Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web.
Spotify tweets a metric, and calculators go to work: Spotify’s engineering team tweeted that the company processes one-billion streams each day. The “processing” is part of a big Data operation around user behavior and musical choices. But for observers who enjoy digging into Spotify’s unreleased metrics like time spent per day and exact royalty payouts, the information nugget was enough to set calculators ablaze. MusicAlly documented what can be known or surmised.
Neil Young’s strange exit from streaming: We reported on Neil Young’s Facebook declaration that he was withdrawing his music from streaming services — not because of royalty payouts, but because of less-than-acceptable sound quality. His Facebook audience was unconcinved, and so is Paul Resnikoff, writing in CNN. Resnikoff points out that audio quality in Spotify and Apple Music is quuite high. Even in relatively low-fi platforms like YouTube, consumers don’t seem to care.
Same ol’ ads in Apple Music: Ad Week takes note of advertisers appearing in the ad-supported version of Apple Music, and observes nothing special about the creatives. Nordstrom and The Home Depoat, frequently observed streaming audio advertisers, are in there, unchanged from previous campaigns.