Track 1 here: Resonate is only 24 seconds long.
So when I play it, it doesn’t get a dot on the 3x3 square that shows number of plays.
I guess that is not intended?
Apologies if this is reported elsewhere, I did look but couldn’t find anything.
Wonder if that’s related to the fact short tracks under 45 seconds are not considered “played” in terms of payments (effectively all tracks below 45 seconds are free on Resonate which could prove problematic for several subgenres) and if the API handles “has been played” and “needs to have a first payment” the same way.
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I can see how this could turn into something complicated!
I suspect you are right, tha it’s to do with 45 seconds.
If I’ve listened all the way through, should that count as a listen for the artist and for the listener to use a partial credit? What if the song is 10seconds?
Should artists accept that short songs are always free?
And so on …
I guess some of this has been discussed before elsewhere?
Yes and we haven’t found a good solution for it yet honestly. (I should mention that it’s an issue that’s fundamentally always going to happen when fixing a universal value on products that, despite belonging to the same art field, have potentially nothing in common, and that I personally always refer to as “the original sin” of Resonate and the streaming industry in general)
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Technically it’s possible to send a “registered play” event when a song finishes playing, so it should be fairly easy to say "if at the end of the song we haven’t “registered” this song, send an event.
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I think it’s good to have a % threshold for how much of the track is played, as well, before registering as played. If I skip directly to the end of a 30-second track, that shouldn’t trigger a “played” event.
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Technically it’s possible to send a “registered play” event when a song finishes playing, so it should be fairly easy to say "if at the end of the song we haven’t “registered” this song, send an event.
For what it’s worth, beam implements this, but because of migrations issues it shouldn’t really be used yet for listening to music.
I think the percentage thing is a good idea but since the 45 second thing was decided by the board and has to do with what is allowed by various regulatory entities around streaming / playing music it’s probably worth a broader discussion.
30-45 second samples are sorta standards for free previews. Have long been aware that this doesn’t work so well for tracks under a minute, so crafting some rule for those situations would help. But we need to be careful, as I believe I’ve seen 30 seconds as a maximum for preview referenced somewhere, but never confirmed.
And no, this wasn’t a board policy but rather a simple system design like any other feature.
There’s a lot of discussion around this here Does stream2own work for longform music? + exploring alternatives - #10 by Hakanto
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This matter was also discussed at length in this topic where @melis_tailored mentionned that GEMA apparently capped free listening times before PRO starts to apply at 30 sec
(Another topic with a lot of discussion)
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work around for this would be…
cap free streaming at 30 seconds.
then advise all artists that if they are uploading any tracks shorter than 30 seconds and they want them to be paid for - they need to add X amount of blank noise space to the end of the track to make it over 30 seconds.
essentially the opposite work around for long tracks - where very long tracks should be broken up with invisible trackmarks so that you get paid for each part that’s listened too in a very long track or piece.
Yeah the “chapter” (or for a more musical analogy “movement”) feature, I’d really want to see that one implemented.
Also I know we hate them but a pop up could be good with a yes and no to pay for the track for sub 30sec/45sec tracks. “This track is so short you didn’t pay for it, but it doesn’t mean you can’t, if you liked it press yes to give it a credit”. It could be annoying but I think 30sec tracks are extremely marginal to the point it wouldn’t matter so much.
people can implement it for themselves! we can write the advise into the handbook - then artists just need to cut or extend their works to make the payment system - as it currently stands - work better for them.
same with podcasts - i would open up resonate for podcasts now, using stream2own, but having a cut every 5 min so podcasters get paid the same rate/system as artists on the site do.
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meh. allergic to pop ups. this should be in the hands of artists to choose, not us or the listener.
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Yeah, I get the pop up aversion, I’m trying to find the most “additional work for artists free” method because, while they can absolutely do things in certain ways, it does imply additional work.
For example I just checked and there’s an audible cut between tracks when listening to an album which means there’s no smooth crossfade between tracks (which makes sense regarding buffer) but it also means if you’ve got a long 20 minutes piece you’re going to have to deal with stops every 5 minutes which is not an ideal user experience and I can imagine a lot of artists reluctant to split that if it means breaking the narrative of the song to the point the cuts are “percievable”. An addition of silence similarly means they have to dedicate time for a Resonate-specific version of their music. So while these are huge things, they’re additional work for artists which I feel as a provider for a listening solution we should be providing instead.
I’m thinking out loud though, I’m fine with updating guidelines as is so that artists can already soft-hack around our current limitations as a company and sort of “pre-implement features” with our blessing knowing they’re kind of going around the code so that it’s more fair and ethical for them in terms of payment. But I can just see how those features could ultimately be cool.
Another idea for you @melis_tailored since I agree pop ups are a chore, everytime someone listens to a sub 45sec track, there could be a notification somewhere, not invasive (no push notification, no sound or whatever) just a notification index and when you open the dropdown it tells you which songs you’ve listened for free in case you want to use your credits for it.
Another option would be for us to add the option to “add silence” natively, like “your song is below 45sec! you can add xxx (the amount to reach payment) seconds of silence to make sure people still use credits to listen to it” and you click and it adds the right amount. Again, this would be, idealy, in the long run, and until then we just tell people their song is short and if they want they can add xx seconds of silence by themselves.
As a dev I think what I would like to see come out of this conversation, if it isn’t a board decision, is a spec for what people would like.
Maybe two-three people hammer away on this to find their ideal solution including all the limitations. Then they present that in a concise post with guidelines. Then devs can review it and give feedback, ask for elaboration, and implement.
It seems to me that currently we should change the limit play to 30s. That will require some changes in the API and transcoding, AFAIK. But we should spin that into a ticket and post it on GitHub so it can be tracked there. It’ll get lost here.
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I like listening to playlists with seamless transitions between tracks. “Padding” tracks with silence to fit our criteria of what is monetizable seems roundabout to me, and eschews listening experience for artist equity.
Can we have a percentage threshold, where tracks shorter than 30 seconds counts as played if they were played for 80-90% of their duration?
With tracks shorter than 10 seconds never being monetizable, to avoid listeners getting bamboozled out of their credits while listening to random playlists without checking timestamps?
Or three 10-second tracks being worth the same as a 30-second track?
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