From the article: “Once Spotify realized how much attention was going to white noise podcasts, the company considered removing these shows from the talk feed and prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify — doing so, according to the document, would boost Spotify’s annual gross profit by €35 million, or $38 million.” That doesn’t sound like it’s costing them $38 million, it sounds like they are speculating they COULD make $38 million. I was confused as to how they would be losing money.
So the problem is that white noise doesn’t compress very easily.
Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that’s extremely noisy it’s really hard to compress because that’s not what the algorithms were designed to do.
This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.
A middle ground would be banning these “podcasts” and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn’t cost any bandwidth at all.
They should just do it procedurally on the fly. because after all there was probably some algorithm that generated those all these and saved to a file. Just cut the file…
I’ve wondered for a while now why so few devices seem to generate it on the fly. Even Google Home and Alexa devices seem to play a 1 hour long file that fades out and in. The older, standalone “sound spa” units played a loop a few seconds long, which bothered some listeners who could hear a pattern due to the loop (maybe due to compression artifacts). I imagine it’s probably just computationally more expensive to generate it on the fly, rather than playing a file, but I also suspect that it’s also just companies pushing out the minimum viable product, and looping an audio file is easiest - especially if the device is already designed to play music, or other audio files like “ocean waves” and “babbling brook.”
I can totally hear a pattern overlaying the white noise sound in my kid’s white noise machine. The sound of the pattern varies based on the level of battery charge, as far as I can tell. I thought it was some kind of unintended noise coming from the circuitry (like maybe bad caps). Given that the underlying white noise sound doesn’t seem to vary based on the state of charge, I am still not sure that the sample length is what causes the pattern, but now you’ve got me super curious to tear the damn thing apart to test the caps.
In corporate math any money you’re willingly not making is a loss. No it’s not rational, it’s all about justifying the worst things for profit.
Can’t Spotify make their own in-app white noise (generated locally rather than streamed), and push it to the top of their own search results for “white noise”?
They are using the term “white nose podcast” as an (intentionally oversimplified) term to include all podcasts that people use as a background soundscape. This includes sounds of nature, cafes, etc.
Fuck corpo
“Creators of a broken system upset that people have found a way to actually profit from said system”.
I find it so weird that some people stream white noise over the internet. It seems like a huge waste of bandwidth.
People could buy an analog radio and “tune” into the cosmic noise.
So this is why all the alien hunters in movies are always listening to radio static…
Not to mention, Spotify is putting ads in white noise content? Kinda…destroys the entire concept, no?
There is so much about this story that makes me hate modern society. How is more of this content still being created? Why are there ads? Spotify can destroy peoples livelihood on a whim?
Although, I did find the part where someone with podcast “didn’t want to call attention to their show” pretty funny.
It’s easy to understand why the content is still being created. The type of people who never have their own ideas, but are always looking for easy shortcuts to riches heard someone was making a lot of money off white noise. So they start recording box fans for 10 hours and a time and uploading it, hoping they can buy a Bugatti. I’m not a fan of these people, but they exist.
Yeah, who says America doesn’t build stuff anymore?! Have you seen our premium content?!
Lol like I said, modern society is a fuckin joke. At this point I’m rooting for climate change
I usually only do it when I’m travelling and have to stay at a motel or something. At home I just have a box fan for white noise and air flow.
My wife and I play white noise to my son via Spotify to help him sleep.
Weirdo me just put a cheap fan in our son’s room.
We have a white noise machine for my son in his room, but having it handy via Spotify is nice for using it in the car.
I do!
Actually not white noise. I find it harsher than brown noise which is more soothing to my ears.
I use Amazon Prime though. I used to just run an app which generated the noise on my phone. Except that my phone is right next to me on my nightstand. It was annoying because one ear would hear it much louder than the other. So I started using the built in background noises that Amazon offers on my Alexa device which was across the room from the bed.
