This article is fascinating. But what's on display here is less of a nefarious plan from Spotify to replace famous Katy Perry with AI - instead we get to see something much more specific: a behind-the-scenes of how those endless chill/lo-fi/ambient playlists get created.
Which is something I've always wondered! How does the Lofi Girl channel on Youtube always have so much new music from artists I have never heard from?
The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing). Third-party stock music ("muzak") companies hiring underemployed jazz musicians to crank out a few dozen derivative songs every day to hack the algorithm.
> “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction.”
I think there's an easy and obvious thing we can do - stop listening to playlists! Seek out named jazz artists. Listen to your local jazz station. Go to jazz shows.
For my part, I'm grateful for Spotify's "exclude from taste profile" feature. This lets me leverage my personally-curated "Flowstate" playlist ^1
for hours at a time while I'm working -- tracks that I've hand-picked to facilitate a "getting things done" mindset / energized mood / creativity or go-time vibe, and can stand to listen to on repeat -- without "polluting" my regular music preferences. It's apples and oranges, mostly - there's music I want to listen and attend to (as a guitar player and lifelong avid music listener across many genres including "serious" jazz), and there's audio (which could as easily be programmatically generated / binaural beats, whatever -- eg brain.fm) that I use as a tool specifically to help shape my cognitive state for focus / productivity.
I think it's kind of funny how some people get confused about the fact that there are many reasons to listen to many kinds of music.
When it comes to music discovery on Spotify, the "go to radio" option from a given track or album is a reliable way to surface new-to-me things. I usually prefer this proactive seeking to the playlists spotify's algo generates for me. (shrug)
Alternative take - this might not actually be the worst thing for musicians, to have a low effort, steady paying gig creating music. I am reminded of the documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" about the "Funk Brothers", which was an amorphous group of jazz musicians who did all of the backing tracks for most of the 100s of Motown hits.
Obviously, making ambient tracks is not quite the same as writing "Please Mr. Postman" and hearing your songs on the radio, but in the documentary the band talked about how they'd pump out songs during the day then go to a jazz club at night to make the music they REALLY wanted to make.
> Alternative take - this might not actually be the worst thing for musicians, to have a low effort, steady paying gig creating music.
I think this is a red herring to try to convince people that it's in their best interests to be force-fed content produced by major labels behind the brand {INSERT_ARTIST_NAME}.
Which incidentally it's the business model from major labels.
I mean, check any major labels artist. Each and every single hit song they release has countless writers and producers claiming a stake, not to mention the fact that some major labels artists don't even try to hide the fact they buy all their content from third-parties to slap their name over it.
Is this the state of affairs that's being defended?
Give me a procedurally-generated playlist that I can listen all day long, and skip the content I'm not interested in.
> less of a nefarious plan from Spotify to replace famous Katy Perry with AI
actually, it's the same nefarious plan, just that AI wasn't yet up to the task. Now it is, and replacing those fake artists, who are still human beings as far as we know, with AI (and the same fake resumes) is the logical next step.
To your point, the article even mentions that since the Muzak labels own the master on all these tracks, they are free to use them however they see fit. Which in this case probably means training their AI entirely on their own cleanly licensed music.
They are probably already doing it, slipping in a few AI-generated songs in with the gig-produced music to see how it’s performing.
> Now it is, and replacing those fake artists (...)
They aren't even artists. They release content bought from third-parties, and at most their role is limited to market it. These "artists" are at best brands that are carefully managed and curated.
I think there's an easy and obvious thing we can do - stop listening to playlists! Seek out named jazz artists. Listen to your local jazz station. Go to jazz shows.
Not a musician myself, but I am a live performer. I think live performance will come back into stride for things people do.
Then again, people do livestreaming all the time, but it's a different sort of entertainment compared to people putting up a live show for you for a lack of better term.
I'm in theater, which is challenging because we do things comparable to TV and movies, but with significant physical constraints. And costs constraints, unless you're doing a Broadway musical for which ticket prices are well over $100.
Yet people still come to my shows. I have to charge more than I want to, simply as a matter of real estate. People do still want what we can bring them live. I could not conceivably make a living at it, but there is still value in doing the work and bringing it to people.
Maybe AI will demotivate people from screens. I haven't seen a flood yet, to be sure, but we'll see.
> Which is something I've always wondered! How does the Lofi Girl channel on Youtube always have so much new music from artists I have never heard from?
> The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing).
Sorry to break it to you, but there's actually tones of AI lofi music from Suno all over YouTube right now.
The YouTube link that starts with RJUvNV, titled "(a). sip" IMO, the first track is a banger (I really like it), and it doesn't sound obviously AI.
The second track is more obviously AI, mostly due to the high frequency "dullness". Likewise, the second link iBT051 seems to have the same issue, it's low fidelity (but in a different way than the lo-fi style is).
Ah, see, my experience is exactly the opposite of yours; I don't listen to the ChilledCow streams, but I do listen to the Chillhop playlists (and in fact purchase the seasonal essentials collections on vinyl) and one of the reasons I like them is because there's a lot of curation that goes into the playlist and they tend to feature artists that I end up liking - Blue Wednesday, Purple Cat, Joey Pecararo are all reliable artists in the genre for me.
I want to know how you found this. Why do you say they are good to the artists? I would love to know how you cultivate your feed and from where you get your music information?
I’m not even mad about it. It’s background music and clearly people are enjoying it. Just because they smashed out 15 tracks in a single session doesn’t make it unfit for purpose. That’s just how Jazz music is.
Yeah, this rules, why are we supposed to be angry? It is like WFH for music makers.
Although, I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of really complex and difficult jazz out there (IIRC it is one of the most advanced genres, whatever they means; I don’t do music). But that isn’t what we’re looking for on the chill whatever ambient music channels.
