Yeah, it seems weird. I can see the record companies not liking it because people listening to hours of white noise aren’t listening to music, but shouldn’t Spotify be happy if people are in the app at all? Maybe the issue is that they have more of a subscription model, so make more money when people pay the fee without using the bandwidth, but the white noise podcasts use bandwidth for many, many hours?
Not just that but due to the randomness of white noise data it can’t be compressed, so the bandwidth is much higher just because of that factor alone. Think 30mb for a white noise file the same length as a 3mb song.
Honestly I just download the stuff I like to listen to from YouTube using vlc and use the android version of that to just play the group of audio files all on a shuffled loop. Then again, my work asks that phones be in airplane mode in the room I work at (tho is fine with music and Bluetooth headphones, it’s something about interference from the data connection they’re worried about) so I couldn’t use a streaming service for it anyway.
Yeah, it seems weird. I can see the record companies not liking it because people listening to hours of white noise aren’t listening to music, but shouldn’t Spotify be happy if people are in the app at all? Maybe the issue is that they have more of a subscription model, so make more money when people pay the fee without using the bandwidth, but the white noise podcasts use bandwidth for many, many hours?
The article certainly doesn’t explain it well.
I think that’s exactly it.
People will leave them playing over night etc.
So they are paying a lot more in bandwidth and royalties.
Not just that but due to the randomness of white noise data it can’t be compressed, so the bandwidth is much higher just because of that factor alone. Think 30mb for a white noise file the same length as a 3mb song.
This is the real reason
I find this hard to believe. True white noise maybe, but it doesn’t need to be that for this use case.
Okay.
That’s an easy fix. Most music streaming services will time out after 30 minutes with an “are you still listening?” prompt.
This is a terrible idea. I use spotify for music at work and if I had to click a prompt every 30 minutes I might as well be watching YouTube videos.
Honestly I just download the stuff I like to listen to from YouTube using vlc and use the android version of that to just play the group of audio files all on a shuffled loop. Then again, my work asks that phones be in airplane mode in the room I work at (tho is fine with music and Bluetooth headphones, it’s something about interference from the data connection they’re worried about) so I couldn’t use a streaming service for it anyway.
This has to be an intentionally bad idea lol, most albums are longer than 30 minutes and this would ruin the flow
As someone who spends 8 hours listening to podcasts every day this sounds like an awful idea
If I have to interact with my phone at any point while I’m driving I’m leaving that service.
A “sleep timer” feature would be a much better suggestion. Audio streaming is not so network-intensive that we need to build in timeouts
As luck would have it, that already exists in Spotify.