Greetings Ted!..... Years ago, you wrote me a very nice letter, commending my album on Catero Records. Much appreciated! That album, and several more, are still available on my Bandcamp site. And by the way, relevant to your post here: I heartily recommend folks go to Bandcamp for their music. Bandcamp is, in many ways, the total opposite of Spotify. Bandcamp (created here in Oakland, California) is set up so that 85% of all sales go to the Artists. And, since the pandemic, every month there is a Free Friday where 100% of all sales go to the Artists. Unlike Spotify, there is NO monthly subscription fee. I could go on and on about how great Bandcamp is (and how bad Spotify is) but, in sum, folks, go check out Bandcamp!!
Very disturbing article. There's a related issue - music by real artists that then gets repackaged by YouTube channels that then get huge viewership on their pages, and the concomitant ad revenue that goes with it, while the artists themselves have far lower viewership.
I read that MBW article, and I think you buried the lede. The real story here is that the DSPs are paying these musicians work-for-hire instead of giving them any royalties at all. Aside from that (and aside from AI-generated music), I don't see how this differs from labels signing bands designed to get onto whatever radio format. Including the so-called Beautiful Music or Easy Listening format, designed for background music at dentists' offices, which has existed since the 1950s.
The world of art can be weird because the business of art is so often driven by people who care very little for it or about it. What you are observing is the fact that so much of the streaming business is driven by people who grudgingly pay $10 a month for it and have no intention of paying attention to it as well.
Someone's found a lucrative way to service that market. And if you think about the subscribers in question and the possibilities of the medium, something like this was inevitable. Fake "artists" providing manufactured music to fake "music" fans? What could be more natural?
The big difference today is that whole industry is built around the low-effort tendencies of the people who don't actually care about the product they are buying. All the money is in servicing the vast majority who just want something other than silence or the low roar of the video game being played next room over. Since pretty much anything genre- or mood-appropriate is good enough for them, eventually that is what they will get, and it is the people who have the skills and power to manipulate the delivery systems who hold the cards.
This all gets more interesting when you start looking at the (quite substantial) portion of the market that is equally musically uninterested but wants some version of "what everyone else is listening to" as a form of social participation.
Music being somewhat driven and directing servicing people who could hardly care less about music isn't anything new, of course. What is new is the degree to which that part of the market dominates with current technology.
In music radio (which I have experience with), for instance, caring and making an effort have historically tended to give you an outsize influence on what music gets played, made, promoted, etc. This is true of the people who make the small effort to call in with feedback, of volunteers who review music as it comes in, of people who help promote and put on live events.
And this was true all over the industry: people who cared enough about music to put volunteer or low-paid effort in, people who were passionate, had far more influence on the direction of the industry than their numbers justified.
On the recording side of the industry this is far less true now.
As bastardized as things were before, this was actually a good thing for people who really cared about music.
But the results today are actually a far better reflection of the actual state of the market.
Great informative article, things change really fast these days! The ironic thing to me is that when the recording 'industry' started artists names weren't even listed on the Edison cylinders. The recording would just say "Stars and Stripes by Brass Band". No one cared who the brass band was, that just described what you were buying. Into the 50's or so, records would have the artist name and then a description like 'vocal with orchestra accompaniment'. So I guess it's cycled back around. People just want to hear 'soothing jazz' or 'upbeat dance music', it doesn't really matter who the artist might be. An unfortunate turn of events!
It's a sad state of affairs. While it's easy (and justifiable, one wishes they would use their power for good) to blame the DSP's, and the fakers, they're just sharks, exhibiting the natural behavior of sharks - if something moves, eat it; if you can make money doing it, do it.
The real culprits, and beneficiaries, and victims, are the overwhelming majority of listeners, for whom music just really doesn't matter, in the way it matters to the people reading your newsletter. The only thrill (if that's not too exaggerated a word) is saying "Alexa, play jazz" and then nothing upsetting comes out.
