I think all these comments discussing white noise miss the point, which isn't white noise but "if people would listen to what is more profitable to us, instead of what they enjoy listening to, we would make X more profit".
They couldn't even have gotten to the point of confusing white noise and leaves rustling with podcasts and other "content" to make a buck off, if it wasn't for that first step. And that view of users as a resource, as people who need to be told what they want, permeates so much of tech... like a giant elephant shitting all over an otherwise quite elegantly made couch.
> "if people would listen to what is more profitable to us, instead of what they enjoy listening to, we would make X more profit".
I was ranting, immaturely, to my ML educated friend recently about how terrible modern discovery algorithms are ("if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?") when he explained this to me.
His response was "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit."
> "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit."
Still in 2016, I could start with a song in genre X and then let Spotify autoplay for hours staying in genre X. I discovered some new bands I liked. Then circa 2017 or 2018 something changed. After a couple of songs, Spotify would switch to genre Y, and break my flow.
I stopped paying for Spotify, and switched to Youtube, then Youtube Music. Youtube Music still does the good old thing, plays random songs staying within the genre I started with.
Maybe Spotify is optimizing for profit, but my money they lost.
Another good example of this is Apple’s “radio station” concept. It plays deep cuts unrelated to the originally chosen music about 3 songs into your list to spread the wealth (play songs with the smallest possible royalty costs).
> if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?"
Has popular sentiment turned against Spotify’s algorithms? I thought their recommendation system was their most-respected feature – in my own experience at least, Discover Weekly continues to be Spotify’s moat.
Cool story, but your friend knowing the answer has nothing to do with his ML education, I suspect, but with his business savvy. I say this because I used to work for a company in the online ads space; they were all knuckleheads but all of them would've told you the same thing.
People always like to figure a conspiracy. It is very unlikely Spotify is optimizing their discovery for profit. Their algorithm is one of their primary selling tools and while it isn't unheard of for brands to fuck their goodwill to increase profit, I just don't see it happening here.
"prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify" — this sounds like Spotify generating the white noise on device or partnering with an app that does so, which seems like a much better use of resources then letting users upload thousands of GB of machine generated audio per week streamed to hundreds of thousands of viewers. I don't think there's much indication at all that the goal is stopping people from listening to white noise and forcing them to listen to other podcasts. And i don't necessarily think they'd be wrong in assessing that this is a very poor use of bandwidth costs, or wrong in thinking that it's one that significantly changed the marginal economics of the platform (auto generated white noise can be uploaded in bulk by computers with no human involvement compared to the time it takes to create even the most bare bones podcast episode, and one "episode" of white noise is indistinguishable from a another for most users, leaving Spotify holding the bag for thousands of hours of back catalog that may never get listened to)
Something that stuck out to me during my time in college business courses is the fact that many teachers are pushing the idea of a manager, director, or other executive roles, into how to understand and allocate resources. One of the resources is humans, either as employees or, in other moments, the users. While clients and investors are more or less seen as another team or "entity"(eg, partner company) that facilitates the use or funding of the project. Just my two cents on what I have seen being thought to the next generation. I don't know how to feel about this. I am interested in others' opinions on this.
This is what enshittification looks like. It's gotten to the point where I only play specific albums I like now. Spotify hates that, as evidenced by how difficult the UI makes it to do.
How is that difficult? I'm wondering if you have a different UI to me, because I can both search an album and then play it, click on the album art from a playing song, or if I want just pin an album and then it behaves like a playlist
But what’s driving people listening to white noise sometimes isn’t enjoyment, right? There have been cases of clear abuse [0] that Spotify is correct to crack down on.
why does a white noise podcast need more than one episode? that's no different than uploading the same episode hundreds of times. it's an attack. except worse because noise is incompressible
In short, white noise is not just one pitch of "TV static".
There can be many pitches in white noise, and also many other types exist: brown noise, pink noise etc.
It also can be mixed in to provide an audio experience.
Human mind is excellent in recognising patterns so if one is using it for sleep/anxiety reduction purposes, it needs variety.
This is why a noise generator producing nature sounds never work, but a fan does.
