It’s hardly white noise then, is it?

It sounds like some ASMR-style background noise, or a chosen sound of nature or ambient noise.

I’d be more impressed if they were getting megabucks for uploading tracks of a tuned-out television.

Then they should ditch their stupid payment pool model and have each user’s money go to the artists they actually listen to.

If someone with a free account listens to one song a hundred times in a month, and I listen to one track from my favorite artist, it works like this:

Spotify pools my money and the ad money from the free user. Then they divide that amount by the number of plays, and that’s how much each play gets paid.

But this means the hundred plays from the free account, get paid for with my money, instead of it going to the one artist I actually listened to.

Spotify’s payment model means you can literally steal from the artists by either botfarming plays, or doing shit like this podcast, that game the algorithm into racking up tons of plays. Another example are these playlists of good music, but stolen and uploaded by someone other than the original artist. If the playlist gets recommended and people mindlessly put them on, and the playlist just racks up plays like mad for that one “artist” who posted tracks they didn’t even make. Once the playlist gets traction, IIRC the creator can even bait-and-switch the content.

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.

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