The point is that artists who have <1000 streams get zero pay. This is designed to help prevent payouts and increase profits. 'Deny,' 'defend', and 'depose'.
There is an incredible amount of unique music & artists on Soundcloud. Or at least there was some years ago. I got quite into it, to where it was taking up too much of my time and I stopped using it altogether. They kept making it more difficult to download music too so that was another thing that drove me away.
I'm just pleasantly surprised that this stuff is played by humans at all. Maybe in 20 years we'll see some "best of mid-2020's streaming muzak" compilations pressed on expensive vinyl, like we got with the library music of yore not that long ago.
If your looking for an early community that wants to press vinyl and create an online community, check out kushtybuckrecords, it’s a project me and my son are building, we have friends that own a vinyl press factory (Press On) and we are trying to build an online community that will help Artist create vinyl records
It hasn't been shown that Spotify has no nefarious plan to replace Katy Perry with AI, but what's on display here, what this article is highlighting, is no such thing.
It’s ironic, though, that what we love about playlists like Lofi Girl (endless streams of music that feel fresh yet familiar) is exactly what’s being exploited
I think the question is, what when inevitably someone uses that human music to train an AI generating the same ambient music? Especially when you acquired the music on the cheap using a monopoly position.
Only on your last sentence did I realize you were describing something you thought was actually bad. In my opinion it's a pretty good system where everybody wins: the audience gets real, fresh music, the players get paid for some practice sessions with low pressure (sounds like fun), and the producers make some money. This is a pretty good expression of music as a service in my opinion.
This business model goes way back, to long before streaming.
The Seeburg 1000 [1] was a background music player sold to restaurants and stores. Like Musak, it was a service, but used a local player. New sets of disks were delivered once a month or so. 1000 songs in a set, hence the name.
The music was recorded by Seeburg's own orchestra, using songs either in the public domain or for which they had purchased unlimited rights. Just like the modern "ghost artists". So this business model goes back to the 1950s.
The records had a form of copy protection - nonstandard RPM, nonstandard size, nonstandard hole size, nonstandard groove width. So they didn't file copyrights on all this material. As a result, there are sites on the web streaming old Seeburg 1000 content.
Seeburg made jukeboxes with random access, but the background player was simpler - it just played a big stack of records over and over.
It's rather low-fi, because the records were 16 2/3 RPM, which limits frequency response.
"As early as 1906, the Cahill Telharmonium Company of New York attempted to sell musical entertainment (produced by Dr. Thaddeus Cahill's "Telharmonium," an early synthesizer) to subscribers through the telephone"
The business failed miserably, but the Telharmonium is remembered as an early electronic music instrument.
The Telharmonium dated from the "if only we had gain" era of pre-electronics. The thing was a huge collection of sizable AC generators running at different
frequencies, run through a keyboard, and mixed with transformers. With no way to amplify a small signal, there was no way to downsize the thing. Once amps were invented, the Hammond Organ, with its tone wheels, was the same concept in a piano-sized package.
Fun fact: there was a brief period after music recording, but before copies could be made with much quality, where if you wanted them to sound halfway decent each recording had to be a unique performance. Studio musicians were paid to perform popular songs over and over. When making copies became more feasible, there was backlash from some musicians, both for financial and artistic reasons - not unlike when recorded music started becoming popular in the first place. Not hard to see the similarities with modern distribution woes like piracy and streaming too.
There is least one other common "bulk music factory" business model like this. Bands like Two Steps from Hell cranked out a whole lot of simple and generic "epic music" that didn't need to be licensed per use, with the purpose being studios could use in trailers for action movies and video games before the real scores were finished.
Amusingly, even though the band existed for the purpose of supplying music for trailers, they eventually became popular enough on the Internet that fans convinced them to release a couple albums and even play live shows.
Different legal environment. Until 1908, player piano companies didn't have to pay royalties to composers. See White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co..[1] So, in its growth period, the player piano industry didn't need to acquire music rights.
Then Congress changed the law, to create the "mechanical license" right to play out the song from a storage device.
Seeburg had the whole concept - blah music intended only for background use, total ownership of the content, several different playlists for industrial, commercial, and dining settings, and their own distribution system.
Their main competitor was Muzak, which started delivering blah music in 1934, and, after much M&A activity and bankruptcies, is still around as Mood Media.[2] Muzak won out, because they could deliver content over phone likes or an FM broadcast subcarrier, rather than shipping out all those records.
Here's a free stream from a Seeburg 1000, from Radio Coast.[1]
> So they didn't file copyrights on all this material.
Huh? I'm really surprised to see this misconception cropping up here of all places. You don't have to "file copyright". It's automatically attached to anything and everything anyone creates as long as it meets some threshold of originality.
I run a label that has direct deals with certain major DSPs. We do over a billion streams a year.
The entire “wellness” music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.
I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. It’s a volume play. I’ve made tracks that I’m quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.
It’s a wild system but we’ve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.
Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.
Just curious, what kind of software do you use, and / or, what is this category of music based on? Brian Eno and the ambient movement as a whole?
It sounds like the kinda thing that'll earn you a paycheck, but not fame. Or the kind of fame that can land you work from e.g. Spotify, not the kind of fame that'll fill up concert halls.
I think it's a sobering look into the music industry (not just your whole comment but the article + comments); the perception is that if you're not filling up concert halls then you don't matter, but the truth is that good or successful music does not necessitate the accompanying fame or "interesting" personality / personal branding.
there are artists that are famous without "filling up concert halls", or even having that much of a scale of an audience. success doesn't have to be this frankly obsolete and obtusely singular idea of it. for a lot of music and artists that were brought up and got popular on the internet, and for the people who listen to them, this "concert fame" is completely irrelevant. i bet that it's almost inverse for a certain kind of listener who either just doesn't go to concerts, or can't, and/or simply enjoy listening music in their own manner of comfort.