> as people who need to be told what they want, permeates so much of tech
all under the disguise of 'objective and smart algorithm analysing data' even though it seems that they will always use data to fit their own need, it feels like a digital feudal system
In case you need it, a static page which will give you an infinite amount of white/pink/waterfall noise: https://www.quaxio.com/noise.html
No tracking and no ads, ever.
Uses WebAudio API. Based on the code from https://noisehack.com/generate-noise-web-audio-api/, but for some reason, the code wasn't working as-is in today's browsers. So tweaked things for a couple minutes.
Another one is https://mynoise.net/, which has a neat mode where the sliders will very slowly move on their own, so you get slowly adjusting soundscapes.
I don't know if it works offline though, and probably not when your phone is locked. They also published recordings on spotify though; some are an hour long, others you can probably download them and loop them though. https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv?si=yL...
If you’re using iOS, there’s a built-in system for Background Sounds[0] that has quite a few options, and is built into the OS, which means it definitely still works while your phone is locked, or even otherwise engaged. It even gets out of the way for other audio and comes back very gradually.
This website quite possibly saved my sanity when renting a tiny one bed flat in London with my partner and newborn baby. The traffic noise was unbearable, it was the hottest summer on record and he was a terrible sleeper.
Also, if you donate to mynoise you get some download credits that you can use to get an mp3 of your preferred slider settings. Great option for using it offline and it helps keep the lights on.
Recently iOS included a native noise generator that bypasses the need for external services like Spotify or websites. It offers six different kinds of noise to listen to on your phone.
It’s in the iPhone control center under the ear icon (which you may have to enable). The feature is called ‘background sounds’.
I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.)
This is great!
Might I suggest to add an X button to go back to the menu select. As if you accidentally select one on your phone, you have to refresh instead of hitting back.
Heads up this doesn’t seem to work on my iPhone 12. I confirmed audio on other apps works for me (I’m not accidentally streaming to an earbud or something) but this page doesn’t play any audio.
Under the hood it’s just making calls to Math.random(), so the white noise generated is exactly as reliable a source of randomness as the system as the system could give you directly.
I really wish Spotify would understand the difference between white noise and actual music, using Spotify on my smart speaker when I go to bed playing a continual brown noise loop completely screws up the recommendation algorithm.
YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.
YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.
I feel ya. I usually fall asleep at night to some kind of "10 hour loop of blizzard and crackling fire noises" playing on Youtube... and now my YT recommendations are full of "10 hours of crackling fire", "10 hours of thunderstorm noises", etc. suggestions. Sadly YT is incapable of understanding that I only listen to that stuff when I'm trying to fall asleep and I have zero need of those videos any other time. groan
I mean, sure, I can go in and hand edit my watch history to remove that stuff (and I do occasionally) but doing that constantly is a huge PITA. I wish they could figure out a way to fix this.
At the risk of sounding like a condescending asshole, maybe the problem is your offloading the responsibility of managing your playlist to a third party?
I'm an ancient relic from the nether times who still manages his own locally stored audio files and playlists, so I simply can't relate to this beyond that if you play lazy games you will win lazy prizes.
Nothing wrong with being lazy, of course. But if you want the power to have a satisfactory playlist you kind of need to own up to the responsibility for one.
You don't sound like an asshole, but you do sound oblivious.
There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.
There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).
For what it's worth, you can pretty easily create your own white/brown/pink noise 24h (or any amount of time) in Audacity[0] it's a generator in the menu.
Dude youtube drives me absolutely crazy. I fall asleep to it almost every night watching some documentary or something on say the medieval times or whatever. Specifically a channel I want to keep watching videos from.
Then when I pop up awake at 3am cause of noises youtube's sent me to WW2/Hitler/Nazi videos. It never, ever fails. Sometimes I get sent to this one physics teachers video who I've never once clicked on, watched, or selected myself, but he has an INSANE amount of views like tens of millions. Like, youtube purposely sends videos to him. I forget who it is but it's a dude with long grey/white hair and a beard talking about physics I think from MIT but I dont remember it's been awhile.
