16 ms·

The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

154 points by jger15 5y ago

mathgenius 5y ago
I don't quite see what is "fake" about the "fake artists". They appear to be real artists. Did I missunderstand something?
- jaclaz 5y ago
  No, you are right, at the end of the article: >Even the term fake artists doesn’t really do justice to the scope of the situation—because, as we have seen, it’s not the musicians, real or otherwise, who are at the root of the situation, but the dominant players in the industry. and there is another article linked to from that one: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-just-blew-open-the-spotify-fake-artists-story-heres-what-they-have-to-say/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-just-bl... where the matter is explained, point #5: >At the end of the day, fake artists are of course real songwriters, instrumentalists and music producers with varying degrees of talent. The "fake artists" is one of those "way off" names the media invented, these people are likely paid peanuts for their work/music/playing, their real names are not publicized and the "record label" gets the most of the streaming royalties. It would be like you paid $10 once to someone on fiverr for - say - an Excel template , get the IP of it, attribute the creation to an invented name (belonging to your "label") then by using some clever SEO or whatever, sell it a few thousand times. They should be called "invented name artists", there is nothing fake in them if not the names, sort of "ghost writers", possibly "ghost artists" would be suitable.
  - jalk 5y ago
    But isnt it Spotify who commission the songs and can just stuff the playlist with content (i.e. like Netflix producing their own shows) in order to keep a bigger cut?
    - gerikson 5y ago
      Pretty much. There's a financial incentive for artists to participate in this. It's more or less a steady income stream, there's no touring, and there's no need to present an attractive public image to sell. Just create music at your own time, let Spotify package it, and get paid.
  - prova_modena 5y ago
    Record labels have been doing similar things since the 1950s, building musical acts on-demand by combining skilled, anonymous "session musicians" with an attractive, marketable image or performers that fit the current trend. The most famous example from the 1960s is the Monkees, but this dynamic played a huge part in the development of a surprising number of famous pop bands and musical personalities. Massive public backlash against the perceived inauthenticity of this approach caused record labels to be much more cautious from the 1970s onward, but it's never gone away. Spotify's main "sin" here seems to be that they aren't as skilled as the big labels in manufacturing authenticity/buzz around their most promoted artists.
    - iostream24 5y ago
      Or rather that they are actively seeding each genre with content they don’t have the pay royalties on and giving preference to this content unless directed specifically otherwise, and the real sin here is not divulging that you’ve been hearing generic house brand “music” and pretending that it’s all equally valid content. This will become more obvious as algorithmic music takes over background music tasks. Spotify is evil in the sense that any other monopoly with perverse incentives trying to appear mellow and not monopolistic is. Netflix specials are labeled as such, and they put some effort and money into them, they aren’t cynical garbage like the Amazon knockoffs of Amazon listed merchants are, which fraudulently purport to be the same.
- nikanj 5y ago
  An artist is not real if we can’t follow their life on the tabloits
h2odragon 5y ago
Muzak. see Norman Spinrad's "Little Heroes" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes Once (and still, probably, in some small places) radio DJ's were valued as editors of playlists. Could it be we jsut need a way to recognize and encourage curators now? Make their job public instead of some "black box algorithm" or more likely middle management committee subject to bribes as is currently done with mass market radio.
- prova_modena 5y ago
  Listening to various DJs has been my primary form of music discovery for the past 10 or more years. The diversity of and access to interesting DJ sets has literally never been better than now. AM/FM radio is mostly irrelevant to this phenomenon, except as a precedent. Like you said, some small stations may be playing interesting stuff but the vast majority is over-commercialized, repetitive and/or boring. However, the internet has opened up tons of possibilities for DJs to curate and share music. Platforms include internet radio stations, Youtube channels, Twitch channels, and purpose-built sites like soundcloud and mixcloud. There used to also be a huge DJ blogging scene but that was mostly dismantled with DMCA takedowns in the 2010s(?). For example, one of my favorite resources is NTS radio (https://nts.live/ https://nts.live/). They are a continuously streaming internet radio station that plays a wide variety of music. Every show they stream is archived for on-demand listening and organized by DJ name and genre tags. They also brilliantly address the demand for Spotify-style "background music" with their Infinite Mixtape feature, with music chosen by resident DJs.
xkcd-sucks 5y ago
Interesting points raised about discoverability, financial incentives of curators, and treating music as "content", but the "pseudonymous artists" bit seems like a pointless distraction. For example Richard D James, more of an "artist" than a "content creator" released music as: - Aphex Twin - Phonic Boy on Dope - Q-Chastic - Blue Calx - The Dice Man - Gak - Power-Pill - Bradley Strider - AFX - Caustic Window - The Tuss (comprising both Brian and Karen Tregaskin!) - user18081971
- zeruch 5y ago
  "but the "pseudonymous artists" bit seems like a pointless distraction." I think what matters here is motive. RDJ used/s pseudonyms to suit an artistic purpose not unlike what Fernando Pessoa did with his heteronyms in literature a century ago. What's happening here looks less like artistic license and more like marketecture designed to game DSPs for streams.
scantron4 5y ago
If generic jazz can easily substitute "important" jazz it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it, especially not in the context of "things for background music." I don't think this is saying anything about more active music consumption where people are actually listening to it. I personally get annoyed if more than 20% of a mix is songs I haven't already upvoted so there isn't a lot of room to bring in weird knockoff artists into my streaming--in fact I saw a recent article that talked about the current problem with streaming is that 90% of profits come from titles older than 18 months so it is harder to break through with new songs (the opposite of radio-driven sales where most profits came from new albums). That seems to be the opposite of "no one cares what they listen to so spotify can just redirect profits wherever they like."
- zeruch 5y ago
  " it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it" that's one hell of a stretch. Failure by a broader audience to understand a genre (or only want to casually consume one part of it passively) doesn't invalidate it's canon. By that measure Kenny G should have usurped John Coltrane as the saxophonist of note, and by any standard except coffee shop and elevator back ground noise he's done no such thing.
  - postingposts 5y ago
    John Coltrane is only good on paper and there’s a cult of personality which exists around his work. I can’t really say that I think much of his improvisations and in general, what people believe is “incredible” could be cranked out by an algorithm. Miles Davis is the real deal of jazz for me. Never cared about notes, fame, or much other than being free. That’s jazz.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      > John Coltrane is only good on paper "Cancel yourself with one terrible take" is a thing that only works on Twitter, I think.
kelseyfrog 5y ago
Fake? By what attribution? > Note that one of the Hara Noda tracks has almost four million plays—that’s more streams than are attributed to most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are, which just won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The author seems to get mixed up in the process of legitimization. There is both no reason a Grammy should legitimize an artist nor why someone should want to delegate the process of legitimization to The Recording Academy. It simply isn't a useful ontology. Ontologies should provide epistemic clarity. Instead the author is left with confusion. The solution is simple: find a new ontology.
