Well Spotify has run at a loss every year since it started - apart from last year, if I remember correctly. So, as they started with a nonsensical business model (all you can eat 24/7 for 10 bucks a month, or free with ads), perhaps this is how they're resolving it. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner they degenerate into a conduit for non stop AI created mush, the better- then perhaps the actual music fans will start looking elsewhere.
Don't we have a moral (such an old-fashioned concept!) obligation to stop using services once we know they are corrupt? I see people continue to use Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Tik Tok , and whatever else I'm missing, despite the revelations of the greed, dishonesty and banality of these services. Personally, I've never streamed music. I hear about new artists, or favorite artists releasing new music, and preview the album. Then I buy the album. I make a judgement, then a decision. I don't allow a judgement and decision to be made for me. And, whatever I pay for an album, I feel confident that the artist is getting the current appropriate share--although I wish they got a lot more!
On the other hand, this does give real musicians a little ray of hope from those stats about thousands of songs being released every single day. If a large chunk of these are generative garbage, then maybe that love song you slaved over writing and recording really isn't quite as quantitatively meaningless as the cynics say!
The "fake artists" issue is not as mysterious as people make it out to be . Epidemic Sound is a stock music library based, like Spotify, in Sweden. They buy the rights for tracks outright and split streaming revenues with the artists. PRO-affiliated composers are not eligible to sell their work to Epidemic, so presumably Epidemic keeps all broadcast revenues. Epidemic music dominates the official Spotify playlists of many different instrumental genres, playlists which are quite difficult to get on without a demonstrated amount of preexisting success - unless you happen to be affiliated with Epidemic or one of its many "subsidiaries". Epidemic and Spotify also happen to have a VC investor in common, which goes a long way to explain the economics of their arrangement. It also explains why "unknowns" like "saxophonist Mitch Coleman" and countless others can rack up huge numbers, because of their prominent playlist placement. The elephant in the room of course is that most of the Epidemic music and other Spotify insider material is polished and professional - and people appear to enjoy it well enough. It fills the function of why "most" people listen to music - it's background. Not art, but craft.
I've noticed this over the past month with Spotify, especially if you let it continue to play songs after listening to an entire album, especially if it's electronic music. Different songs, but generic sound, covers, weird artist names with only one or two releases to their names. Very obvious what's going on.
Reminds me of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited and the problems they have with 'book stuffing' -- where someone fills an ebook with random text or the same chapter over and over but tricks a reader to hit a button toward the front that takes them to the end of the books and registers the pages as read, so the scammer gets paid. Now there's the threat of AI creating books and music.
The problem isn't that people will mistake AI-created content for human; AIs just aren't there yet. But, it's going to be harder for people to wade through the fake songs and stories, as evidenced by Adam Faze's experience with hearing the same song over and over. It will be the big platforms pushing this crap over actual art.
Whatever happened to buying an album, listening to it over and over, savouring it and learning its nuances? I have albums that I've had for 45 years. Some I haven't listened to in decades, but when I do pull one off the shelf I find that I hear it quite differently than I did as a youngun'. That pleasure of discovery and rediscovery can't be there if you simply download playlists of random songs made by people whose names you don't even know.
Again a very interesting topic. Earlier today I noticed a related ‘anomaly’ on Spotify. Since I’m reading the book ‘the most beautiful’ by the former wife of Prince I decided to take a deep dive in the catalog of Prince, starting with the album ‘For you’ (1978) and then chronologically listening to the other albums. Halfway the album ‘Dirty Mind’ (1980) I encountered what I now understand to be a dirty Spotify algo: in the middle of a song Spotify jumped to another song by another artist. I then went back to the Prince album to play the song I was listening too. The song didn’t play but what happened instead was the remaining songs of the album passing by on the screen without them being played. Spotify thus skipped the remainder of the album and then went on to play an unknown song by an unknown artist. I haven’t checked whether this artist is of the AI-kind or not since I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon until I read this article. Since I’m only in the year 1980 of the Prince catalog there is still enough material to test the thesis if Spotify is leading me towards artists that are better for the bottom line of the company. Also, since I’m a paying Spotify subscriber I am on a mission to tame this algo by continuing to listen to the rest of the Prince catalog. It will be a long road, wish me luck...
As a musician myself, I don’t even plan to ever release my work on Spotify, it forces listeners to increasingly homogenous music.
It would not surprise me if it just evolves into the kind of AI-generated content Gibson describes on Neuromancer.