Why can't you keep me watching stuff related to what I'm watching?? How do I get from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler?? It's ALWAYS Hitler.
Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.
Look spotify, I did it for you
`if (!song.white_noise) {
add_for_recommend_history_(song);
}`
In a more serious note YouTube has a similar problem, "Oh I looked recommendations for a drawing tablet to buy my friend", now till to the ends of time I get recommendations for drawing tablets, and if I had used the "Incognito mode" they show me ads despite me being a premium user, I want it incognito but not THAT much of incognito you geniuses at Google.
it would surprise me if they didn’t try to handle this. It is similar to the Christmas music in January problem.
With white noise it is so easy to generate for free that likely 1000s of people are generating hordes of static content and uploading it to try to get a payout.
And it’s probably not that easy to identify every track that is intended to be listened to as ambient noise. Ambient noise itself is a music genre.
You can exclude certain playlists from the list of stuff that is considered when creating the recommendations. Tap the three dots on a playlist and tap "Exclude from taste profile".
Heck I just use YouTube-DL to rip tracks like that to MP3 and copy them to my phone to play directly. That said maybe OP just wanted to vent about Spotify rather than find solutions.
> 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
> shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit
I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s
A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones. Is the sum of those wasted ads that's equal to $38 M?
My guess would be the idea is to shift listeners from white noise that Spotify pays royalties for toward white noise that Spotify owns. The hidden factor is ads that don't actually play for Spotify subscribers. The general idea behind paying for an ad-free experience is that royalties and revenue are either paid by subscription fees or by advertisers. The free tier gets ads and the paid tier doesn't. If Spotify shifted users to content they don't pay royalties for, then users wouldn't notice the difference, but behind the scenes Spotify can claim the royalties and ad revenue for itself rather than pay them out to a third party.
For example, if Spotify replaces the podcaster who makes $18k month in royalties with Spotify's own white noise podcast, then the immediate effect is that $18k/month doesn't leave Spotify's pockets.
> A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones.
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …'
I still don't understand. If people like a background noise while sleeping, they will keep having one, be it chill / lounge / etc ... Music. The issue will remain the same.
I can give some insight to this. If you search for white/brown etc. noise on spotify for songs you won't find longer tracks. I use these while travelling if I'm having troubles sleeping in a room where there's noise, or on a plane. Airpods in, lie back and it blocks out more noise. The problem with the albums of white noise are they fade between different kinds of noise which usually only lasts a few mins - this is enough to break the effect. I can only presume there is a limit on song length for albums, because there are white noise podcasts which are 10 hours long - which is exactly what I need for my use-case.
It's stuff like this that resulted in a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts for me with streaming services. I was fed up enough to put a lot of effort into getting my music library onto a NAS and serving it through plexamp. I now have a seamlessly loopable 10 minute long white/pink noise flac file I can play from anywhere and am not beholden to platform lock-in (at least not in the same way as Spotify where my library cannot be taken to another platform, at least not easily). It takes some upfront work and a bit of a hobbyist's attitude towards it but it is extremely rewarding to not be beholden to a platform and to own your own music library.
You just have to look in the bottom drawer of the locked filing cabinet marked "tax returns", in the sub-basement room with a sign on the door saying "beware of the tiger".
Head to your iPhone’s Settings.
Next, tap Accessibility.
On the Accessibility page, find Audio/Visual and select it.
From there, search for “Background Sounds” and toggle it on.
Sorry, somewhat off-topic, but this article is a great example why LLMs will beat old-school web search. Huge article full of stuff you already known of you got there via search and the entire valuable content is just this:
"Here’s how to play white noise on your iPhone, step-by-step:
Head to your iPhone’s Settings.
Next, tap Accessibility.
On the Accessibility page, find Audio/Visual and select it.
From there, search for “Background Sounds” and toggle it on."
There are bands with songs over an hour long on Spotify. Distrokid (the most popular service for independent artists to get on Spotify et al) has no maximum length for song uploads.
I think the real reason is Spotify pays you per "song played" not per minute played. If I listen to Dopesmoker by Sleep, which is an hour long, then I listen to a 60 second white noise clip, both artists get paid an equal amount.
