White noise podcasts have found a huge footing on Spotify, amounting to tens of millions of dollars in lost profit.
  • itsyourmom@artemis.camp
    13·
    10 months ago

    I actually didn’t know Spotify HAD white noise to stream! Well, I’ve had a noise machine for almost 20 years from “Timex”. Bought it at Radio Shack at the mall… lol… their ad “Takes a lickin and keeps on tickin’”… apparently spot on… I’ve moved, dropped, smacked and banged into that alarm/CD player/radio/noise machine combo so many times these last 20 something years… still works!

  • rentar42@kbin.social
    9·
    10 months ago

    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.

    That’s hilarious. When they demand too much money it’s" as long as the consumers are willing to pay, the price is right", but when the customers decide that their golden goose is only worth as much as some other content that they enjoy then they cry like little babies. Where is “trust the market” now?

    • Spzi@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Yeah, interesting! At first, I can obviously understand where they are coming from. But what about supply and demand? Isn’t value defined by how much someone is willing to pay for it? Who are they to tell us this piece of audio is worth more than that piece of audio, all while consumers value them equally?

      I also think it’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. I assume white noise is consumed in different contexts than pop music. You would probably annoy pop music consumers if you played white noise instead, and vice versa. If that was not the case, from a capitalist perspective, one should really question if Sheeran’s high production cost is justified, given a random recording from your backyard achieves the same value.

      Another assumption: The value of white noise increases, the more ubiquitous other sounds become. The more the music industry tries to produce and sell and place and shove, the more demand there is for alternatives. Leave me alone, I want to slow down. I care more about the well-being of humanity, of my fellow humans, than I care about the well-being of some industry and rich fucks. I read this story with delight. The sounds of nature are a treasure worth seeking, a source of health and serenity which will possibly always be unparalleld by artists.

  • JelloBrains@kbin.social
    6·
    10 months ago

    I like that rain on the tin roof sound, not necessarily that podcast, that the record executive hates and I would pay more for that than I ever would for anything by Ed Sheeran.

  • bedrooms@kbin.social
    3·
    10 months ago

    We can also say it’s a waste of money to subscribe to leisure services as much as the providers hope. Photos, music, sports, then other sports, then news, games, video streamings, Amazon, Twitter, your favorite apps, phone, internet, car, etc. etc.

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Hmm, why would it annoy them? White noise is highly compressible, especially if you use an efficient low-bitrate codec like Opus. It would barely use up any bandwidth or storage, and would cost Spotify practically nothing to store and stream. I’m not sure if they store their masters as FLAC or something, but if they switched to lossy compression for these, no would even know or complain - any noise introduced by the lossy compression would just blend into the noise…

    • exscape@kbin.social
      4·
      10 months ago

      Um, shouldn’t white noise be extremely INcompressible? Noise in general doesn’t compress well, unless it’s not truly random.