I don't believe this behavior is new, really; in the past, most of these people just listened to the radio, if they listened to music at all. Maybe they played an album that had sold millions of copies, possibly a greatest hits package, but even that required effort. Now, they have to take the step of selecting a streamer, and a playlist (but not even that, in the case of Alexa), and that choice gets recorded, where, in the past, it went undetected, except in the gross aggregate of (songwriter-only) radio royalties.
Lamenting the bad actions of the streaming behemoths is full-time employment, with job security. Despairing of the vast majority's indifference to music, or the quality of music, has been going on for decades. I try to focus on supporting the artists I like, and spend some time looking for new stuff, although I'm pretty old now, and finding something that excites me takes some work. But it's a good thing to do, and keeps me from thinking about the ugly stuff.
If people choose bland music by ease of access then they deserve what they get. I spend some time finding (and making) music that matters to me. People don't want that, they want audio wallpaper. Very few people cover their walls with original intelligent art, they have paint, wallpaper and dreadfully boring images. Now they can have the music to go with it.
I make intelligent original music, trust me, nobody wants to listen to that - they want comforting background noise
This is basically Muzak on the elevator. No one ever knows who those artists are creating that music. But that wasn’t the purpose. It’s just background music.
I'm not clear on what makes them "fake artists". There are session artists everywhere who record schlock for TV shows, commercials, whatever needs inoffensive background music. If you choose to make a living as a musician that way instead of hustling to book gigs and sell records, that doesn't make you lesser or a fake. Many of them do have more "serious" musical pursuits outside of the bill-paying work that so many people consider to be selling out.
I do agree that _everybody_ on Spotify should be paid more, including the session musicians. The solution might be to walk away from streaming entirely and switch to Bandcamp (which I do), but as you note, the great majority don't care nearly enough to think about whether musicians are getting squeezed.
Everything about this is gross. I can’t make people care more about music, but I can choose to only give my money to best support people who do care about music; By buying, instead of leasing, my tunes.
i have noticed a similar thing when it comes to cover songs. search for a popular song from the past on spotify by entering the title, and go through the results (trying your best to filter out all the songs that don't belong in that list because they have completely different titles but possibly are by a band with that name or have some otherwise unknown connection to the song). focus on the entries that have exactly the same running times, and then listen to them. you will find that there are numerous instances in which the absolute identical version of the song appears multiple times--but with completely different performer names. this CAN'T be right.
another thing you can notice when searching for cover songs on streaming services is what i call "song squatting," wherein someone has cranked out a piece of musical pablum that is in no way a cover of a popular song, but just happens to have the same title, and which now inhabits a space on that DSP's servers. so let's say you wanted to hear some cover songs of a song whose title you might even expect to be unique--like "shock the monkey," by peter gabriel. what are the odds that anyone would ever come up with another song justifiably entitled "shock the monkey"? by all rights, there should not another song in the universe entitled "shock the monkey." and yet, big as day, there sits "shock the monkey" by one carlos kaiser. should the unsuspecting listener click on it, justifiably expecting to hear a cover of peter gabriel's classic, he/she will instead get an insipid lump of three minutes of carnivaloid hokum less like the original than your average fart. there's not even any vocals/lyrics in it--so how in the world could you somehow randomly, coincidentally come up with a massively popular, yet highly idiosyncratic song title for it?
by the time you realize it's not a cover of the peter gabriel tune, it's too late. you've been suckered by a song squatter, and even if you promptly stop listening, the entity calling himself/herself carlos kaiser has been paid by the DSP. lest you think he/she/it is unique, the list also contains a "shock the monkey" by a savannah johnson...strangely enough, another song with no vocals/lyrics, simply a long, repetitive slice of faceless electronica.
see for yourself. get on spotify and type in the title of one of your favorite hit songs of the past. if you look through the results diligently, you will find examples of at least one of these phenomenons, if not both.