I don't use spotify but I wondered how a length limit would work for some esoteric bands. Shpongle is another one with extremely long songs that wouldn't work if they were chopped up.
I think the argument is that they already have spotify downloaded and are probably already using it. So why NOT use it? Why bother with a dedicated app?
Spotify is also probably more feature-filled than the average crap app thrown on the appstore for quick money as a whitenoise maker. For example the ability to download or send to speakers (like Sonos, Alexa, for example). Plus Spotify has greater selection of noises (yes there are MANY different types of white noise). Plus you can easily switch to your other podcasts and songs when you want.
I for one am an avid whitenoise listener on spotify throughout the day. I will listen to one type of whitenoise in the morning, then listen to a podcast episode, switch to a different type of white noise for a while, then some ambient noises, maybe some actual music around lunchtime, some more soft whitenoise after lunch to focus, another podcast at the end of the day. Doing it all in Spotify has value. Could I switch apps if I had to...? Sure. But a fully-featured music app is a natural place for long tracks of audio, so it makes sense to have it all together.
I don't know if you've ever been in a very noisy environment, but the tinny speakers on your android/iPhone absolutely won't cut it if you need to drown out lower frequency sounds - so for me, it's extremely convenient to be able to instruct my smart speaker to open my Spotify brown noise playlist.
You can buy perfectly loopable white noise tracks on iTunes for $0.99. Permanently yours. Don’t need internet. Looping feature built in into the music app. As a bonus I have a Shortcuts home icon that plays it in a loop and sets focus mode to sleep.
And I have a shortcut that turns on the white noise apple includes on the iPhone for free. No internet, no tracking, no money, and no cluttering music app with white noise track
It might be that Spotify pays per song rather than per minute. Songs have been getting shorter in length because longer songs mean less money for artists.
If you have 10 6 minute songs, someone can only listen to 10 songs in an hour. If you have 20 3 minute songs, someone can listen to double the number of songs in an hour. If you're creating an album of white noise and trying to make the most money from Spotify, you don't want to create a long "song".
Yeah thats the same argument for movies being shorter as well.
Thats why a lot of movies have crept down to 80-90 mins. It allows theaters to fit a whole extra showing into the day, which means more box office revenue. Only the big hits are generally allowed by the studios to be longer (like a Christopher Nolan or James Cameron movie for example).
Because the same thing is true for movies. A theater ticket is going to be $10 regardless of whether the movie is 75 mins or 180 mins. Might as well squeeze more showings out.
I have 6 long hour audio track I found online years ago that i use as white noise. its actually a loop of the Star Trek TNG ambient warp engine thrumming sound effect it not actually random but works for my needs. i just keep it on my pones computers or tablet and play it when i need white noise
"I can only presume there is a limit on song length for albums,"
Definitely not, I have plenty of real songs in my Spotify library that are an hour long or longer. My guess is that it has more to do with how Spotify calculates artist payouts and that white noise "creators" found that they could get 20x the number of views if they split all of their tracks up into 3 minute chunks.
Install SoX and you can generate noise without using any data at all. Even without internet access. Imagine that.
play -n synth 60:00 whitenoise
play -n synth 60:00 pinknoise
play -n synth 60:00 brownnoise
Or make your own wav files:
sox -n whitenoise.wav synth 60:00 whitenoise
# Also works with pinknoise/brownnoise
I wouldn't use lossy compression to compress these. There's no redundant data in noise so lossy compression will just make it less noise-y. I can only imagine that noise on streaming services sounds weird.
A lot of these white noise thread are not just straight up pink / white / brown noise, some of them vary with time to create more soothing effects like wave sounds or sounding like a vacuum etc.
Speaking from experience of trying anything to try get babies to sleep!
I sometimes use the "chroma doze" and generate colored noise with my phone. Playing it over the phone speaker isn't great, but if you need some noise it will do.
If I were Spotify I would include some noise generators and clever sample based waterfall noises in the subscription. People pay money for this already, it's free* market share.
In fact it's actually built into the iPad.
