SpotifyThrowbacks.com

Is anybody else confused by today’s music charts like me? For the purpose of blogging, I decided to dive in the new era of digital “top hits.” You know, obviously I am very pro music streaming, but the way we find music now has become so unnecessarily challenging in some ways. Now, I guess people can make the argument that it’s my age that gets in the way of understanding or even accepting the new concepts of music streaming. However, I doubt it has anything to do with my age (as that would be the first thing a young person would point out). I am one of the very few my age that not only understands, but actually use the technology more than 80% of most people in my age group (on a consistent basis). Having said that, my reality is that many of these “Top Hits” charts are just not efficient in my opinion.

Genres appeared to have been completely removed from streaming music charts!

This appears to be inline with many streaming services.

I am very saddened that websites that keep track of digital song hits have abandoned genres. I feel genres are very important, because they allow us to zero in on the type of music we like. Now we’re forced to listen through music genres we really may not like. This can be not only tedious, but unnecessary work. Streaming services may get away with not having genres because of the heavy reliance on algorithms, but in my opinion, you can’t apply that to music charts, because our reasons for goin’ there are slightly different. Another complication is that many of these “Top Charts” come from different places. So, in other words, one song may be #1 on Spotify, but #9 on Youtube. I think we need someone to build a site that combines all the streaming counts from various streaming services, and spit out a single average for each song, that would tell us what the hits are.

You know, I know the title of today’s post may seem a little odd. I had an interesting conversation with someone on reddit. I wanted to get a sense of how people find new music; and whether or not people still use Facebook or even Tumblr to find new music. I mentioned a very popular site called Pitchfork. Pitchfork is a very well known site that writes about new, and often times eccentric artists. Personally, the kinds of music Pitchfork writes about really wasn’t my type of music (to tell you the truth), and I still considered myself a pretty musically open minded person. The fellow reddit user shared that he doesn’t read Pitchfork anymore because (I get a sense that) in essence they’ve changed focus on the kinds of artists they now write about.

Finding new (whether an old vinyl, or fresh hot off the radio) music still requires a lot of soul searching. People take for granted just how hard it is!

I guess a bloggers focus can change, yes… But, understand that the whole purpose of having a blog is to share your journal of personal interest and make them public. Having a blog is similar to having a personal diary. So, as your interest change, so will your favorite blog. On the other hand, we have to remember that, it is also true that growing up, music was always filtered on the radio. In other words, we were fed music we were supposed to listen to. Today, we’re exposed to more music than we’d like to deal with. Perhaps this is the perfect case for the importance of just listening to your favorite streaming service, and allowing the algorithms to do its job and learn your taste. I don’t have a complete understanding of how scientifically the algorithms work, but it’s pretty mind-blowing how over time the streaming services actually recommends music along the lines of my taste. it’s frightening how what boils down to AI (artificial intelligence) could learn me and my tastes like that!

What’s the secret to making a good playlist? Well, in my opinion, let me start off by writing what it should NOT be! Today, the reality is for a significant part of our global population has been affected as a result of social media. And I’m sure more than others depending on whether or not you have a site to promote. Having said that, a playlist should not be created for the purpose of getting likes or thumbs up. Now, I don’t mean to stereotype anyone. I’m pretty sure that a lot of my thoughts come from the fact that I came from a different generation when it comes to music. However, if you’ve listened to as much music as I have throughout my life, you can not only judge the quality of music (based on my preferred genres), but you can tell what songs belong together or blend well within a playlist. When creating a playlist, these things should be taken in to consideration. It’s too easy for someone who has a little technical ability, or ssshoo, no technical ability at all, that can through up a website. There a lot of free or low cost services that will allow you to drag and drop a few elements on a page and voila! You’ve got a website!

It’s important that a playlist have a theme

You know, in this era, it appears that no matter who you are, or what you are, people frown on advice. Not only that, it seems that good advice from life experience, is now seen as being synonymous with “someone tryin’ to tell you what to do.” People are so offended by, or even threatened by new information today, that almost anything can be seen as an insult at will. You’re then scanned up and down, given you the signal you’re about to be paid back with a barrage of insults to your character, or even the way you write. “It is said that music is supposed to sooth the savage beast,” yet, it doesn’t seem to do anything for some of today’s “music lovers” behavior. Hmm. But I’ll digress on that one.

The fact of the matter is, we all don’t have the same taste in music. It is important to give clues as to what the playlist may contain. It’s the same idea when you’re trying to find a good movie to watch. This is why many of us still search for movie genres. Unfortunately, many streaming services, including Spotify has moved away from music categories. Perhaps this is due to AI becoming so sophisticated, they’ve mastered your listening habits. I can respect that. However, when it comes to playlists, notice that there still exist basic categories to help users find the type of music their looking for. Don’t name your playlist “the best-est playlist in the entire world,” and plop 9,000 random songs, or dump whole albums in it and expect followers. Unless you’re one of those people that payed for bulk followers. Those aren’t real people! The one thing that hasn’t changed in the music digital age is that, it still takes heart and lots of thought to put together a playlist for your audience!  In the seventies or even the eighties, when you met someone new, you’d never dump anything random on a cassette tape to give your crush/valentines. Why would you do that for your fans you’re trying to build?