Ted! FINALLY, I have found someone commenting on this. I've tried to research this on my own and gotten nowhere. I'm a jazz fan and jazz musician wannabe. I do use Spotify to create my own playlists when trying to learn songs and I had noticed this phenomenon a year or so ago. Made the same observations as you described. One of the real bummers about this as that as a musician, I can appreciate that particularly with these jazz tracks, there are actual quite talented humans involved in the making of these tracks. Some are quite good! My guess was that they were probably made by paying a few young, just-out-of-Berklee (or wherever) grads a one-time fee for the recording session and then placing them on Spotify-curated playlists under some name like "Suzanne Fade," "Phillip Love," or "Sixth Street Quartet" reaping royalties for Spotify and no additional money or credit to the artists.
I have discovered Bandcamp and SoundCloud, too, in an effort to locate the artists that I like and actually buy the albums from them, if possible. I am, I believe, one of the rare remaining music fans that is willing to shell out money to the artist for an album. I must be rare because I'm a jazz and classical fan willing to buy albums - how niche can you get these days? I take no pride in this, though, because meanwhile I use Spotify to stream probably 90% of the music I take in. This is not helping any of the artists I care about. I don't even own a CD played anymore. Many older jazz musicians still offer physical CDs on their websites, but buying them seems like a weird solution. I would just park the CD in the drawer and then stream it anyway, I guess. Some other musicians offer direct digital purchase on their website and I have downloaded the songs, but haven't found a digital player that will put the songs in a queue so I can listen in the car or at home without having to pick up the phone and move song to song.
This turned into a longer rambling response than I intended. I'm frustrated that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get money to the artists who are making art. But, this incarnation of the fake artist seems to be a step in the wrong direction.
OK I see that now, however, at the present moment, artists are still making 82% of sales revenues, and 100% on "Free Fridays." It would be sad if folks stopped buying music simply because of a perceived notion that things will get worse. Music will always be "the flowers growing up through the cracks in the cement."
Yet another reason I will not use these pre-curated sources. I prefer to do the work myself. (& it is verified - by me)
Greetings Ted!..... Years ago, you wrote me a very nice letter, commending my album on Catero Records. Much appreciated! That album, and several more, are still available on my Bandcamp site. And by the way, relevant to your post here: I heartily recommend folks go to Bandcamp for their music. Bandcamp is, in many ways, the total opposite of Spotify. Bandcamp (created here in Oakland, California) is set up so that 85% of all sales go to the Artists. And, since the pandemic, every month there is a Free Friday where 100% of all sales go to the Artists. Unlike Spotify, there is NO monthly subscription fee. I could go on and on about how great Bandcamp is (and how bad Spotify is) but, in sum, folks, go check out Bandcamp!!
So discouraging to read this, but shining this light in the darkened, rancid corners of these practices is important work. Thanks, Honest Broker.
Very disturbing article. There's a related issue - music by real artists that then gets repackaged by YouTube channels that then get huge viewership on their pages, and the concomitant ad revenue that goes with it, while the artists themselves have far lower viewership.
I read that MBW article, and I think you buried the lede. The real story here is that the DSPs are paying these musicians work-for-hire instead of giving them any royalties at all. Aside from that (and aside from AI-generated music), I don't see how this differs from labels signing bands designed to get onto whatever radio format. Including the so-called Beautiful Music or Easy Listening format, designed for background music at dentists' offices, which has existed since the 1950s.
The world of art can be weird because the business of art is so often driven by people who care very little for it or about it. What you are observing is the fact that so much of the streaming business is driven by people who grudgingly pay $10 a month for it and have no intention of paying attention to it as well.
Someone's found a lucrative way to service that market. And if you think about the subscribers in question and the possibilities of the medium, something like this was inevitable. Fake "artists" providing manufactured music to fake "music" fans? What could be more natural?
The big difference today is that whole industry is built around the low-effort tendencies of the people who don't actually care about the product they are buying. All the money is in servicing the vast majority who just want something other than silence or the low roar of the video game being played next room over. Since pretty much anything genre- or mood-appropriate is good enough for them, eventually that is what they will get, and it is the people who have the skills and power to manipulate the delivery systems who hold the cards.