*Obviously it takes time to develop but it would take one smart guy a day so if your team struggles it's on you.
Readit News
They couldn't even have gotten to the point of confusing white noise and leaves rustling with podcasts and other "content" to make a buck off, if it wasn't for that first step. And that view of users as a resource, as people who need to be told what they want, permeates so much of tech... like a giant elephant shitting all over an otherwise quite elegantly made couch.
I was ranting, immaturely, to my ML educated friend recently about how terrible modern discovery algorithms are ("if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?") when he explained this to me.
His response was "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit."
Still in 2016, I could start with a song in genre X and then let Spotify autoplay for hours staying in genre X. I discovered some new bands I liked. Then circa 2017 or 2018 something changed. After a couple of songs, Spotify would switch to genre Y, and break my flow.
I stopped paying for Spotify, and switched to Youtube, then Youtube Music. Youtube Music still does the good old thing, plays random songs staying within the genre I started with.
Maybe Spotify is optimizing for profit, but my money they lost.
Has popular sentiment turned against Spotify’s algorithms? I thought their recommendation system was their most-respected feature – in my own experience at least, Discover Weekly continues to be Spotify’s moat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37159338
Reception wasn't great to say the least.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si...
all under the disguise of 'objective and smart algorithm analysing data' even though it seems that they will always use data to fit their own need, it feels like a digital feudal system
it surely does.
and quite an interesting take on the declaration of independence of cyberspace.
This is a weird reference! Do you, mayhap, have large, boisterous, disliked relatives?
No tracking and no ads, ever.
Uses WebAudio API. Based on the code from https://noisehack.com/generate-noise-web-audio-api/, but for some reason, the code wasn't working as-is in today's browsers. So tweaked things for a couple minutes.
I don't know if it works offline though, and probably not when your phone is locked. They also published recordings on spotify though; some are an hour long, others you can probably download them and loop them though. https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv?si=yL...
If you’re using iOS, there’s a built-in system for Background Sounds[0] that has quite a few options, and is built into the OS, which means it definitely still works while your phone is locked, or even otherwise engaged. It even gets out of the way for other audio and comes back very gradually.
A real hidden gem.
0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212775
It’s in the iPhone control center under the ear icon (which you may have to enable). The feature is called ‘background sounds’.
An app, though, not a website.
My baby will love this
YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.
Also, the soothing crackle makes transmissions from my home planet more distinctive, so I never miss any of the crucial orders relating to my mission:
https://youtu.be/jjeUuakHsLw?t=29s
I feel ya. I usually fall asleep at night to some kind of "10 hour loop of blizzard and crackling fire noises" playing on Youtube... and now my YT recommendations are full of "10 hours of crackling fire", "10 hours of thunderstorm noises", etc. suggestions. Sadly YT is incapable of understanding that I only listen to that stuff when I'm trying to fall asleep and I have zero need of those videos any other time. groan
I mean, sure, I can go in and hand edit my watch history to remove that stuff (and I do occasionally) but doing that constantly is a huge PITA. I wish they could figure out a way to fix this.
I'm an ancient relic from the nether times who still manages his own locally stored audio files and playlists, so I simply can't relate to this beyond that if you play lazy games you will win lazy prizes.
Nothing wrong with being lazy, of course. But if you want the power to have a satisfactory playlist you kind of need to own up to the responsibility for one.
There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.
There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).
[0] https://www.audacityteam.org/
Then when I pop up awake at 3am cause of noises youtube's sent me to WW2/Hitler/Nazi videos. It never, ever fails. Sometimes I get sent to this one physics teachers video who I've never once clicked on, watched, or selected myself, but he has an INSANE amount of views like tens of millions. Like, youtube purposely sends videos to him. I forget who it is but it's a dude with long grey/white hair and a beard talking about physics I think from MIT but I dont remember it's been awhile.
Why can't you keep me watching stuff related to what I'm watching?? How do I get from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler?? It's ALWAYS Hitler.
Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.