- djur 5y ago
  And for that matter, no real disrespect intended to Batiste, who is a talented guy, but would he have won a Grammy if he wasn't associated with a popular TV show? Does the involvement of CBS in promoting his work make him a "fake artist"? I don't think that's fair at all.
john_minsk 5y ago
This looks to me as not “fake artist” problem but rather SEO problem, but this time platform itself is doing it. The solution to me is simple: build service with more relevant and neutral results. That is if people actually need it. I, for example, just subscribed to Endel (AI generated ambient music) which looks even worse from the standpoint of the author.
TonyTrapp 5y ago
The real fake artist problem of streaming platforms are people taking music freely available on the internet and monetizing it through those platforms without consent of the original authors. That's fake, and there's no obvious solution to it apart from making it more expensive to publish your music again.
brundolf 5y ago
What makes them "fake"? I kept waiting for the author to explain how people are taking others' music and re-packaging it as their own to collect royalties, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happening. SEO-optimized music is not "fake music". It's an interesting phenomenon, and maybe even a bad one, but framing it this way is disingenuous and alarmist.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  yes, thank you. this article struck me as just a musician who hates that corporate music is popular on large corporate streaming sites. so what?
- nikanj 5y ago
  Sounds like the complaint boils down to ”people on the playlists are not celebrities”. Which I see as a positive thing.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    No, people on the playlists are artists /created by spotify/. It's insidious because you expect these to be curated playlists containing real artists that you might like. But really spotify is redirecting all the royalty money to... themselves.
    - rjknight 5y ago
      I think this depends a lot on the mindset of the listener. Am I just looking for some good music to have on in the background while the bulk of my attention is on something else? Or am I looking for a connection to an artist, a set of emotional perspectives on life and meaning encoded in musical form? If I'm looking for the former, Spotify own-brand muzak is fine. It might even be /better/, for my purpose. If I'm looking for a connection to an artist whose music can, in some way, become part of my inner emotional life, then I might be upset and disappointed to discover that there is no artist persona that I can relate to. Both use cases are valid! The OP fails to distinguish between them, and perhaps thinks that the first one either does not exist, or that the potential disruption to the second one is the only thing that matters. However, we can do a bit better than this, and acknowledge that people have different reasons for streaming music. The important question, which could only be settled by looking at what Spotify listeners actually think and feel, is whether or not there is anyone who yearns for an emotional connection to the person creating the background jazz music, and is upset when they can't find them.
deleted 5y ago
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mkmk 5y ago
The ghost kitchens of music streaming!
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aidenn0 5y ago
I've also seen covers of songs with obscure names (e.g. Bullet with Butterfly Wings) released under more SEO friendly names (The World is a Vampire, I'm Still Just a Rat in a Cage). In fact that specific example showed up in my Discover Weekly rather than the original track. Spotify's webpage isn't loading for me right now, so I can't check play counts.
pg_bot 5y ago
This is an incredibly clever hack to get people to listen to your music. I think we should come to the opposite conclusion of the author, there are a large number of talented artists that just lack mainstream exposure. I think it is much more likely that we are bad at filtering than the "best musicians" are the most popular in any respective genre.
- iostream24 5y ago
  There are, but they are likely not on Spotify. The artists listed here in the article are not very talented or interesting or even acceptable as background jazz, in my opinion. Your statement about undisclosed talent is absolutely true, go to bandcamp for example , and find new music. The artists and publishers discussed in the article are scattershot attempts at money making likely not even by the artists or performers in question. There are corporations that cheaply scoop up the rights to tons of old music or by commissioning session musicians to bang out generic copies of standards etc. I’m not joking, follow up and see that I speak truth. Check out many electronic chill genres. I and other artists have been exploited by such content consolidators
paxys 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand the author's point here. Spotify is recommending artists outside of the top 40 charts who they haven't heard of before, therefore they are fake?
- razzimatazz 5y ago
  There are steps missing, perhaps - Artists with only 2 songs on Spotify are probably fake, there are odds they are the property of Spotify themselves and have been carefully created and placed into playlists to minimize royalty costs to Spotify. I love to discover a great new song and artist on a playlist, where that artist has a whole bunch of songs for me to try out - such an artist is much more real. And I'm willing to pay a tiny bit more to access real artists because of that.
  - nwsm 5y ago
    > Artists with only 2 songs on Spotify are probably fake Based on what? Spotify has made it very easy for independent artists to publish on the platform. I know small time musicians with just a couple releases.
    - razzimatazz 5y ago
      Fair enough - based only on the couple of super-minor artists I've stumbled upon who have put on an album or EP's worth of tracks at once (4-10 or so).
iostream24 5y ago
It’s shameful to read all the folks claiming that actually known famous historical jazz greats are somehow being legitimately usurped by generic nothing music even in the context of background music. What the article discusses is clearly dishonest, whatever your take on the word “fake” Grammy awards are indicative of some popularity and reknown, so not seeing Grammy winners on Spotify genre pages is suspect. There are actual sales awards like platinum and gold and such, and if Spotify genre pages don’t reflect these but push generic in-house brands as top tier products on the world stage it’s fundamentally dishonest as it purports to reflect the state of the charts and state of the industry but actually puts out their own preferences purportedly as the former. If it’s honest it can say : “we would like you try things we recommend” at best… But then Spotify is a virtual monopoly in music streaming services and is not helping either quality musicians or quality listeners. Sure, try to justify it by saying they are a private company and can do what they want, but their dishonesty should be noted and the general bad influence they have on the music industry should be noted, and we who care already don’t use or support Spotify. I recommend bandcamp, among other artist-respecting and fan-respecting services.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  I don't see anything remotely dishonest about this. "Spotify genre pages don’t reflect these but push generic in-house brands as top tier products on the world stage" is AFAICT not based on reality. Spotify's playlists for the hottest hits in the genre or decade of your choice have exactly what you would expect them to have. The generic background music only shows up when you ask for generic background music.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- cwkoss 5y ago
  The Grammys are just the music industry establishment patting itself of the back. I think its probably a very poor indicator of quality as music production has become increasingly decentralized.
- 5y ago
TomK32 5y ago