You & others may not like it. It may not align with your ethos or your peers' norms. But I see nothing ethically, morally or legally wrong with parent's comment...
On one hand, it’s a way to guarantee visibility and streams... On the other, it seems like another symptom of how streaming has commodified music... (I'm talking about the reduced payouts for preferential playlist treatment)
I honestly don't give a shit about music nor artists. Never have. But I'm at the gym about 3 hours a week and need a soundtrack so I like to listen to synthwave that the Spotify AI recommends me.
Spotify seems to trigger the hell out of music purists...
I am the only one to be a bit upset by the term "fake artist"?
While AI is evoked, this is not what is talked about here. The article mentions Epidemic Sound, and looking at their page, it "doesn’t currently use generative AI to create music".
It means that we are talking about real people here, there is nothing fake about them and their work, what they do takes skill and effort. That they focus on quantity over quality and are under-recognized does not make them "fake". Otherwise, I bet most of us would be called "fake engineers".
They are given fake names and identities in the platform in a deliberate intent to mislead the audience, deprive the real author of credit, and hide the real source of the work the major record labels. “Fake artist” is a generous term.
what is an artist name, alias, etc. if not a fake name? should people be forced to put their government id name on display to be deemed real artists?
there are some genres in which making up artist names, even just for a one-off release, is almost the point and part of the fun of making music. should artists be forced to release music under one name exclusively as well?
One of the producers in the article describes making the music as “brain-numbing” and “pretty much completely joyless.” The process is described as “...I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.”
He's not a fake musician by any means. But I think he'd accept the work he creates for this being described as fake 'art' specifically. There's no thought, meaning, or passion injected into it. It's a conveyor belt. It's based on analytics. It's soulless.
So its an office job? I know people who makes this exact music described in the article and it's part of their daily work to earn a living as music producers. Other musicians play weddings for example. It's not fake. But you don't put your serious artist name on a track like for a chill muzak stream. Music is a product that fills many categories and I salute the ones that can find ways to earn a living doing with their passion. Some of the time you do a routine and other time you follow your dream
Isn't this just like how supermarkets have their "house brands" that compete with name brands? If your consumption of music amounts to "whatever Spotify tells me to listen to" then chances are you were the type of person who used to just have the radio on for background noise anyway.
EDIT: If you think about this "scandal" in reverse, that is that Spotify was started as a background, inert restaurant playlist app that paid session musicians to record 50 songs a day for lo-fi chill ambient jazz playlists, and later tried to expand their reach by allowing musicians to upload their songs, it wouldn't be a scandal at all.
> Isn't this just like how supermarkets have their "house brands" that compete with name brands? I
1) A supermarket does not bill itself as a neutral discovery platform. It's not comparable to Spotify.
2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).
3) Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
Supermarkets sell promotional space and in some cases access to have products even appear in store, either through discounts on the wholesale price or straight up charging for it. They absolutely tilt things in favour of their own brands, and in some supermarkets in some categories don't stock any non house brands.
Spotify has discovered there is a big market for music where the quality isn't that important and they can serve it themselves. Same as supermarkets do with many products.
> What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
That's a terrible analogy.
Spotify has tons of ways to access the real artists. Often including dedicated playlists for each one of them. They show up in search. In related arists. In radio playlists. In top music playlists. Etc.
Spotify isn't taking anything "off the shelf". A more apt analogy is a grocery store with a dedicated section for store-brand goods only. Where everything's still normally on the shelves where you expect -- nothing has been taken off the shelf -- but you can also visit the store-brand-only section.
It's hard to see why that would be a bad thing for a supermarket to do.
> 1) A supermarket does not bill itself as a neutral discovery platform.
Neither does Spotify? It's the "pay once, listen to anything, more convenient than Torrents" thing; discovery sucks everywhere anyway.
> 2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).
Yeah, but then if you read it carefully, you may be surprised to learn that the Premium Brand Cereal X, and the Value-Add store-brand cereal, are literally the same thing, made in the same factory, differing only in packaging and price (and perhaps in quality brackets).
Perhaps like with supermarkets, if Spotify users cared more about provenance, they'd realize that the same people are doing the 'high art' hits and cranking out supermarket music - that the preference for "high art" of specific bands may have nothing to do with quality of art, but rather is just falling for the brand marketing.
So perhaps musicians were better off with Spotify not drawing users' attention to the in-store background and to who made it.
> Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
I can't help but think that this is not a problem that actually exists, because a supermarket that keeps brand products forever in the stocking room in favor of in-house brands, would be much better off not ordering the brand product in the first place. Why pay money for product that you're not going to sell anyway, and lose the storage space too?
The dynamics of what's happening with in-house vs. outside brands in stores are quite complex, as are the underlying reasons, but I argue it all has very little to do with discovery.
If a upscale steak restaurant is known for using quality meats and then they decide to include something like Beyond Meat but make it hard to tell that's what you're ordering.
If you walk into a steakhouse and order the porterhouse and you get taco bell Beefy™ meat, that's one thing. If you pay the restaurant a monthly retainer to feed you steak whenever you feel like wandering in and you get such treatment, you weren't really ripped off.
Someone tells Spotify "I want to listen to the latest Lil yachty album" and it plays, expectations were met. Someone says "play whatever I just need background noise", expectations were also met. You can't ask for elevator music and be upset that that's what you get. The fact that you can still pay a flat monthly rate and get access to almost any music you'd want to hear, that's like still getting the porterhouse every day for a monthly fee. That's amazing and fantastic. Don't expect it to last much longer. And don't ask for the soup of the day if you want something fresh.