Recently, I’ve written about my decision to use what I call “link aggregators,” to help pull songs/playlists from various streaming services, such as YouTube and iTunes. Well, I’ve discovered that there are great disparities in content between services. I think it’s time that we as music bloggers start to talk/write about what I now realize is still a problem. It also shows which are the streaming services that are truly worth using.

*GASP* iHeart Radio is the worst when it comes to missing content.<2h2>

One of the biggest disappointments I’ve discovered is iHeart Radio! They are one of the biggest supporters of artists and artists events. Yet matching songs against YouTube, Spotify, and even iTunes is a nightmare. It’s so bad that, at one time, Amazon Prime music started off with around 2 million songs. Now Amazon has more music than iHeart (it appears). At least in terms of music matches. I will most likely drop iHeart radio from my playlist making, because they just don’t have enough music licenses to match the music I have among other streaming services. At the same time, I guess I can’t complain or blame them. Because the reality is, Spotify is at the top of paid and free active users! YouTube is close to second, and although iTunes is way low on their music streaming user base, they’re still better than iHeart and Pandora in terms of music licensing.

You know, I’ve written a few times about my struggle as to whether to continue blogging or not. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying as me not having faith in what I’m doing. Believe me, I spent a lot of time building my blog from scratch, and I’m proud of my end result. So, it’s not about insecurity or anything like that. But, the reality is, social media has changed a lot in the last 10-15 years. Bloggers like myself rely on social media; and when the algorithms are rigged in such away that it’s almost impossible to promote yourself without spending a tone of money on ads, that is a discouragement. In other words, it clear that there is a lot of suppression in social media; it’s not just about politics. I remember when podcasting was about the people; the “nobodies” made podcasting what it is now. Today, we almost can’t find any of the original podcasters from back in the day, because the news media has taken it over, and the people no longer have a voice.

Took a hard look at some stats, and I discovered quite a few things that changed my view about my own blogging

My revelation made for some good cyber-life experience!

So, I started to take a much closer look at the tools I have available to me, in terms of SEO, and I was surprised to discover a few things I hadn’t realized. Well, let me first share a few myths. I don’t remember if I’ve written about this before, but, with the exception of YouTube, there appears to be a clear anti-streaming services on some social media sites like Facebook. They hate Spotify, and they hate iTunes. The only thing FB wants to see on FB is YouTube. On some level, I see that on Twitter too. But, many are just artist promoting numbers to get people to listen to their music. Which is different from music fans sharing music they like. This was one of the reasons that caused me to stop blogging for a while. There is no real discussion about this on the net, and I didn’t know how to proceed. Until I found some recent legitimate numbers of streaming uses. Spotify has more than 450+ million users (including paid and freemium users). This really shocked me, because the attitudes on FB almost made me a shamed of starting a Spotify site. I mean, they would literally delete my posts. That is really a turn off. A lot of these music groups owners are assholes really. I was also shocked to find out that Spotify beat iTunes; Spotify has almost 4x more subscribers than iTunes, what I used to call the king of music content. This really reshaped my view of things.

The next thing I’ve learned is that, I was reading a lot of articles on how people are using their mobile phones to do more and more things such as shopping. So, since that made logical sense to me, I designed my blog for mobile use (really). Then after taking a closer look at my stats, it turns out that more than 70% of people who are using Windows computer systems are accessing my site via Firefox & Chrome. Another interesting fact that those who ARE using their mobiles to access my blog are mostly Apple iPhone users. While it’s true (relatively speaking), I have a small fan base of over a thousand+ monthly, they’re not only returning visits, I also discovered that people from all over the world. It’s frustrating when you’re doing something unique and you don’t have enough data/or articles written to help you with decisions about our web projects. I feel happy tho, because I can clearly see that my hard work is being appreciated.

Welp, it happened! When we think of inflation, we think of food, gas prices, cloths, etc. We never think of business that function almost exclusively on digital technology would be affected by inflation. Well, I guess they can. Many business such as Apple, was one of the first to increase their prices on their music platform as of last month. You can bet your ass that other platforms will ensue. Sometimes I think, was this really about inflation? Or is it because of smaller and lesser known artists have been fighting for years for bigger payouts? Perhaps the current inflation was a hidden excuse to make this happen?