I skipped spotify alltogether, my digial collection is vast enough to last me for months, including December. Regarding streaming, I did love last.fm's radio, it helped me to discover a LOT of music, artists and styles. The 3 Euro (Pound?) fee was well-spent. Or was it 5? When that went down the drain I did some footwork myself by scrolling through bandcamp and these day I just turn on BBC 6 music. Sure, every DJ might have some agenda behind their playlist, one of them (Tom Ravenscroft) is often just going through his dad's record collection, but that's fine: because when they pick tracks the audience will give them feedback and the whole experience becomes an interaction between DJs and their listeners. No AI can give you that. Does anyone else know good radio stations with a wide range of music that I should listen to?
- lostmsu 5y ago
  > because when they pick tracks the audience will give them feedback and the whole experience becomes an interaction between DJs and their listeners. No AI can give you that. This is exactly what Spotify gives you, no?
- frxx 5y ago
  I miss the last.fm radio as well... Neither Spotify radio or Google Play Music radio are even coming close. My GF said that Pandora radio, I think, was pretty good some years back. These days? I'm trying Bandcamp but it's probably not what you're after.
bsedlm 5y ago
what's an artist anyways? ...I don't even know anymore. (this will only get worse now that we're on the verge of some neural net 'rendering' as much music as you can listen to in anybody's style; I mean, it's been done in a lab already) also, this seems to be all about the rights to royalties (collecting rent) for the playback of music. what's that got to do with artistry?
- danamit 5y ago
  Art is a type of craftsmanship that has some form of self-expression. Popular artists are mainly ruthless businessmen.
betaby 5y ago
Basically 'store brand' of music platforms. Where is the problem?
- FerociousTimes 5y ago
  but with the labels mislabeled
tonguez 5y ago
“Can you really reach a larger audience by getting on a background jazz playlist than taking home the most coveted Grammy? I hate to share the bad news, my friends, but the world has changed.” wow what an amazing insight. some dead awards show for geriatrics where disney child actors always win musician of the year or whatever. it’s truly shocking that nobody cares about that
- iostream24 5y ago
  Missing the point: when the playlist features in-house brands pushed to prominence they don’t actually have to fuel higher profits for Spotify in lieu of paying royalties to independent artists or labels that needs to be labeled. “Amazon knock off of Amazon independent merchants product” Which is precisely shady behavior. “Hey you asked for jazz, here’s the top ten” with no mention that it’s stocked full of generic house brands commissioned specifically to bang out cheap non innovative copies. Had you searched for “generic jazz Muzak” you might expect such dreck and even welcome it. But as it stands you have the worlds largest streaming service undercutting it’s own clients.
Marazan 5y ago
The thing the article alludes to but doesn't outright state is that the streaming platforms themselves are not just putting together "hand curated" playlists for popular search terms but are filling those play lists with songs owned by the platform. It's Payola but where the streaming platform is paying itself.
truffdog 5y ago
A podcast interviewing someone making this kind of music: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv/183-the-venova-king https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv/183-the-veno...
FerociousTimes 5y ago
How did he reach the conclusion that Hara Noda is a fictional character? I read the whole piece and I couldn't find any evidence to support this assertion.
- Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
  He did not, he says "Hara Noda seems to be a real person, working as a producer and drummer in Sweden" ... and then jumps to making claims about Sweden being some hotspot of off-brand cheap instant jazz. The article is easily misunderstand-able and quite insulting towards this one artist in particular as it can create the impression he is somehow involved in some scam.
  - FerociousTimes 5y ago
    then why did he insinuate that the artist is fictitious by casting doubts on the presumably inflated number of playbacks in the playlist? I want my 5 mins back.
    - iostream24 5y ago
      Perverse incentives, in house generic products promoted as name brands, etc, my typing finger hurts repeating myself, if you are genuinely baffled read the comments here and grok the actual complaint which is sufficiently defined here.
randrews 5y ago
While I work, I listen to hour-long mixes of synthwave / retrowave / vaporwave music on YouTube. I've never heard of any of the artists, and other than the occasional "hey I recognize this melody from another mixtape" I've never heard of any of the songs... And I hope these guys are making a fortune in royalties for my plays. They are in no way "fake artists" and I have no problem saying that I'd rather spend time listening to their work than albums that have won Grammys. Maybe some of these albums should win Grammys.
- ttoinou 5y ago
  And I hope these guys are making a fortune in royalties for my plays Where does the money come from exactly ?
  - randrews 5y ago
    Well, I'm paying YouTube for a subscription for that, so probably out of there. People who aren't buying a subscription see ads, the advertisers pay to place those, so, out of there. Edit: I don't think the economics of it are the issue. My thing is, if people are fine with more famous artists getting revenue from streaming, why should they have a problem with other artists doing so? I don't care that these random synthwave people are unknowns, I like their music so I listen to it. That's every bit as valid a reason for them to get paid as the other guys have.
    - kupopuffs 5y ago
      if it's a 3P Youtube Creator (aka a random person who started a channel and is creating these mixes by pasting music together), these artists might not even be getting paid for their music
bwooceli 5y ago
I call this the Pentatonix Problem at Christmas. When left in "auto-play" mode, streaming services absolutely default to the lowest payout possible. The fastest way to discover if there was a Pentatonix version of a song is to ask "Hey Google, play <christmas standard>" ... "OK, playing <christmas standard> by Pentatonix" So yeah, they pay a bunch of basement recording artists to throw together a million generic sounding low-effort Ableton jams and voila, lower play counts and lower royalties for the normal working artists. Some genres are easier to game than others. Classical music is really rough right now. Unless you already know EXACTLY what version of the piano concerto you want, you're going to get some crappy midi playthrough that was likely just the "performer" dropping the sheet music straight into the midi roll.
drewzero1 5y ago
A few months ago my toddler was in a "must have music" phase, and when we got tired of switching records or listening to the same local radio ads over and over, we turned to Spotify. The kids' music playlist we stumbled on had one album with bizarre choices of tempo, instrumentation, and effects. It kind of grew on me after a while. I wanted to learn more about the artist but when I tried searching (it was a super generic name like "Music for Kids") they only seemed to exist on Spotify. I'm disappointed but I can't say I'm surprised.
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
  There was a nice video where a bunch of YT musical blogging celebs made some "Advanced" music for kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8KT07m5aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8KT07m5aY https://tupletsfortoddlers.bandcamp.com/album/tuplets-for-toddlers https://tupletsfortoddlers.bandcamp.com/album/tuplets-for-to... Personally, I don't think children need their own special music most of the time, unless it has cool stories and interesting colourful lyrics. Otherwise, there's a bunch of Classical, Jazz, New Age and some Rock music which work great for kids.
  - drewzero1 5y ago
    Thanks for the links! I'll have to check those out when I get a chance. We found that Boots Randolph is great for spirited toddler dancing, as well as any 6/8 Sousa march. A lot of the time we just listen to what I would normally listen to. We had a lot of fun with Bach and Wagner when he was a baby, but now that he can move around he wants something he can dance to.
KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