Beyond Meat is a weird analogy here. It's relatively expensive, and having a Beoynd Meat alternative to steaks would open up new markets (vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, groups of people who include vegans and vegetarians and pescatarians) so it's something restaurants tend to feature prominently on their menues as a vegan or vegetarian alternative.
A better alternative would be a steak restaurant known for using quality meats and then they decide to include cheap meat to reduce cost, and not make it clear that that's what you're ordering.
In that specific scenario, if the customers can't tell, I'd say the beyond meat option is better: still gives you the experience, the proteins, less cruelty and better for the environment. Win win to me.
Unlike here the topic in question, I'd assume cows too would prefer you having a beyond meat instead of them. But I'm just projecting, I'm not actually sure about that.
> If a upscale steak restaurant is known for using quality meats and then they decide to include something like Beyond Meat but make it hard to tell that's what you're ordering.
That sounds like an analogy worth belabouring!!
I think this is more like if you had an upscale steak restaurant and then they opened up a series of food trucks that used the same branding but sold sausages instead.
If you are a Spotify user please make an active effort to seek and listen to artists _albums_. Playlist are a worse experience (unless you make them) and only play into Spotify's pocket.
A few key points with albums:
- You are listening to the artists vision/journey. The songs are not played in isolation but as part of a collective arrangement.
- Artists get payed more per play than individual songs.
- Albums don't degrade like playlists which can be changed by users or spotify to inject some newer commercial push.
> - You are listening to the artists vision/journey. The songs are not played in isolation but as part of a collective arrangement.
I think this is less of the case nowadays. The latest albums I've listened to have all been just a complication of the artist's latest EPs with a couple of new tracks.
This tends to be true of mamy of the artists that chart, but less so for indie bands. I see Major Parkinson's Blackbox and Magna Carta Cartel's The Dying Option as two of the best albums of the century so far, for example.
That's nothing new though, a lot of the big name artists' albums are a collection of most of their singles (idk how the album vs single market works); e.g. Taylor Swift with 7 singles made from the 13 tracks on '1989'.
I don't know what is normal, but releasing singles or EPs before the full album seems like a common way to generate hype beforehand. Also, the Spotify model - assuming against what the previous comment says and every stream counts for the same revenue - doesn't differentiate between singles, EPs or albums, so it's whatever from that point of view. I've seen a few artists start releasing demos, songs-that-didn't-quite-make-it, and all kinds of unusual material that wasn't good enough for a full album onto streaming platforms, which then ends up in the long tail of their repertoire. It ties in with the article though, in that these songs will also start appearing in the playlists related to those artists.
Another interesting one is a single artist releasing songs under different names; Devin Townsend comes to mind, who can fill up a related playlist with songs released under his own name, Strapping Young Lad, Devin Townsend Band, Devin Townsend Project, Casualties of Cool, etc. And given he does many different genres, he'd appear - theoretically - on many different styles of playlists too, although I think the algorithm would get confused when the artist name gets associated with both hourlong ambient tracks and seven minute chaos metal genre mashups.
I would recommend switching to Apple Music if you want to stream. They're continuing to lean into the idea of human curation (with the launch of three new live radio stations this month) and I find their human curated playlists lead to me discovering a lot more music I like than Spotify's. Apple Music also works well with local files so music you purchase of Bandcamp, bootlegs etc. will work across devices.
Is the software still garbo on Windows and Android? Last I tried it, it would crash after a couple hours and I have no valid airplay targets in my home. They were generous about the 2 month trial but I only needed 2 hours to realize that I wasn't the target market.
For all of spotify's faults, it runs on EVERYTHING and Spotify Connect is effectively borderless.
Do they really get paid more “per play” on an album vs. a playlist? That seems quite tricky to figure out the accounting.
Is it as simple as per play? I only know what’s posted on the loud and clear website but stream share isn’t quite the same thing from what they’re saying in the FAQ.
I used to think like this, but no longer. Honestly, in an average album, there may only be 2-4 tracks that are excellent and the rest are just OK. This is a pretty common pattern and you can see reflected in the number of streams for each song. As for the album being the artists collective vision, I don't know that that is true. Maybe it is for something like Pink Floyd, but I get the impression most songs are written in isolation, rather than being a part of a collective vision.
In the end, why waste time listening to something you only half enjoy?
Another thing that happens with Spotify playlist is that someone will post something like:
"epic hip hop bangers"
Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.
That's why I typically only listen either to whole albums on spotify, or DJ sets on soundcloud or youtube. There are too many individual human beings out there with great taste to bother with the algorithmic stuff.
I don't know if it's still common but I used to run into this with album playlists on Youtube: all the tracks from something famous and then the creator's tracks tacked on the end.
> Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.
Not sure if I understand your argument. Is it the following: "epic hip hop bangers 1-13 and 15-23" are the boring millionth replay of all the genre-defining tracks of the past 40 years, and only tracks 14 and 24 are the precious new finds? If that is the argument, I totally agree.
The way I understand it is that the 14th song is not a banger, but a song put between well known, good songs, to boost its number of streams.
I’ve noticed it a few times, I was listening to something like “best of 80s” and a few tracks were from the same band that I couldn’t find any info about. So my guess was that the creator of the list put some of the songs they (or their friends) made, then those songs got millions of streams just because they were on that playlist even though they had nothing to do with the expected content. It’s either for the money or maybe PR to make an impression that the band is popular
I mean that's not unusual either I suppose, it's a self promo strategy. Spotify does it themselves as well, mixing in relatively unknown artists into generated playlists to give them a bit more exposure which they would never get if "existing popularity" was the metric to include them in generated playlists. The article implies that artists can accept lower royalty payments to get more exposure like that too, so it's intentional by Spotify and the artists themselves. I mean personally I don't care for it, but good for them.