Even most established artists that have their work on the platform don’t really profit from it anyway, and make real money on shows, where Spotify works more like a showcase for fans to buy tickets.
I wonder if this is related to the way performing rights association royalties are paid, in that each song play is allocated points and are tallied up against all the 'points' from every play during the month/quarter by all the artists. It'd have the effect of lowering the amount most artists get on average because those songs would both increase the amount of points and lower the $ per play for legitimate artists.
This ties in with the piece cross-posted on The Free Press this morning, on the loss of trust in the world we live in. How long will it be before an AI is asked to create a ballad in the style of John Lennon, and clone his voice to sing it? The world portrayed in the Pixar hit WALL-E is looking less like a nice kid-friendly movie, and more like a documentary of our future.
This is truly horrific and totally predictable. There is one simple solution - don’t subscribe to these services. The only streaming service I subscribe to is the Neil Young Archives which for $20/year (not a misprint) I get access to Neil’s entire catalog streaming in hi-res. Trying to squeeze profits, manipulate audiences and screw musicians is nothing new in the muzak business. Ask any artist who’s tried to get their music out there with out selling their soul. In terms of how to access music there’s Tidal which streams much of it’s content in MQA format, platforms like HDTracks which sells downloadable Hi-res albums or good old fashion vinyl or CDs. And don’t get me started on the poor audio quality of mp3s, iphones and ear buds.
Dear Corporate Puppetmasters, Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. Been around for about a decade or so, laid many a poor soul to waste. I was there when Steve Jobs blew his stack and Mark Zuxckerberg sealed our fate. Took tea with Billy G and watched Dorsey sail off and leave a Musky T. Pleased to meet you, can you guess my name?
I’m buying property out of the country. I can’t tell you how many different listings and different price tags that come with the same listing, as well as those that have already been sold. It’s the wild west.
Every post like this makes me feel like I’m buying a house in Central America.
Music streaming platforms are also littered with unknown "albums" on the discographies of most classic jazz musicians. If you look up Wes Montgomery, or Freddie Hubbard, or the MJQ, the same album covers and vague titles show up, blowing up discographies of certain artists into over a hundred albums worth. For the MJQ on Amazon Music, you need to scroll through at least 50 albums before finding an official release.
Well Spotify has run at a loss every year since it started - apart from last year, if I remember correctly. So, as they started with a nonsensical business model (all you can eat 24/7 for 10 bucks a month, or free with ads), perhaps this is how they're resolving it. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner they degenerate into a conduit for non stop AI created mush, the better- then perhaps the actual music fans will start looking elsewhere.
Don't we have a moral (such an old-fashioned concept!) obligation to stop using services once we know they are corrupt? I see people continue to use Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Tik Tok , and whatever else I'm missing, despite the revelations of the greed, dishonesty and banality of these services. Personally, I've never streamed music. I hear about new artists, or favorite artists releasing new music, and preview the album. Then I buy the album. I make a judgement, then a decision. I don't allow a judgement and decision to be made for me. And, whatever I pay for an album, I feel confident that the artist is getting the current appropriate share--although I wish they got a lot more!
One more reason not to pay for "music" on Spotify.
On the other hand, this does give real musicians a little ray of hope from those stats about thousands of songs being released every single day. If a large chunk of these are generative garbage, then maybe that love song you slaved over writing and recording really isn't quite as quantitatively meaningless as the cynics say!
The "fake artists" issue is not as mysterious as people make it out to be . Epidemic Sound is a stock music library based, like Spotify, in Sweden. They buy the rights for tracks outright and split streaming revenues with the artists. PRO-affiliated composers are not eligible to sell their work to Epidemic, so presumably Epidemic keeps all broadcast revenues. Epidemic music dominates the official Spotify playlists of many different instrumental genres, playlists which are quite difficult to get on without a demonstrated amount of preexisting success - unless you happen to be affiliated with Epidemic or one of its many "subsidiaries". Epidemic and Spotify also happen to have a VC investor in common, which goes a long way to explain the economics of their arrangement. It also explains why "unknowns" like "saxophonist Mitch Coleman" and countless others can rack up huge numbers, because of their prominent playlist placement. The elephant in the room of course is that most of the Epidemic music and other Spotify insider material is polished and professional - and people appear to enjoy it well enough. It fills the function of why "most" people listen to music - it's background. Not art, but craft.
I've noticed this over the past month with Spotify, especially if you let it continue to play songs after listening to an entire album, especially if it's electronic music. Different songs, but generic sound, covers, weird artist names with only one or two releases to their names. Very obvious what's going on.