Bottom line is, streaming payouts are complicated in my opinion

I don’t know if music fans are aware of it or not, but there still is very much a payout war when it comes to music streaming. And in my opinion it’s really complicated depending on various conditions; such as licensing, how large the streaming service is; publicity; your fan base; how many of your fans use said service; how many of your fans use freemium services appose to paid; etc, etc. Another important fact is, we’re exposed to a lot more music than we ever had been before. The market is wider than it ever was before. So, it may not be a matter of an artist getting “paid enough,” but rather are you talented enough to make the money you’re demanding a streaming service to pay you! Well, don’t want to get into my soapbox. for now, I’m ok with it, because growing up, I know how much I paid for music, and if I think of things from that standpoint, I know the $1 extra I spend is still a great deal to have access to more music I’ll ever have time to listen to.

I just want to remind my readers that music streaming (even from YouTube (I’m grudgingly admitting)), is still important. I’ve shockingly encountered some people who are anti-streaming; however, seriously understand that the millions and millions and millions of people that are using streaming right now, would be pirating your music if it wasn’t for streaming. So I really think it’s counter productive to try and convince people NOT to use streaming, because you’re living in the past. What you may consider a little chump change, is better than making nothing at all!!!

You know, Being a blogger is so wonderful, because when you think about a subject matter no one else is really talking about, we as bloggers have the power to write it, and get our ideas out to the masses! We all know how important playlists are today; whether you’re using an actual streaming service or YouTube; playlist helps us to find new likable content, or new old content you’ve never heard before. Believe it or not, I still use several streaming services other than Spotify. You might be asking yourself, why does he do that? Well, the answer is fairly simple. Different streaming services have different customized algorithms, that give different results in terms of the music it recommends. If you learn anything from my blog, please remember this (and I’ve written about this before), it takes quite some time for a good streaming service to learn the type of music you listen to. It is absolutely ridiculous for anyone to think that can listen to a service such as Spotify , for about two days, and think Spotify is going to give you amazing music you’ve never heard before! Why would you even think that? When I started off using Spotify, it took about 3 months of almost daily use before I noticed a difference in Spotify’s music selection for me. It took another 3 months before I considered Spotify’s recommendations to me were perfect for my individual tastes.

Be aware that there are different unique algorithms for all the major music streaming platforms!

Having said this, there is an issue that sometimes arises when you listen to too much of the same music with a certain tempo (or perhaps genre?). On occasion, some auto generated playlists can contain too much of the same artist, or sometimes too many songs from the same album in a single playlist. I’m not exactly sure what causes this. I’m gonna assume that it’s because if we’re listening to really old and obscure music, the algorithms for the service you’re listening to has trouble matching previous songs with another (or artist). This is were listening to other streaming services can be beneficial. Now, I’m NOT suggesting that you should spend $10 for all the major streaming services. You may be surprised that there are a couple of services that offer “freemium” services as well as Spotify. I think Spotify should be the first on your list of freemium services because they’re very pro-playlist; and you can easily create them by choosing any song or album and right-click and choose “create station.”

Another freemium service is Deezer, you can’t create “playlistable radio stations” like with Spotify. However, Deezer supply several daily playlists for you (just like Spotify). There is also YouTube Music & iHeartRadio. Again, you can’t auto-create playlists like you can for Spotify, but both offers a wealth of pre-made playlists created by both the service and their users. If you already subscribe to a streaming service, and you don’t want to listen to commercials, you can use a free service called Soundiiz, and transfer all your playlist (interchangeably) to different services! However, keep in mind, I do recommend you listen to the commercials every once in a while, as that’s how the algorithms build your profile & taste. Look it up!! 🤣

I was actually inspired by this question because of a rude facebook comment I got a while back, of a song I posted. To be honest, I don’t remember the song I posted. However, I was kind of shocked at the person’s comment, saying something to the effect that the song was garbage, yadda, yadda, yadda. Now, I wasn’t emotionally distraught, as we all know a troll when we see one. But, that brought up an issue that I never really heard anyone talk about. that is, a “hit song” really depends on not only the city you’re living in, but the radio stations you actually have access to. Now, in today’s streaming era, I don’t think this is a huge factor as it was back in the day. Or maybe it still is, as we still have many men and women of my generation who are still scared to touch a computer, damn it!

I think this really brings home the importance of having an open mind when it comes to music. Especially in regard to younger people. This lack of open mindedness is one of the many reasons a significant amount of our people now have no music culture.

The fact that people are so closed minded to consume other genres, is one of the many reasons I started this blog in the first place. We need more musicophiles who actually posses diverse musical tastes, that can blog examples of good music outside of today’s genre norms. One of the most beautiful things about having a personal blog, is that you have total control of your own creative content! If anyone tries to judge you and say a song you post is crap, assume that idiot has absolutely no culture of their own! Sometimes even within cities themselves, can have several entirely different demographics within them! Let’s stop being so snobbish, and open your mind to something different for a change. A hit song should not be defined by record sales, but the spirit and the soul of a song itself.