This guy would have a heart attack over Dall E.
weeksie 5y ago
Wait until language models get in on the game.
freetime2 5y ago
It's interesting to know that this is happening. It makes perfect sense given the shift in peoples' listening habits and the economic incentives for the streaming companies - but it's just not something I had ever considered before. But I don't necessarily see it as a "problem", and especially not anything new in the world of music (although maybe the scale on which it is happening now is new). Collections of background music have always been recorded by artists whose name you wouldn't recognize. You won't any recordings by the Berlin Philharmonic on your mom's "Classical Music for Relaxation" CD that she listens to on repeat in the car. But the recordings are good enough that they keep the listener happy, and using "no name" artists helps keep prices down. Everybody wins - except music elitists out there who don't think your musical tastes are refined enough.
- iostream24 5y ago
  And artists… like all of them, but they should go away in your model, and be replaced by competent clone monkeys who are poorly paid but don’t pander to musical elitism. I resent your world view.
dmz73 5y ago
Can we really call any of the musicians and actors artists? They work in the music and movie industries and produce entertainment commodities. They are no more artists than someone making machine parts or assembling fridges.
- iostream24 5y ago
  That is a bizarre take. Can we really call software developers developers? Maybe they are just potted plants in disguise?
danamit 5y ago
I know someone who make his own music, and he has like a half a million monthly listeners in Spotify. He has an artist name, he produce his music, googling him show you some songs in YouTube, but nothing is fake about him. This is similar to me calling all popular Twitter users who got famous just from Twitter fake celebrities.
davidgerard 5y ago
Every now and then there's a big rant from someone in the music industry, who tries to get you upset that some other part of the music industry is an industry. Popular music has always been manufactured. "Tin Pan Alley" was a cliche rather than a place for decades before pop as we know it existed. The people complaining about this are record companies who have just discovered that their A&R genius fails in direct A/B testing against muzak.
- iostream24 5y ago
  Otoh, actually misleading behavior should be legally punished. Spotify is not labeling their generic house brand music and pushing it to the top of charts to reduce royalties paid out. It’s akin to the Amazon in house knockoff problem and it’s illegal, when framed correctly and not made excuses for. You don’t throw your hands up and say what you said when a street construction company doesn’t finish a project on time, you fine em. Large entities who play games like this also get fined: see Eu and Google or Facebook recent legal precedents etc
p1necone 5y ago
This seems kinda analogous to Amazon Basics pulling the rug out from under successful third parties on their platform. Spotify has provided a platform for artists to release music on, and implicitly promised that they will curate that music in playlists etc to promote the artists. But then they pull the rug out from under them and just push in house stuff instead, denying royalties to the artists that probably only joined the platform because Spotify /weren't/ doing stuff like this. People saying OP is just upset that "non famous artists" are being recommended or that these artists aren't really "fake" are missing the point - these are artists created /by Spotify/ being promoted /instead of/ artists that Spotify would actually have to pay royalties to. There's clearly some perverse incentives here.
- avs733 5y ago
  that was my take too. As with any company, if they can stop sharing revenue with third parties it seems almost inevitable that they will. It isn't just Amazon basics, its Netflix producing its own shows that are a product of machine learning about people's preferences. Whether that is good or bad is a different question Whether they are being honest about it is a different question Whether they should inform people / people should inform themselves is a different question But I see the perverse incentives as a problem, and the the misleading behavior as another the problem...the incentive is universal in any platform that has to pay for the content it hosts, and while folks may be okay with this one, whats the limit? If they really stood behind this they would be transparent 'here I'm playing you music created by spotify to fill your home with generic low-engagement sound. The fact that they are obfuscating it is telling.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    Netflix doing it bothers me less than Spotify and Amazon for some reason. I think it's because TV/Movie production needs a proportionally much larger crew of people and budget behind it to produce content. So Netflix is both enabling things to be created that couldn't be without their help and there's actually a significant cost to them to produce said content. Also, the in house content that Netflix puts out strikes me as much more unique than HDMI cables and background music jazz playlists. I guess I'd be more okay with Spotify doing this if they approached it more like a genuine record label, as opposed to what seems like anonymous session musicians + graphic design? Basically the problem I have is that they're able to get away with putting out low effort content because they can algorithmically recommend it to people. If they had to compete for listeners on an equal playing field with all the other artists on the platform it wouldn't really be a problem.
marstall 5y ago
fake journalist (100% aggregated facts) exposes fake artists. What a fucking era we live in.
smackeyacky 5y ago
Anyone who has dug through record bins in charity shops would have seen endless numbers of weird cover records of popular songs. Like "The xxx orchestra performs Burt Bacharach" with Burt Bacharach in huge writing and the actual orchestra listed low on the cover. Sometimes with a fetching picture of some young lady on them, sometimes not. Sometimes it's just instrumentals, occasionally an un-named vocalist on there. This is not a new phenomenon, it goes back at least 60 years.
locusofself 5y ago
My wife is a (professional) musician. She has achieved some organic popularity and her music has been in TV/movies, but having some songs featured on curated Spotify playlists has been one of the most profitable things for her career. Musicians rightfully complain that spotify pays fractions of a penny per play, but if your music ends up on a front-page playlist for months/years you can at least make many thousands of dollars.
- Rastonbury 5y ago
  The argument here is that Spotify is adding to their curated playlists songs/artists that they do not need to pay royalties to. So they end up paying out less royalties to musicians like your wife
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    Royalties will still be paid though. And royalties are paid from a revenue share model AFAIK, it's not a strict 0.0X cents per stream, etc. It's probably a bit of a better deal than the royalty agreements with the big 4 record labels, but I'd be surprised if it's so much so to organise this sort of conspiracy.
    - Rastonbury 5y ago
      If 3 songs out of 30 on every curated playlist was royalty free that's 10% less royalties. It's the same business rationale as Amazon Basics
aulin 5y ago
Spotify has a bigger way more real scammer issue with their default playlists... For each of their discovery weekly, release radar, daily mixes there's a scammer album or playlist with the very same name stealing plays and royalties. Last I checked 9/10 asking for such a playlist to google assistant would get you to the scammer one. I stopped using it out of frustration and now I only select playlists manually from the app. Never understood why they don't just ban those as it's a blatant scam, there must be some term of service they are violating.
arrakeen 5y ago
it might be useful for those having a hard time understanding what "fake" means here to think of it in terms of the shovelware games found on our modern app stores. sure, they're still technically games and they were technically made by actual people and you can technically have fun playing them, but they were created with the intent of siphoning off attention from the well-known games they were inspired by.