This all gets more interesting when you start looking at the (quite substantial) portion of the market that is equally musically uninterested but wants some version of "what everyone else is listening to" as a form of social participation.
Music being somewhat driven and directing servicing people who could hardly care less about music isn't anything new, of course. What is new is the degree to which that part of the market dominates with current technology.
In music radio (which I have experience with), for instance, caring and making an effort have historically tended to give you an outsize influence on what music gets played, made, promoted, etc. This is true of the people who make the small effort to call in with feedback, of volunteers who review music as it comes in, of people who help promote and put on live events.
And this was true all over the industry: people who cared enough about music to put volunteer or low-paid effort in, people who were passionate, had far more influence on the direction of the industry than their numbers justified.
On the recording side of the industry this is far less true now.
As bastardized as things were before, this was actually a good thing for people who really cared about music.
But the results today are actually a far better reflection of the actual state of the market.
Great informative article, things change really fast these days! The ironic thing to me is that when the recording 'industry' started artists names weren't even listed on the Edison cylinders. The recording would just say "Stars and Stripes by Brass Band". No one cared who the brass band was, that just described what you were buying. Into the 50's or so, records would have the artist name and then a description like 'vocal with orchestra accompaniment'. So I guess it's cycled back around. People just want to hear 'soothing jazz' or 'upbeat dance music', it doesn't really matter who the artist might be. An unfortunate turn of events!
It's a sad state of affairs. While it's easy (and justifiable, one wishes they would use their power for good) to blame the DSP's, and the fakers, they're just sharks, exhibiting the natural behavior of sharks - if something moves, eat it; if you can make money doing it, do it.
The real culprits, and beneficiaries, and victims, are the overwhelming majority of listeners, for whom music just really doesn't matter, in the way it matters to the people reading your newsletter. The only thrill (if that's not too exaggerated a word) is saying "Alexa, play jazz" and then nothing upsetting comes out.
I don't believe this behavior is new, really; in the past, most of these people just listened to the radio, if they listened to music at all. Maybe they played an album that had sold millions of copies, possibly a greatest hits package, but even that required effort. Now, they have to take the step of selecting a streamer, and a playlist (but not even that, in the case of Alexa), and that choice gets recorded, where, in the past, it went undetected, except in the gross aggregate of (songwriter-only) radio royalties.
Lamenting the bad actions of the streaming behemoths is full-time employment, with job security. Despairing of the vast majority's indifference to music, or the quality of music, has been going on for decades. I try to focus on supporting the artists I like, and spend some time looking for new stuff, although I'm pretty old now, and finding something that excites me takes some work. But it's a good thing to do, and keeps me from thinking about the ugly stuff.
Everything is fake. The internet is dead.
If people choose bland music by ease of access then they deserve what they get. I spend some time finding (and making) music that matters to me. People don't want that, they want audio wallpaper. Very few people cover their walls with original intelligent art, they have paint, wallpaper and dreadfully boring images. Now they can have the music to go with it.
I make intelligent original music, trust me, nobody wants to listen to that - they want comforting background noise
This is basically Muzak on the elevator. No one ever knows who those artists are creating that music. But that wasn’t the purpose. It’s just background music.
I'm not clear on what makes them "fake artists". There are session artists everywhere who record schlock for TV shows, commercials, whatever needs inoffensive background music. If you choose to make a living as a musician that way instead of hustling to book gigs and sell records, that doesn't make you lesser or a fake. Many of them do have more "serious" musical pursuits outside of the bill-paying work that so many people consider to be selling out.
I do agree that _everybody_ on Spotify should be paid more, including the session musicians. The solution might be to walk away from streaming entirely and switch to Bandcamp (which I do), but as you note, the great majority don't care nearly enough to think about whether musicians are getting squeezed.
