandwith when a one time download of a few loops and some intelligent transitiuons between t

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[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. Seems like multicast would be ideal for this type of content.

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[thegarbz]

No one cares about your connection and how you pointlessly waste your personal resource.

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[e3m4n]

O O O Ozempic! Or Down with Rebelsis. Thats what is gonna haunt your podcast.

White noise?

[Comboman]

I thought Joe Rogan was the only white noise podcaster on Spotify.

Disappointing

[byronivs]

They could talk [spotify.com] about the birds chirping. I personally was looking for just what they're discouraging. I like my armpit farts straight-up with no commentary.

Not the "white noise" you are imagining

[Gibgezr]

Some of you are confusing "white noise" with "white noise". This is not so much about "white/pink/brown noise", aka "static", but more about 8 hours of recorded ocean waves at the beach etc.Most of what they are talking about is not algorithm-generated noise.

Good way to distract from a shitty business model

[BishopBerkeley]

If they are scrounging for dollars here to show profits, then the business model is failing. Layoffs may not be far away.

It is a failure for music

[Anonymous Cward]

People running banks of phones can make a nice, easy profit from running short-length ASMR on very large playlists 12/7/365. This is a known issue Spotify cannot fix, since ASMR is intended to be played overnight, and ASMRtists can very quickly rack up large legitimate followings while also automating small-scale playbacks of their own material to get easy kickbacks from day one. Most real musicians on the other hand can enjoy sweet FA by comparison, with high-effort, low-reward being the norm for them.

h [slashdot.org]

Wrong noise

[holostagram]

Rain and songbirds are what I like to listen to. White boy podcasts are the real noise.

It's great to have such Podcasts

[simnaika]

It's great to have such Podcasts. And it's foolish for a platform to arbitrarily evaluate and select entire genres regardless of implementation - for sponsorship programs that are otherwise widely open.

Spotify is a very good music

[simnaika]

It's great to have such Podcasts. Spotify is a very good music streaming application, descargar spotify premium apk [modfyp.com] and enjoy the best songs in the world today.