154 points by jger15 5y ago

I don't quite see what is "fake" about the "fake artists". They appear to be real artists. Did I missunderstand something?

jaclaz 5y ago
No, you are right, at the end of the article: >Even the term fake artists doesn’t really do justice to the scope of the situation—because, as we have seen, it’s not the musicians, real or otherwise, who are at the root of the situation, but the dominant players in the industry. and there is another article linked to from that one: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-just-blew-open-the-spotify-fake-artists-story-heres-what-they-have-to-say/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-just-bl... where the matter is explained, point #5: >At the end of the day, fake artists are of course real songwriters, instrumentalists and music producers with varying degrees of talent. The "fake artists" is one of those "way off" names the media invented, these people are likely paid peanuts for their work/music/playing, their real names are not publicized and the "record label" gets the most of the streaming royalties. It would be like you paid $10 once to someone on fiverr for - say - an Excel template , get the IP of it, attribute the creation to an invented name (belonging to your "label") then by using some clever SEO or whatever, sell it a few thousand times. They should be called "invented name artists", there is nothing fake in them if not the names, sort of "ghost writers", possibly "ghost artists" would be suitable.
- jalk 5y ago
  But isnt it Spotify who commission the songs and can just stuff the playlist with content (i.e. like Netflix producing their own shows) in order to keep a bigger cut?
  - gerikson 5y ago
    Pretty much. There's a financial incentive for artists to participate in this. It's more or less a steady income stream, there's no touring, and there's no need to present an attractive public image to sell. Just create music at your own time, let Spotify package it, and get paid.
- prova_modena 5y ago
  Record labels have been doing similar things since the 1950s, building musical acts on-demand by combining skilled, anonymous "session musicians" with an attractive, marketable image or performers that fit the current trend. The most famous example from the 1960s is the Monkees, but this dynamic played a huge part in the development of a surprising number of famous pop bands and musical personalities. Massive public backlash against the perceived inauthenticity of this approach caused record labels to be much more cautious from the 1970s onward, but it's never gone away. Spotify's main "sin" here seems to be that they aren't as skilled as the big labels in manufacturing authenticity/buzz around their most promoted artists.
  - iostream24 5y ago
    Or rather that they are actively seeding each genre with content they don’t have the pay royalties on and giving preference to this content unless directed specifically otherwise, and the real sin here is not divulging that you’ve been hearing generic house brand “music” and pretending that it’s all equally valid content. This will become more obvious as algorithmic music takes over background music tasks. Spotify is evil in the sense that any other monopoly with perverse incentives trying to appear mellow and not monopolistic is. Netflix specials are labeled as such, and they put some effort and money into them, they aren’t cynical garbage like the Amazon knockoffs of Amazon listed merchants are, which fraudulently purport to be the same.
nikanj 5y ago
An artist is not real if we can’t follow their life on the tabloits

h2odragon 5y ago

Muzak. see Norman Spinrad's "Little Heroes" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes Once (and still, probably, in some small places) radio DJ's were valued as editors of playlists. Could it be we jsut need a way to recognize and encourage curators now? Make their job public instead of some "black box algorithm" or more likely middle management committee subject to bribes as is currently done with mass market radio.

prova_modena 5y ago
Listening to various DJs has been my primary form of music discovery for the past 10 or more years. The diversity of and access to interesting DJ sets has literally never been better than now. AM/FM radio is mostly irrelevant to this phenomenon, except as a precedent. Like you said, some small stations may be playing interesting stuff but the vast majority is over-commercialized, repetitive and/or boring. However, the internet has opened up tons of possibilities for DJs to curate and share music. Platforms include internet radio stations, Youtube channels, Twitch channels, and purpose-built sites like soundcloud and mixcloud. There used to also be a huge DJ blogging scene but that was mostly dismantled with DMCA takedowns in the 2010s(?). For example, one of my favorite resources is NTS radio (https://nts.live/ https://nts.live/). They are a continuously streaming internet radio station that plays a wide variety of music. Every show they stream is archived for on-demand listening and organized by DJ name and genre tags. They also brilliantly address the demand for Spotify-style "background music" with their Infinite Mixtape feature, with music chosen by resident DJs.