Everything about this is gross. I can’t make people care more about music, but I can choose to only give my money to best support people who do care about music; By buying, instead of leasing, my tunes.
i have noticed a similar thing when it comes to cover songs. search for a popular song from the past on spotify by entering the title, and go through the results (trying your best to filter out all the songs that don't belong in that list because they have completely different titles but possibly are by a band with that name or have some otherwise unknown connection to the song). focus on the entries that have exactly the same running times, and then listen to them. you will find that there are numerous instances in which the absolute identical version of the song appears multiple times--but with completely different performer names. this CAN'T be right.
another thing you can notice when searching for cover songs on streaming services is what i call "song squatting," wherein someone has cranked out a piece of musical pablum that is in no way a cover of a popular song, but just happens to have the same title, and which now inhabits a space on that DSP's servers. so let's say you wanted to hear some cover songs of a song whose title you might even expect to be unique--like "shock the monkey," by peter gabriel. what are the odds that anyone would ever come up with another song justifiably entitled "shock the monkey"? by all rights, there should not another song in the universe entitled "shock the monkey." and yet, big as day, there sits "shock the monkey" by one carlos kaiser. should the unsuspecting listener click on it, justifiably expecting to hear a cover of peter gabriel's classic, he/she will instead get an insipid lump of three minutes of carnivaloid hokum less like the original than your average fart. there's not even any vocals/lyrics in it--so how in the world could you somehow randomly, coincidentally come up with a massively popular, yet highly idiosyncratic song title for it?
by the time you realize it's not a cover of the peter gabriel tune, it's too late. you've been suckered by a song squatter, and even if you promptly stop listening, the entity calling himself/herself carlos kaiser has been paid by the DSP. lest you think he/she/it is unique, the list also contains a "shock the monkey" by a savannah johnson...strangely enough, another song with no vocals/lyrics, simply a long, repetitive slice of faceless electronica.
see for yourself. get on spotify and type in the title of one of your favorite hit songs of the past. if you look through the results diligently, you will find examples of at least one of these phenomenons, if not both.
Ted! FINALLY, I have found someone commenting on this. I've tried to research this on my own and gotten nowhere. I'm a jazz fan and jazz musician wannabe. I do use Spotify to create my own playlists when trying to learn songs and I had noticed this phenomenon a year or so ago. Made the same observations as you described. One of the real bummers about this as that as a musician, I can appreciate that particularly with these jazz tracks, there are actual quite talented humans involved in the making of these tracks. Some are quite good! My guess was that they were probably made by paying a few young, just-out-of-Berklee (or wherever) grads a one-time fee for the recording session and then placing them on Spotify-curated playlists under some name like "Suzanne Fade," "Phillip Love," or "Sixth Street Quartet" reaping royalties for Spotify and no additional money or credit to the artists.
I have discovered Bandcamp and SoundCloud, too, in an effort to locate the artists that I like and actually buy the albums from them, if possible. I am, I believe, one of the rare remaining music fans that is willing to shell out money to the artist for an album. I must be rare because I'm a jazz and classical fan willing to buy albums - how niche can you get these days? I take no pride in this, though, because meanwhile I use Spotify to stream probably 90% of the music I take in. This is not helping any of the artists I care about. I don't even own a CD played anymore. Many older jazz musicians still offer physical CDs on their websites, but buying them seems like a weird solution. I would just park the CD in the drawer and then stream it anyway, I guess. Some other musicians offer direct digital purchase on their website and I have downloaded the songs, but haven't found a digital player that will put the songs in a queue so I can listen in the car or at home without having to pick up the phone and move song to song.
This turned into a longer rambling response than I intended. I'm frustrated that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get money to the artists who are making art. But, this incarnation of the fake artist seems to be a step in the wrong direction.
OK I see that now, however, at the present moment, artists are still making 82% of sales revenues, and 100% on "Free Fridays." It would be sad if folks stopped buying music simply because of a perceived notion that things will get worse. Music will always be "the flowers growing up through the cracks in the cement."