What I really don't like is the spam where they add a random well-known artist's name to their song to make it look like it's a collaboration, but it's either a low effort cover or has absolutely nothing to do with it. At least I've stopped gettring random basement mumble rap in generated metal playlists.
Are you seeing that on individual playlists created by users or official Spotify playlists? I’ve only seen the former so far trying to get their band exposure, etc by making a playlist popular.
> The entire history of the music business is one of attorneys developing ever more inventive ways of screwing over musicians.
Meta: this feels like a similar problem as doctors and nurses vs administrators, teachers/professors vs administrators, devs vs management, and I’m sure there are others. The latter group takes a disproportionate share of profit, and claims it is justified because of the responsibility.
> it seems like most Spotify listeners don't care.
I am the kind of listeners that care, but to be honest, indeed most people don't care, and what Spotify does is taking advantage of that fact which makes business sense.
Most people just listen to "chill music" and never care to find out the musicians behind the tracks. They may not even realize that lots of tracks sound very similar (for good reason -- they are created by the same musician[s]). They just need some music while studying/working.
I play instruments myself, and I force myself to listen to many different styles of music and delve deep into artists' works, so that I can be a better (amateur) musician. I don't listen to Spotify "chill" playlists, not just because of the practice described in this article, but because I could actually tell that the music was repetitive and low effort, and I can never find more albums made by those musicians when I occasionally find a track that I find interesting. Can you expect other listeners to think this way? No.
I got a cab some months ago with a young driver, he'd play a playlist, scrub the song to jump around the 01:00 mark, listen to 30-45s of the chorus, scrub again to find the 2nd chorus, and skip the song afterwards.
Well I care and I would rather use model where my subsbcription gets distributed only to musicians I listen to. As a side effect, all these ghost/fake frauds for milking money would cease to exist.
Same. I buy mp3s from bandcamp, and upload them to (currently) Google Music (or whatever they decided to call it now), after backing them up to my hard drive.
How much of my money am I supposed to fork over to streaming companies? Tidal, Qobuz, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Apple. And how much work am I supposed to invest in migrating my playlists between them? I don't want to invest my time in digging through every new artist (SoundCloud?), at the same time, I occasionally find a deep rabbithole I want to go down. How do I go spelunking if the archive isn't deep and rich?
The same way as it was always done: through effort.
Before you'd need to visit different record stores, hitting one every few days to check their latest in catalogue. Find the hidden boxes with low print releases, listen on a player and skip the needle around track grooves. Or have good friends recommending you stuff.
It got easier but I think we need to realise to find the signal on a sea of noise will probably require effort for a long time. Given time enough every new information discovery tool gets flooded by the noise, almost like a form of entropy.
> The sad thing (for artists) is that it seems like most Spotify listeners don't care.
The standard risk model for a musical artist is massive-upfront-investment-for-a-tiny-chance-of-payoff-someday. A different model with smaller rewards and lower risks isn't "sad" - if it had existed 30 years ago I might be a professional musician today instead of an engineer
If a customer wants endless elevator music, then I don't think that Spotify is wrong to generate endless elevator music for them. The problem is deception. If you want to listen to human performances, then Spotify should give you choice instead of hoping you don't notice.
Free market means you can vote with your wallet. If you don't, then it says less about markets and more about our stated vs revealed preferences. Maybe we just don't care if real artists go away.
The music industry relies on government supported copyrights. Music is often unsaleable unless you have an existing exclusive contract with the label. Royalty rates are set by the government.
We're pretty far away from any actual "free market" here.
In all honesty, do you think most Spotify listeners or even Apple music listeners have a decent understanding of the model in which artists are paid? Or an understanding that isn't from the mouth of said company?
To say we don't care is akin to saying most people don't care about how they contribute to child labor/exploitation, wage theft, global warming by buying and using products that contribute to those things. It's not that people don't care its that people don't have a reason to suspect is nefarious, nor do they feel the impact of it.
I see musicians on music videos, on radio and touring, how am I supposed to know they're severely disadvantaged when I listen to their music on a streaming platform?
That applies to the users of the software that I write.
It's not their job to care. They like what they like, regardless of how it got there.
If they prefer junk software, shat out by dependency-addicted clowns, it's usually because it gives them what they need/want. I can get all huffy and elitist, but it won't change the facts on the ground: users prefer the junk. That's their right, and there's always someone willing to drop the bar, if it will make them money/prestige.
It's up to me, to produce stuff that gets users to prefer mine, over theirs. That means that I need to take the time to understand the users of my software, and develop stuff that meets their needs, at a price (which isn't just money -if my software is difficult to use, that's also a price) that the user is willing to pay.
Of course, in today's world, promotion and eye-candy can also affect what users prefer. Marketing, advertising, astroturfing reviews or GH stars, whatever, can affect what end-users prefer. I also need to keep that in mind.
> The sad thing (for artists) is that it seems like most Spotify listeners don't care.
Why would/should they care? They are touted a service where you pay a monthly fee, and you get to consume anything they have. So now you're suggesting that music consumers are going to look for sustainably sourced music too?
As you've said, most people "like" music to have in the background, but are not music aficionados that look for anything other than whatever their influencer of choice says is trendy.
Readit News
Which is something I've always wondered! How does the Lofi Girl channel on Youtube always have so much new music from artists I have never heard from?
The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing). Third-party stock music ("muzak") companies hiring underemployed jazz musicians to crank out a few dozen derivative songs every day to hack the algorithm.
> “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction.”
I think there's an easy and obvious thing we can do - stop listening to playlists! Seek out named jazz artists. Listen to your local jazz station. Go to jazz shows.