xkcd-sucks 5y ago

Interesting points raised about discoverability, financial incentives of curators, and treating music as "content", but the "pseudonymous artists" bit seems like a pointless distraction. For example Richard D James, more of an "artist" than a "content creator" released music as: - Aphex Twin - Phonic Boy on Dope - Q-Chastic - Blue Calx - The Dice Man - Gak - Power-Pill - Bradley Strider - AFX - Caustic Window - The Tuss (comprising both Brian and Karen Tregaskin!) - user18081971

zeruch 5y ago
"but the "pseudonymous artists" bit seems like a pointless distraction." I think what matters here is motive. RDJ used/s pseudonyms to suit an artistic purpose not unlike what Fernando Pessoa did with his heteronyms in literature a century ago. What's happening here looks less like artistic license and more like marketecture designed to game DSPs for streams.

scantron4 5y ago

If generic jazz can easily substitute "important" jazz it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it, especially not in the context of "things for background music." I don't think this is saying anything about more active music consumption where people are actually listening to it. I personally get annoyed if more than 20% of a mix is songs I haven't already upvoted so there isn't a lot of room to bring in weird knockoff artists into my streaming--in fact I saw a recent article that talked about the current problem with streaming is that 90% of profits come from titles older than 18 months so it is harder to break through with new songs (the opposite of radio-driven sales where most profits came from new albums). That seems to be the opposite of "no one cares what they listen to so spotify can just redirect profits wherever they like."

zeruch 5y ago
" it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it" that's one hell of a stretch. Failure by a broader audience to understand a genre (or only want to casually consume one part of it passively) doesn't invalidate it's canon. By that measure Kenny G should have usurped John Coltrane as the saxophonist of note, and by any standard except coffee shop and elevator back ground noise he's done no such thing.
- postingposts 5y ago
  John Coltrane is only good on paper and there’s a cult of personality which exists around his work. I can’t really say that I think much of his improvisations and in general, what people believe is “incredible” could be cranked out by an algorithm. Miles Davis is the real deal of jazz for me. Never cared about notes, fame, or much other than being free. That’s jazz.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    > John Coltrane is only good on paper "Cancel yourself with one terrible take" is a thing that only works on Twitter, I think.

kelseyfrog 5y ago

Fake? By what attribution? > Note that one of the Hara Noda tracks has almost four million plays—that’s more streams than are attributed to most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are, which just won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The author seems to get mixed up in the process of legitimization. There is both no reason a Grammy should legitimize an artist nor why someone should want to delegate the process of legitimization to The Recording Academy. It simply isn't a useful ontology. Ontologies should provide epistemic clarity. Instead the author is left with confusion. The solution is simple: find a new ontology.

djur 5y ago
And for that matter, no real disrespect intended to Batiste, who is a talented guy, but would he have won a Grammy if he wasn't associated with a popular TV show? Does the involvement of CBS in promoting his work make him a "fake artist"? I don't think that's fair at all.

john_minsk 5y ago

This looks to me as not “fake artist” problem but rather SEO problem, but this time platform itself is doing it. The solution to me is simple: build service with more relevant and neutral results. That is if people actually need it. I, for example, just subscribed to Endel (AI generated ambient music) which looks even worse from the standpoint of the author.

TonyTrapp 5y ago

The real fake artist problem of streaming platforms are people taking music freely available on the internet and monetizing it through those platforms without consent of the original authors. That's fake, and there's no obvious solution to it apart from making it more expensive to publish your music again.

brundolf 5y ago

What makes them "fake"? I kept waiting for the author to explain how people are taking others' music and re-packaging it as their own to collect royalties, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happening. SEO-optimized music is not "fake music". It's an interesting phenomenon, and maybe even a bad one, but framing it this way is disingenuous and alarmist.

metalliqaz 5y ago
yes, thank you. this article struck me as just a musician who hates that corporate music is popular on large corporate streaming sites. so what?
nikanj 5y ago
Sounds like the complaint boils down to ”people on the playlists are not celebrities”. Which I see as a positive thing.
- p1necone 5y ago
  No, people on the playlists are artists /created by spotify/. It's insidious because you expect these to be curated playlists containing real artists that you might like. But really spotify is redirecting all the royalty money to... themselves.
  - rjknight 5y ago
    I think this depends a lot on the mindset of the listener. Am I just looking for some good music to have on in the background while the bulk of my attention is on something else? Or am I looking for a connection to an artist, a set of emotional perspectives on life and meaning encoded in musical form? If I'm looking for the former, Spotify own-brand muzak is fine. It might even be /better/, for my purpose. If I'm looking for a connection to an artist whose music can, in some way, become part of my inner emotional life, then I might be upset and disappointed to discover that there is no artist persona that I can relate to. Both use cases are valid! The OP fails to distinguish between them, and perhaps thinks that the first one either does not exist, or that the potential disruption to the second one is the only thing that matters. However, we can do a bit better than this, and acknowledge that people have different reasons for streaming music. The important question, which could only be settled by looking at what Spotify listeners actually think and feel, is whether or not there is anyone who yearns for an emotional connection to the person creating the background jazz music, and is upset when they can't find them.

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mkmk 5y ago

The ghost kitchens of music streaming!

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aidenn0 5y ago

I've also seen covers of songs with obscure names (e.g. Bullet with Butterfly Wings) released under more SEO friendly names (The World is a Vampire, I'm Still Just a Rat in a Cage). In fact that specific example showed up in my Discover Weekly rather than the original track. Spotify's webpage isn't loading for me right now, so I can't check play counts.

pg_bot 5y ago

This is an incredibly clever hack to get people to listen to your music. I think we should come to the opposite conclusion of the author, there are a large number of talented artists that just lack mainstream exposure. I think it is much more likely that we are bad at filtering than the "best musicians" are the most popular in any respective genre.

iostream24 5y ago
There are, but they are likely not on Spotify. The artists listed here in the article are not very talented or interesting or even acceptable as background jazz, in my opinion. Your statement about undisclosed talent is absolutely true, go to bandcamp for example , and find new music. The artists and publishers discussed in the article are scattershot attempts at money making likely not even by the artists or performers in question. There are corporations that cheaply scoop up the rights to tons of old music or by commissioning session musicians to bang out generic copies of standards etc. I’m not joking, follow up and see that I speak truth. Check out many electronic chill genres. I and other artists have been exploited by such content consolidators

paxys 5y ago

I'm not sure I understand the author's point here. Spotify is recommending artists outside of the top 40 charts who they haven't heard of before, therefore they are fake?