Now I agree with you that it seems like it’s a waste of bandwidth. But when I run it at night I’m not really using the internet for anything else. More importantly, if it was a problem for Amazon serving those noises, then let me install an app or something that would simply generate the noises. The mathematical formula to generate the noises with some sine waves is probably like a 1MB of data (if that) and I’d only need it once. But since I don’t think you can just install apps on Alexa devices then too bad for them. I’ll continue doing what I’m doing.
I just ask my HomePod to do it.
I guess that it might be streaming it?
Which sorta highlights a large portion of the people doing it you’re likely missing: people who don’t even think about it.
I wonder which way Apple does it, seeing as they have white noise (and a few other options), built into iOS. It seem like it would be trivial to stick that on the HomePod.
I’m curious about this too. Maybe they are listening with headphones? I have no idea if they make them like this but it seems like an opportunity for white noise machine makers to just add Bluetooth and they would sell more. Maybe?
White noise is literally random numbers. Your machine can do it using approximately zero percent of its available resources.
In a very real sense, any single transistor can do it, and computer engineering is an effort to keep them from doing it.
It seems like headphones with active noise cancelling are basically creating intelligent white noise. ANC works by listening to the should outside, then playing the opposite of that, to try and net out to something that sounds like nothing.
It looks like there are little white noise makers with headphones as well. https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Oasis-Continuous-Non-looping-Tones-high/dp/B06XSQ3WWR/ref=sr_1_3
They’re paying Joe Rogan $200M to be the exclusive home of his conspiracy disinformation bullshit, and they’re more concerned about forest_stream_with_gentle_rain_3.mp3?
I still like Bandcamp. The creators get more of a cut and I get drm free music. Pretty good deal.
Bandcamp for the win. I definitely have made up for my napster actions in 2000.
So much this! It also gets you back to actually supporting small artists in a meaningful way and not just $0.000001/play
Hilarious, they’re getting ad revenue and engagement, that’s all they should worry about and keeping Joe Rogan pumped full of his not-drug drugs so he doesn’t go totally fucking nuts.
In other news, does anyone recommend any other music streaming platform? Spotify just doesn’t recommend me anything good anymore
Tidal is ok for me
Tidal has done well for me. Have to get your podcasts elsewhere, though.
I get them on antennapod. It’s great. Free and open source too. Pulls from multiple locations.
I have used Jango on android for around 10 years. Tonnes of artists, no ads. You just have to listen to the occasional independent artist and accompanying voiceover.
I’d recommend either Tidal or Qobuz. If you end up buying albums instead I would also recommend Roon (not a streaming service).
128kbps vs Spotify 160kbps.
I think from an advertising revenue pov, it makes sense for Spotify to treat this as a problem. Spotify has an incentive to attract advertisers to spend money on ad space in their ad supported audio content. Part of the value is having ads placed in spaces with a high probability o"viewability" which is basically saying that when the ad was delivered, did it deliver in an environment where someone saw it or heard it. Regular podcasts probably have a high viewability because listeners are more actively engaged. White noise “pod casts” probably have a low viewability because the whole point is for it to put users to sleep and be background noise. So I think there’s probably a challenge for Spotify to increase the value to advertisers by demonstrating white noise machines aren’t eating up their ad dollars. And there’s a challenge with the content producers of non white noise to be compensated fairly for having higher viewership generating content than white noise.
Couple of things. What are White Noise Podcasts?. Spotify only started to offer Podcasts (got annoyed them pushing them in the recent UIs) a while back didnt they?. Imagine many people who use podcasts for any length of time actually use another service or app (in my case Podcast addict and now Antennapod). I used to use Spotify premium for music only. Thanks for all the recommendations further down for alternatives but how many offer mainstream music/download purchase etc?
YouTube revanced works well
If you are an artist on Spotify, you will likely make more money shorting their stock than you will from stream revenue.
Just a fun little fact.
My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it
They need to incorporate ambient sounds as an app feature (no ads) and then ban content that simply recreates that default feature.
News flash: providing a product costs money!
it’s better than most of the stuff on Spotify
in case bloomberg isnt loading for you heres an archive link [https://archive.is/MaXIb](bloomberg archive)