For my part, I'm grateful for Spotify's "exclude from taste profile" feature. This lets me leverage my personally-curated "Flowstate" playlist ^1 for hours at a time while I'm working -- tracks that I've hand-picked to facilitate a "getting things done" mindset / energized mood / creativity or go-time vibe, and can stand to listen to on repeat -- without "polluting" my regular music preferences. It's apples and oranges, mostly - there's music I want to listen and attend to (as a guitar player and lifelong avid music listener across many genres including "serious" jazz), and there's audio (which could as easily be programmatically generated / binaural beats, whatever -- eg brain.fm) that I use as a tool specifically to help shape my cognitive state for focus / productivity.
I think it's kind of funny how some people get confused about the fact that there are many reasons to listen to many kinds of music.
When it comes to music discovery on Spotify, the "go to radio" option from a given track or album is a reliable way to surface new-to-me things. I usually prefer this proactive seeking to the playlists spotify's algo generates for me. (shrug)
1. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
This is my first time being made aware of this. Fantastic option that more websites should adopt
It has always boggled my mind that this point seems to be lost on every music streaming service.
Obviously, making ambient tracks is not quite the same as writing "Please Mr. Postman" and hearing your songs on the radio, but in the documentary the band talked about how they'd pump out songs during the day then go to a jazz club at night to make the music they REALLY wanted to make.
I think this is a red herring to try to convince people that it's in their best interests to be force-fed content produced by major labels behind the brand {INSERT_ARTIST_NAME}.
Which incidentally it's the business model from major labels.
I mean, check any major labels artist. Each and every single hit song they release has countless writers and producers claiming a stake, not to mention the fact that some major labels artists don't even try to hide the fact they buy all their content from third-parties to slap their name over it.
Is this the state of affairs that's being defended?
Give me a procedurally-generated playlist that I can listen all day long, and skip the content I'm not interested in.
actually, it's the same nefarious plan, just that AI wasn't yet up to the task. Now it is, and replacing those fake artists, who are still human beings as far as we know, with AI (and the same fake resumes) is the logical next step.
They are probably already doing it, slipping in a few AI-generated songs in with the gig-produced music to see how it’s performing.
They aren't even artists. They release content bought from third-parties, and at most their role is limited to market it. These "artists" are at best brands that are carefully managed and curated.
Not a musician myself, but I am a live performer. I think live performance will come back into stride for things people do.
Then again, people do livestreaming all the time, but it's a different sort of entertainment compared to people putting up a live show for you for a lack of better term.
I am hoping to do it next year.
Yet people still come to my shows. I have to charge more than I want to, simply as a matter of real estate. People do still want what we can bring them live. I could not conceivably make a living at it, but there is still value in doing the work and bringing it to people.
Maybe AI will demotivate people from screens. I haven't seen a flood yet, to be sure, but we'll see.
> The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing).
Sorry to break it to you, but there's actually tones of AI lofi music from Suno all over YouTube right now.
See this video for an explanation: https://youtu.be/_oxtFP2UUyM
And here are some examples of the content:
https://youtu.be/RJUvNVCqtpIhttps://youtu.be/iBt051Pq7_4
The second track is more obviously AI, mostly due to the high frequency "dullness". Likewise, the second link iBT051 seems to have the same issue, it's low fidelity (but in a different way than the lo-fi style is).
Psalm Trees, an artist with them, just put out an interesting little 'double'-ish album here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmL9LvTYjMQ
He produced a whole jazz album just so he could sample from it for a lofi album. Absolutely mental workload.
There's a lot of crap in lofi, but also some real 'bangers' too : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3yBo2szD8 (yes, really, 10 hours of great work, IMHO)
Although, I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of really complex and difficult jazz out there (IIRC it is one of the most advanced genres, whatever they means; I don’t do music). But that isn’t what we’re looking for on the chill whatever ambient music channels.
Has that been shown?
This probably applies to most mainstream entertainment.
I think the question is, what when inevitably someone uses that human music to train an AI generating the same ambient music? Especially when you acquired the music on the cheap using a monopoly position.
There are also websites and apps like Suno that make whatever you want on the fly.
The music was recorded by Seeburg's own orchestra, using songs either in the public domain or for which they had purchased unlimited rights. Just like the modern "ghost artists". So this business model goes back to the 1950s.
The records had a form of copy protection - nonstandard RPM, nonstandard size, nonstandard hole size, nonstandard groove width. So they didn't file copyrights on all this material. As a result, there are sites on the web streaming old Seeburg 1000 content.
Seeburg made jukeboxes with random access, but the background player was simpler - it just played a big stack of records over and over. It's rather low-fi, because the records were 16 2/3 RPM, which limits frequency response.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Y6OKy4AMc
"As early as 1906, the Cahill Telharmonium Company of New York attempted to sell musical entertainment (produced by Dr. Thaddeus Cahill's "Telharmonium," an early synthesizer) to subscribers through the telephone"
The business failed miserably, but the Telharmonium is remembered as an early electronic music instrument.
History of pre-transistor electronics:
- If only we had voltage.
- If only we had current.
- If only we had rectification.
- If only we had gain.
- If only we had frequency.
- If only we had power gain.
- If only we had reliability.
- If only we had precision.
- If only we had counting.
Amusingly, even though the band existed for the purpose of supplying music for trailers, they eventually became popular enough on the Internet that fans convinced them to release a couple albums and even play live shows.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-Smith_Music_Publishing_C....
Their main competitor was Muzak, which started delivering blah music in 1934, and, after much M&A activity and bankruptcies, is still around as Mood Media.[2] Muzak won out, because they could deliver content over phone likes or an FM broadcast subcarrier, rather than shipping out all those records.
Here's a free stream from a Seeburg 1000, from Radio Coast.[1]
[1] http://198.178.121.76:8157/stream
[2] https://us.moodmedia.com/sound/music-for-business/
Huh? I'm really surprised to see this misconception cropping up here of all places. You don't have to "file copyright". It's automatically attached to anything and everything anyone creates as long as it meets some threshold of originality.
