About a month ago I saw an article for a service called Soundtrack Your Brand that steams long, non-repeating, thematic/mood based music playlists for restaurants, retail, workspaces, etc.
It even has a feature where you can feed it an existing Spotify playlist and it’ll extend the playlist to be several days long without repeating tracks. It’s also properly licensed for commercial playback, which Spotify and Pandora and lots of other streaming services technically are not.
While repeating songs isn’t our most painful problem, I’ve been pretty impressed with the quality and some members have even commented that we’ve been playing ‘songs they haven’t heard in so long’ which I think is a compliment
It is a commercial service, so it’s priced higher than Spotify. One question I haven’t found an answer to is if they actually pay artists more that Spotify does. If they do, I’m much happier to pay the premium.
Anybody familiar with this service and have feedback, positive or negative?
Hey Alex, not that service, but at Dojo we used something similar - https://getatmosphere.com/. Can’t quite recall the pricing, but it used human curators working with us to get the playlists on point with our brand. No doubt would have been more expensive than SYB, but another option there. We found them great to deal with too.
They claim the service ensures artists receive “accurate” compensation, I’m not sure that necessarily means higher compensation. Most of the additional fees seem to go to performing rights organizations, which are theoretically distributed to artists, after all of the other intermediaries, eg record labels, distributors, etc.
I haven’t tried SYB, but started considering it earlier this year when Spotify changed the playlist looping functionality. That change seemed to coincide with a full marketing push of SYB.
If artists are being better compensated and if a service like this is keeping things legal, then I’d certainly like to use it! Just can’t find any evidence that artists are better compensated.
How have you been finding it since your post? Have you heard of any other services?
Didn’t even occur to me that SYB and Spotify would be related. Looks like they are more of a Spotify funded spinoff but yeah I can see this shift in the company and product history.
I haven’t found anything more about artist payment, or other alternatives.
Mainly love it - it took a while to get the “right” playlists for different times of the day - but now it’s set and forget - and we get great feedback
User experience is annoying - and website wrong!
“Full Sonos integration” is basically a lie - you cannot schedule playlists - only control it by hand - which kills the main feature for us! We installed Sonos then had to rip it out again!
Don’t worry about licensing again is a lie in the UK at least - you DO still need a separate PRS/PPL licence in the UK. No idea about US / other markets
It took me ages to figure it out - but you can just use a tablet - but if you want set + forget you can get a device from them for about $150 which just needs ethernet - and then audio comes out (phono/optical). We’ve just used old-fashioned rack amps - with 100v line for powering multiple floors (eg 6 floors of toilets on one amp)
Billing is horrible - four locations means four separate invoices - each of which means logging in to download it!
I love the service - just hate dealing with the company - and (what I perceive as) blatant lies on their home page!
Hi Alex,
My co-working space in Berlin uses Soundsuit.fm and would highly recommend it. I’ve heard that it’s easy to use and I really enjoy the generated playlists - they’re of great quality.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