Godwin's law
In a more serious note YouTube has a similar problem, "Oh I looked recommendations for a drawing tablet to buy my friend", now till to the ends of time I get recommendations for drawing tablets, and if I had used the "Incognito mode" they show me ads despite me being a premium user, I want it incognito but not THAT much of incognito you geniuses at Google.
With white noise it is so easy to generate for free that likely 1000s of people are generating hordes of static content and uploading it to try to get a payout.
And it’s probably not that easy to identify every track that is intended to be listened to as ambient noise. Ambient noise itself is a music genre.
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Dead Comment
> Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes
> shifting users away from white noise programming could net the company an additional $38 million in profit
I wonder what does Spotify think those people could listen to while sleeping, heavy metal? /s
A problem could be that ads in those stream are wasted unless we discover that sleeping people can be influenced as awake ones. Is the sum of those wasted ads that's equal to $38 M?
For example, if Spotify replaces the podcaster who makes $18k month in royalties with Spotify's own white noise podcast, then the immediate effect is that $18k/month doesn't leave Spotify's pockets.
how can you have copyright on white noise???
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …'
Thanks, I didn't understand what the problem was before, and was thinking "if the white noises still has ads, who cares?"
Anyway, Pandora has essentially "solved" this problem with the "are you still listening?" button that pops ups, so IDK why they don't just do that.
Honestly, there are days when I go to sleep with metal blasting from the ear buds. That can be calming depending on how the day went.
[0] https://www.rd.com/article/iphone-white-noise/
"Here’s how to play white noise on your iPhone, step-by-step:
Head to your iPhone’s Settings. Next, tap Accessibility. On the Accessibility page, find Audio/Visual and select it. From there, search for “Background Sounds” and toggle it on."
I think the real reason is Spotify pays you per "song played" not per minute played. If I listen to Dopesmoker by Sleep, which is an hour long, then I listen to a 60 second white noise clip, both artists get paid an equal amount.
Spotify is also probably more feature-filled than the average crap app thrown on the appstore for quick money as a whitenoise maker. For example the ability to download or send to speakers (like Sonos, Alexa, for example). Plus Spotify has greater selection of noises (yes there are MANY different types of white noise). Plus you can easily switch to your other podcasts and songs when you want.
I for one am an avid whitenoise listener on spotify throughout the day. I will listen to one type of whitenoise in the morning, then listen to a podcast episode, switch to a different type of white noise for a while, then some ambient noises, maybe some actual music around lunchtime, some more soft whitenoise after lunch to focus, another podcast at the end of the day. Doing it all in Spotify has value. Could I switch apps if I had to...? Sure. But a fully-featured music app is a natural place for long tracks of audio, so it makes sense to have it all together.
There are thousands of free apps that do exactly that.
Streaming white noise from Spotify or iTunes seems, to me, incredibly crazy.
If you have 10 6 minute songs, someone can only listen to 10 songs in an hour. If you have 20 3 minute songs, someone can listen to double the number of songs in an hour. If you're creating an album of white noise and trying to make the most money from Spotify, you don't want to create a long "song".
Thats why a lot of movies have crept down to 80-90 mins. It allows theaters to fit a whole extra showing into the day, which means more box office revenue. Only the big hits are generally allowed by the studios to be longer (like a Christopher Nolan or James Cameron movie for example).
Because the same thing is true for movies. A theater ticket is going to be $10 regardless of whether the movie is 75 mins or 180 mins. Might as well squeeze more showings out.
I noticed it too recently, but it's not always this way. A few years ago I could find white noise songs with hours of duration.
Definitely not, I have plenty of real songs in my Spotify library that are an hour long or longer. My guess is that it has more to do with how Spotify calculates artist payouts and that white noise "creators" found that they could get 20x the number of views if they split all of their tracks up into 3 minute chunks.
If you find a shorter one just put the track on repeat and up the cross-fade to like 3s.
Speaking from experience of trying anything to try get babies to sleep!
This is a nice synthetic ocean sound, with "waves":
Or with a little more high end, it sounds like gusts of wind:You stumped me there. Then I got it.
In fact it's actually built into the iPad.
*Obviously it takes time to develop but it would take one smart guy a day so if your team struggles it's on you.