Reminds me of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited and the problems they have with 'book stuffing' -- where someone fills an ebook with random text or the same chapter over and over but tricks a reader to hit a button toward the front that takes them to the end of the books and registers the pages as read, so the scammer gets paid. Now there's the threat of AI creating books and music.
The problem isn't that people will mistake AI-created content for human; AIs just aren't there yet. But, it's going to be harder for people to wade through the fake songs and stories, as evidenced by Adam Faze's experience with hearing the same song over and over. It will be the big platforms pushing this crap over actual art.
Whatever happened to buying an album, listening to it over and over, savouring it and learning its nuances? I have albums that I've had for 45 years. Some I haven't listened to in decades, but when I do pull one off the shelf I find that I hear it quite differently than I did as a youngun'. That pleasure of discovery and rediscovery can't be there if you simply download playlists of random songs made by people whose names you don't even know.
Again a very interesting topic. Earlier today I noticed a related ‘anomaly’ on Spotify. Since I’m reading the book ‘the most beautiful’ by the former wife of Prince I decided to take a deep dive in the catalog of Prince, starting with the album ‘For you’ (1978) and then chronologically listening to the other albums. Halfway the album ‘Dirty Mind’ (1980) I encountered what I now understand to be a dirty Spotify algo: in the middle of a song Spotify jumped to another song by another artist. I then went back to the Prince album to play the song I was listening too. The song didn’t play but what happened instead was the remaining songs of the album passing by on the screen without them being played. Spotify thus skipped the remainder of the album and then went on to play an unknown song by an unknown artist. I haven’t checked whether this artist is of the AI-kind or not since I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon until I read this article. Since I’m only in the year 1980 of the Prince catalog there is still enough material to test the thesis if Spotify is leading me towards artists that are better for the bottom line of the company. Also, since I’m a paying Spotify subscriber I am on a mission to tame this algo by continuing to listen to the rest of the Prince catalog. It will be a long road, wish me luck...
As a musician myself, I don’t even plan to ever release my work on Spotify, it forces listeners to increasingly homogenous music.
It would not surprise me if it just evolves into the kind of AI-generated content Gibson describes on Neuromancer.
Even most established artists that have their work on the platform don’t really profit from it anyway, and make real money on shows, where Spotify works more like a showcase for fans to buy tickets.
I wonder if this is related to the way performing rights association royalties are paid, in that each song play is allocated points and are tallied up against all the 'points' from every play during the month/quarter by all the artists. It'd have the effect of lowering the amount most artists get on average because those songs would both increase the amount of points and lower the $ per play for legitimate artists.
Mine is a crude and 'old timey' response, but 'when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.'
This ties in with the piece cross-posted on The Free Press this morning, on the loss of trust in the world we live in. How long will it be before an AI is asked to create a ballad in the style of John Lennon, and clone his voice to sing it? The world portrayed in the Pixar hit WALL-E is looking less like a nice kid-friendly movie, and more like a documentary of our future.
This is truly horrific and totally predictable. There is one simple solution - don’t subscribe to these services. The only streaming service I subscribe to is the Neil Young Archives which for $20/year (not a misprint) I get access to Neil’s entire catalog streaming in hi-res. Trying to squeeze profits, manipulate audiences and screw musicians is nothing new in the muzak business. Ask any artist who’s tried to get their music out there with out selling their soul. In terms of how to access music there’s Tidal which streams much of it’s content in MQA format, platforms like HDTracks which sells downloadable Hi-res albums or good old fashion vinyl or CDs. And don’t get me started on the poor audio quality of mp3s, iphones and ear buds.
Dear Corporate Puppetmasters, Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. Been around for about a decade or so, laid many a poor soul to waste. I was there when Steve Jobs blew his stack and Mark Zuxckerberg sealed our fate. Took tea with Billy G and watched Dorsey sail off and leave a Musky T. Pleased to meet you, can you guess my name?
I’m buying property out of the country. I can’t tell you how many different listings and different price tags that come with the same listing, as well as those that have already been sold. It’s the wild west.
Every post like this makes me feel like I’m buying a house in Central America.
Music streaming platforms are also littered with unknown "albums" on the discographies of most classic jazz musicians. If you look up Wes Montgomery, or Freddie Hubbard, or the MJQ, the same album covers and vague titles show up, blowing up discographies of certain artists into over a hundred albums worth. For the MJQ on Amazon Music, you need to scroll through at least 50 albums before finding an official release.