this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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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.
The original article contains 362 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Yes, this is accurate