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The entire “wellness” music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.
I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. It’s a volume play. I’ve made tracks that I’m quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.
It’s a wild system but we’ve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.
Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.
It sounds like the kinda thing that'll earn you a paycheck, but not fame. Or the kind of fame that can land you work from e.g. Spotify, not the kind of fame that'll fill up concert halls.
I think it's a sobering look into the music industry (not just your whole comment but the article + comments); the perception is that if you're not filling up concert halls then you don't matter, but the truth is that good or successful music does not necessitate the accompanying fame or "interesting" personality / personal branding.
You & others may not like it. It may not align with your ethos or your peers' norms. But I see nothing ethically, morally or legally wrong with parent's comment...
Is it that far from payola?
Spotify seems to trigger the hell out of music purists...
While AI is evoked, this is not what is talked about here. The article mentions Epidemic Sound, and looking at their page, it "doesn’t currently use generative AI to create music".
It means that we are talking about real people here, there is nothing fake about them and their work, what they do takes skill and effort. That they focus on quantity over quality and are under-recognized does not make them "fake". Otherwise, I bet most of us would be called "fake engineers".
there are some genres in which making up artist names, even just for a one-off release, is almost the point and part of the fun of making music. should artists be forced to release music under one name exclusively as well?
He's not a fake musician by any means. But I think he'd accept the work he creates for this being described as fake 'art' specifically. There's no thought, meaning, or passion injected into it. It's a conveyor belt. It's based on analytics. It's soulless.
the people are indeed real (well, for now, but soon to be replaced with AI -- it's the logical next step)
what is fake is that the bios are not who those people are; it's like me putting on my bio that I went to Julliard
EDIT: If you think about this "scandal" in reverse, that is that Spotify was started as a background, inert restaurant playlist app that paid session musicians to record 50 songs a day for lo-fi chill ambient jazz playlists, and later tried to expand their reach by allowing musicians to upload their songs, it wouldn't be a scandal at all.
1) A supermarket does not bill itself as a neutral discovery platform. It's not comparable to Spotify.
2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).
3) Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
Spotify has discovered there is a big market for music where the quality isn't that important and they can serve it themselves. Same as supermarkets do with many products.
That's a terrible analogy.
Spotify has tons of ways to access the real artists. Often including dedicated playlists for each one of them. They show up in search. In related arists. In radio playlists. In top music playlists. Etc.
Spotify isn't taking anything "off the shelf". A more apt analogy is a grocery store with a dedicated section for store-brand goods only. Where everything's still normally on the shelves where you expect -- nothing has been taken off the shelf -- but you can also visit the store-brand-only section.
It's hard to see why that would be a bad thing for a supermarket to do.
Neither does Spotify? It's the "pay once, listen to anything, more convenient than Torrents" thing; discovery sucks everywhere anyway.
> 2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).
Yeah, but then if you read it carefully, you may be surprised to learn that the Premium Brand Cereal X, and the Value-Add store-brand cereal, are literally the same thing, made in the same factory, differing only in packaging and price (and perhaps in quality brackets).
Perhaps like with supermarkets, if Spotify users cared more about provenance, they'd realize that the same people are doing the 'high art' hits and cranking out supermarket music - that the preference for "high art" of specific bands may have nothing to do with quality of art, but rather is just falling for the brand marketing.
So perhaps musicians were better off with Spotify not drawing users' attention to the in-store background and to who made it.
> Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
I can't help but think that this is not a problem that actually exists, because a supermarket that keeps brand products forever in the stocking room in favor of in-house brands, would be much better off not ordering the brand product in the first place. Why pay money for product that you're not going to sell anyway, and lose the storage space too?
The dynamics of what's happening with in-house vs. outside brands in stores are quite complex, as are the underlying reasons, but I argue it all has very little to do with discovery.
If a upscale steak restaurant is known for using quality meats and then they decide to include something like Beyond Meat but make it hard to tell that's what you're ordering.
Expectations were set.
Personally I have no issue with it.
Someone tells Spotify "I want to listen to the latest Lil yachty album" and it plays, expectations were met. Someone says "play whatever I just need background noise", expectations were also met. You can't ask for elevator music and be upset that that's what you get. The fact that you can still pay a flat monthly rate and get access to almost any music you'd want to hear, that's like still getting the porterhouse every day for a monthly fee. That's amazing and fantastic. Don't expect it to last much longer. And don't ask for the soup of the day if you want something fresh.
A better alternative would be a steak restaurant known for using quality meats and then they decide to include cheap meat to reduce cost, and not make it clear that that's what you're ordering.
Unlike here the topic in question, I'd assume cows too would prefer you having a beyond meat instead of them. But I'm just projecting, I'm not actually sure about that.
That sounds like an analogy worth belabouring!!
I think this is more like if you had an upscale steak restaurant and then they opened up a series of food trucks that used the same branding but sold sausages instead.
In reverse: Many dictators killed millions of their own people, but then completely stopped and began building roads for the people instead.
A few key points with albums:
- You are listening to the artists vision/journey. The songs are not played in isolation but as part of a collective arrangement.
- Artists get payed more per play than individual songs.
- Albums don't degrade like playlists which can be changed by users or spotify to inject some newer commercial push.
I think this is less of the case nowadays. The latest albums I've listened to have all been just a complication of the artist's latest EPs with a couple of new tracks.
I don't know what is normal, but releasing singles or EPs before the full album seems like a common way to generate hype beforehand. Also, the Spotify model - assuming against what the previous comment says and every stream counts for the same revenue - doesn't differentiate between singles, EPs or albums, so it's whatever from that point of view. I've seen a few artists start releasing demos, songs-that-didn't-quite-make-it, and all kinds of unusual material that wasn't good enough for a full album onto streaming platforms, which then ends up in the long tail of their repertoire. It ties in with the article though, in that these songs will also start appearing in the playlists related to those artists.
