So Spotify mad because people are enjoying their content? And some business guy was like, these jerks are listening to stuff and we not taking advantage of that money. Then they make up some crazy number they claim to be missing out on money.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A peculiar type of podcast has found a huge footing on Spotify, amounting to what the platform says totals tens of millions of dollars in lost profit: entire episodes of white noise, seemingly aimed at listeners who are asleep.

Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes of crashing waves or recordings of fans blowing air, Bloomberg reports.

Spotify makes the most money by pushing customers to its paid music subscriptions, an important revenue stream for a company that relies on razor-thin margins.

Once Spotify started spending time making sense of the data, it concluded that shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit, according to document obtained by Bloomberg.

“The proposal in question did not come to fruition — we continue to have white noise podcasts on our platform,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Apart from a flood of white noise, Spotify has also been dealing with a tsunami of AI-generated music, sometimes with bots artificially inflating its listener count.

The original article contains 362 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

“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

But it totally can mean just that. This kind of cognitive bias is crazy for a CEO to have. He should embrace the fact that the consumers have spoken and generate professional quality white noise tracks. As an MBA, that would be my gut reaction.

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How exactly is this lost revenue for Spotify, vs if users were listening to other tracks? It makes even less sense than piracy’s ‘every download is a lost purchase’ logic