Another interesting one is a single artist releasing songs under different names; Devin Townsend comes to mind, who can fill up a related playlist with songs released under his own name, Strapping Young Lad, Devin Townsend Band, Devin Townsend Project, Casualties of Cool, etc. And given he does many different genres, he'd appear - theoretically - on many different styles of playlists too, although I think the algorithm would get confused when the artist name gets associated with both hourlong ambient tracks and seven minute chaos metal genre mashups.
I would recommend switching to Apple Music if you want to stream. They're continuing to lean into the idea of human curation (with the launch of three new live radio stations this month) and I find their human curated playlists lead to me discovering a lot more music I like than Spotify's. Apple Music also works well with local files so music you purchase of Bandcamp, bootlegs etc. will work across devices.
For all of spotify's faults, it runs on EVERYTHING and Spotify Connect is effectively borderless.
Is it as simple as per play? I only know what’s posted on the loud and clear website but stream share isn’t quite the same thing from what they’re saying in the FAQ.
In the end, why waste time listening to something you only half enjoy?
"epic hip hop bangers"
Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.
That's why I typically only listen either to whole albums on spotify, or DJ sets on soundcloud or youtube. There are too many individual human beings out there with great taste to bother with the algorithmic stuff.
Not sure if I understand your argument. Is it the following: "epic hip hop bangers 1-13 and 15-23" are the boring millionth replay of all the genre-defining tracks of the past 40 years, and only tracks 14 and 24 are the precious new finds? If that is the argument, I totally agree.
I’ve noticed it a few times, I was listening to something like “best of 80s” and a few tracks were from the same band that I couldn’t find any info about. So my guess was that the creator of the list put some of the songs they (or their friends) made, then those songs got millions of streams just because they were on that playlist even though they had nothing to do with the expected content. It’s either for the money or maybe PR to make an impression that the band is popular
What I really don't like is the spam where they add a random well-known artist's name to their song to make it look like it's a collaboration, but it's either a low effort cover or has absolutely nothing to do with it. At least I've stopped gettring random basement mumble rap in generated metal playlists.
The sad thing (for artists) is that it seems like most Spotify listeners don't care.
Most of our music consumption today seems to be as a kind of background vibe rather than an appreciation of the music itself.
Meta: this feels like a similar problem as doctors and nurses vs administrators, teachers/professors vs administrators, devs vs management, and I’m sure there are others. The latter group takes a disproportionate share of profit, and claims it is justified because of the responsibility.
I see these asymmetries everywhere now.
I am the kind of listeners that care, but to be honest, indeed most people don't care, and what Spotify does is taking advantage of that fact which makes business sense.
Most people just listen to "chill music" and never care to find out the musicians behind the tracks. They may not even realize that lots of tracks sound very similar (for good reason -- they are created by the same musician[s]). They just need some music while studying/working.
I play instruments myself, and I force myself to listen to many different styles of music and delve deep into artists' works, so that I can be a better (amateur) musician. I don't listen to Spotify "chill" playlists, not just because of the practice described in this article, but because I could actually tell that the music was repetitive and low effort, and I can never find more albums made by those musicians when I occasionally find a track that I find interesting. Can you expect other listeners to think this way? No.
It was fascinating to experience.
Before you'd need to visit different record stores, hitting one every few days to check their latest in catalogue. Find the hidden boxes with low print releases, listen on a player and skip the needle around track grooves. Or have good friends recommending you stuff.
It got easier but I think we need to realise to find the signal on a sea of noise will probably require effort for a long time. Given time enough every new information discovery tool gets flooded by the noise, almost like a form of entropy.
The standard risk model for a musical artist is massive-upfront-investment-for-a-tiny-chance-of-payoff-someday. A different model with smaller rewards and lower risks isn't "sad" - if it had existed 30 years ago I might be a professional musician today instead of an engineer
Free market means you can vote with your wallet. If you don't, then it says less about markets and more about our stated vs revealed preferences. Maybe we just don't care if real artists go away.
We're pretty far away from any actual "free market" here.
In all honesty, do you think most Spotify listeners or even Apple music listeners have a decent understanding of the model in which artists are paid? Or an understanding that isn't from the mouth of said company?
To say we don't care is akin to saying most people don't care about how they contribute to child labor/exploitation, wage theft, global warming by buying and using products that contribute to those things. It's not that people don't care its that people don't have a reason to suspect is nefarious, nor do they feel the impact of it.
I see musicians on music videos, on radio and touring, how am I supposed to know they're severely disadvantaged when I listen to their music on a streaming platform?
It's not their job to care. They like what they like, regardless of how it got there.
If they prefer junk software, shat out by dependency-addicted clowns, it's usually because it gives them what they need/want. I can get all huffy and elitist, but it won't change the facts on the ground: users prefer the junk. That's their right, and there's always someone willing to drop the bar, if it will make them money/prestige.
It's up to me, to produce stuff that gets users to prefer mine, over theirs. That means that I need to take the time to understand the users of my software, and develop stuff that meets their needs, at a price (which isn't just money -if my software is difficult to use, that's also a price) that the user is willing to pay.
Of course, in today's world, promotion and eye-candy can also affect what users prefer. Marketing, advertising, astroturfing reviews or GH stars, whatever, can affect what end-users prefer. I also need to keep that in mind.
Why would/should they care? They are touted a service where you pay a monthly fee, and you get to consume anything they have. So now you're suggesting that music consumers are going to look for sustainably sourced music too?
As you've said, most people "like" music to have in the background, but are not music aficionados that look for anything other than whatever their influencer of choice says is trendy.