razzimatazz 5y ago
There are steps missing, perhaps - Artists with only 2 songs on Spotify are probably fake, there are odds they are the property of Spotify themselves and have been carefully created and placed into playlists to minimize royalty costs to Spotify. I love to discover a great new song and artist on a playlist, where that artist has a whole bunch of songs for me to try out - such an artist is much more real. And I'm willing to pay a tiny bit more to access real artists because of that.
- nwsm 5y ago
  > Artists with only 2 songs on Spotify are probably fake Based on what? Spotify has made it very easy for independent artists to publish on the platform. I know small time musicians with just a couple releases.
  - razzimatazz 5y ago
    Fair enough - based only on the couple of super-minor artists I've stumbled upon who have put on an album or EP's worth of tracks at once (4-10 or so).

iostream24 5y ago

It’s shameful to read all the folks claiming that actually known famous historical jazz greats are somehow being legitimately usurped by generic nothing music even in the context of background music. What the article discusses is clearly dishonest, whatever your take on the word “fake” Grammy awards are indicative of some popularity and reknown, so not seeing Grammy winners on Spotify genre pages is suspect. There are actual sales awards like platinum and gold and such, and if Spotify genre pages don’t reflect these but push generic in-house brands as top tier products on the world stage it’s fundamentally dishonest as it purports to reflect the state of the charts and state of the industry but actually puts out their own preferences purportedly as the former. If it’s honest it can say : “we would like you try things we recommend” at best… But then Spotify is a virtual monopoly in music streaming services and is not helping either quality musicians or quality listeners. Sure, try to justify it by saying they are a private company and can do what they want, but their dishonesty should be noted and the general bad influence they have on the music industry should be noted, and we who care already don’t use or support Spotify. I recommend bandcamp, among other artist-respecting and fan-respecting services.

plorkyeran 5y ago
I don't see anything remotely dishonest about this. "Spotify genre pages don’t reflect these but push generic in-house brands as top tier products on the world stage" is AFAICT not based on reality. Spotify's playlists for the hottest hits in the genre or decade of your choice have exactly what you would expect them to have. The generic background music only shows up when you ask for generic background music.
- deleted 5y ago
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cwkoss 5y ago
The Grammys are just the music industry establishment patting itself of the back. I think its probably a very poor indicator of quality as music production has become increasingly decentralized.
5y ago

TomK32 5y ago

I skipped spotify alltogether, my digial collection is vast enough to last me for months, including December. Regarding streaming, I did love last.fm's radio, it helped me to discover a LOT of music, artists and styles. The 3 Euro (Pound?) fee was well-spent. Or was it 5? When that went down the drain I did some footwork myself by scrolling through bandcamp and these day I just turn on BBC 6 music. Sure, every DJ might have some agenda behind their playlist, one of them (Tom Ravenscroft) is often just going through his dad's record collection, but that's fine: because when they pick tracks the audience will give them feedback and the whole experience becomes an interaction between DJs and their listeners. No AI can give you that. Does anyone else know good radio stations with a wide range of music that I should listen to?

lostmsu 5y ago
> because when they pick tracks the audience will give them feedback and the whole experience becomes an interaction between DJs and their listeners. No AI can give you that. This is exactly what Spotify gives you, no?
frxx 5y ago
I miss the last.fm radio as well... Neither Spotify radio or Google Play Music radio are even coming close. My GF said that Pandora radio, I think, was pretty good some years back. These days? I'm trying Bandcamp but it's probably not what you're after.

bsedlm 5y ago

what's an artist anyways? ...I don't even know anymore. (this will only get worse now that we're on the verge of some neural net 'rendering' as much music as you can listen to in anybody's style; I mean, it's been done in a lab already) also, this seems to be all about the rights to royalties (collecting rent) for the playback of music. what's that got to do with artistry?

danamit 5y ago
Art is a type of craftsmanship that has some form of self-expression. Popular artists are mainly ruthless businessmen.

betaby 5y ago

Basically 'store brand' of music platforms. Where is the problem?

FerociousTimes 5y ago
but with the labels mislabeled

tonguez 5y ago

“Can you really reach a larger audience by getting on a background jazz playlist than taking home the most coveted Grammy? I hate to share the bad news, my friends, but the world has changed.” wow what an amazing insight. some dead awards show for geriatrics where disney child actors always win musician of the year or whatever. it’s truly shocking that nobody cares about that

iostream24 5y ago
Missing the point: when the playlist features in-house brands pushed to prominence they don’t actually have to fuel higher profits for Spotify in lieu of paying royalties to independent artists or labels that needs to be labeled. “Amazon knock off of Amazon independent merchants product” Which is precisely shady behavior. “Hey you asked for jazz, here’s the top ten” with no mention that it’s stocked full of generic house brands commissioned specifically to bang out cheap non innovative copies. Had you searched for “generic jazz Muzak” you might expect such dreck and even welcome it. But as it stands you have the worlds largest streaming service undercutting it’s own clients.

Marazan 5y ago

The thing the article alludes to but doesn't outright state is that the streaming platforms themselves are not just putting together "hand curated" playlists for popular search terms but are filling those play lists with songs owned by the platform. It's Payola but where the streaming platform is paying itself.

truffdog 5y ago

A podcast interviewing someone making this kind of music: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv/183-the-venova-king https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv/183-the-veno...

FerociousTimes 5y ago

How did he reach the conclusion that Hara Noda is a fictional character? I read the whole piece and I couldn't find any evidence to support this assertion.

Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
He did not, he says "Hara Noda seems to be a real person, working as a producer and drummer in Sweden" ... and then jumps to making claims about Sweden being some hotspot of off-brand cheap instant jazz. The article is easily misunderstand-able and quite insulting towards this one artist in particular as it can create the impression he is somehow involved in some scam.
- FerociousTimes 5y ago
  then why did he insinuate that the artist is fictitious by casting doubts on the presumably inflated number of playbacks in the playlist? I want my 5 mins back.
  - iostream24 5y ago
    Perverse incentives, in house generic products promoted as name brands, etc, my typing finger hurts repeating myself, if you are genuinely baffled read the comments here and grok the actual complaint which is sufficiently defined here.

randrews 5y ago

While I work, I listen to hour-long mixes of synthwave / retrowave / vaporwave music on YouTube. I've never heard of any of the artists, and other than the occasional "hey I recognize this melody from another mixtape" I've never heard of any of the songs... And I hope these guys are making a fortune in royalties for my plays. They are in no way "fake artists" and I have no problem saying that I'd rather spend time listening to their work than albums that have won Grammys. Maybe some of these albums should win Grammys.

ttoinou 5y ago
And I hope these guys are making a fortune in royalties for my plays Where does the money come from exactly ?
- randrews 5y ago
  Well, I'm paying YouTube for a subscription for that, so probably out of there. People who aren't buying a subscription see ads, the advertisers pay to place those, so, out of there. Edit: I don't think the economics of it are the issue. My thing is, if people are fine with more famous artists getting revenue from streaming, why should they have a problem with other artists doing so? I don't care that these random synthwave people are unknowns, I like their music so I listen to it. That's every bit as valid a reason for them to get paid as the other guys have.
  - kupopuffs 5y ago
    if it's a 3P Youtube Creator (aka a random person who started a channel and is creating these mixes by pasting music together), these artists might not even be getting paid for their music

bwooceli 5y ago

I call this the Pentatonix Problem at Christmas. When left in "auto-play" mode, streaming services absolutely default to the lowest payout possible. The fastest way to discover if there was a Pentatonix version of a song is to ask "Hey Google, play <christmas standard>" ... "OK, playing <christmas standard> by Pentatonix" So yeah, they pay a bunch of basement recording artists to throw together a million generic sounding low-effort Ableton jams and voila, lower play counts and lower royalties for the normal working artists. Some genres are easier to game than others. Classical music is really rough right now. Unless you already know EXACTLY what version of the piano concerto you want, you're going to get some crappy midi playthrough that was likely just the "performer" dropping the sheet music straight into the midi roll.

drewzero1 5y ago

A few months ago my toddler was in a "must have music" phase, and when we got tired of switching records or listening to the same local radio ads over and over, we turned to Spotify. The kids' music playlist we stumbled on had one album with bizarre choices of tempo, instrumentation, and effects. It kind of grew on me after a while. I wanted to learn more about the artist but when I tried searching (it was a super generic name like "Music for Kids") they only seemed to exist on Spotify. I'm disappointed but I can't say I'm surprised.

ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
There was a nice video where a bunch of YT musical blogging celebs made some "Advanced" music for kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8KT07m5aY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8KT07m5aY https://tupletsfortoddlers.bandcamp.com/album/tuplets-for-toddlers https://tupletsfortoddlers.bandcamp.com/album/tuplets-for-to... Personally, I don't think children need their own special music most of the time, unless it has cool stories and interesting colourful lyrics. Otherwise, there's a bunch of Classical, Jazz, New Age and some Rock music which work great for kids.
- drewzero1 5y ago
  Thanks for the links! I'll have to check those out when I get a chance. We found that Boots Randolph is great for spirited toddler dancing, as well as any 6/8 Sousa march. A lot of the time we just listen to what I would normally listen to. We had a lot of fun with Bach and Wagner when he was a baby, but now that he can move around he wants something he can dance to.

KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago

This guy would have a heart attack over Dall E.

weeksie 5y ago

Wait until language models get in on the game.

freetime2 5y ago

It's interesting to know that this is happening. It makes perfect sense given the shift in peoples' listening habits and the economic incentives for the streaming companies - but it's just not something I had ever considered before. But I don't necessarily see it as a "problem", and especially not anything new in the world of music (although maybe the scale on which it is happening now is new). Collections of background music have always been recorded by artists whose name you wouldn't recognize. You won't any recordings by the Berlin Philharmonic on your mom's "Classical Music for Relaxation" CD that she listens to on repeat in the car. But the recordings are good enough that they keep the listener happy, and using "no name" artists helps keep prices down. Everybody wins - except music elitists out there who don't think your musical tastes are refined enough.

iostream24 5y ago
And artists… like all of them, but they should go away in your model, and be replaced by competent clone monkeys who are poorly paid but don’t pander to musical elitism. I resent your world view.

dmz73 5y ago

Can we really call any of the musicians and actors artists? They work in the music and movie industries and produce entertainment commodities. They are no more artists than someone making machine parts or assembling fridges.

iostream24 5y ago
That is a bizarre take. Can we really call software developers developers? Maybe they are just potted plants in disguise?

danamit 5y ago

I know someone who make his own music, and he has like a half a million monthly listeners in Spotify. He has an artist name, he produce his music, googling him show you some songs in YouTube, but nothing is fake about him. This is similar to me calling all popular Twitter users who got famous just from Twitter fake celebrities.

davidgerard 5y ago

Every now and then there's a big rant from someone in the music industry, who tries to get you upset that some other part of the music industry is an industry. Popular music has always been manufactured. "Tin Pan Alley" was a cliche rather than a place for decades before pop as we know it existed. The people complaining about this are record companies who have just discovered that their A&R genius fails in direct A/B testing against muzak.

iostream24 5y ago
Otoh, actually misleading behavior should be legally punished. Spotify is not labeling their generic house brand music and pushing it to the top of charts to reduce royalties paid out. It’s akin to the Amazon in house knockoff problem and it’s illegal, when framed correctly and not made excuses for. You don’t throw your hands up and say what you said when a street construction company doesn’t finish a project on time, you fine em. Large entities who play games like this also get fined: see Eu and Google or Facebook recent legal precedents etc

p1necone 5y ago

This seems kinda analogous to Amazon Basics pulling the rug out from under successful third parties on their platform. Spotify has provided a platform for artists to release music on, and implicitly promised that they will curate that music in playlists etc to promote the artists. But then they pull the rug out from under them and just push in house stuff instead, denying royalties to the artists that probably only joined the platform because Spotify /weren't/ doing stuff like this. People saying OP is just upset that "non famous artists" are being recommended or that these artists aren't really "fake" are missing the point - these are artists created /by Spotify/ being promoted /instead of/ artists that Spotify would actually have to pay royalties to. There's clearly some perverse incentives here.

avs733 5y ago
that was my take too. As with any company, if they can stop sharing revenue with third parties it seems almost inevitable that they will. It isn't just Amazon basics, its Netflix producing its own shows that are a product of machine learning about people's preferences. Whether that is good or bad is a different question Whether they are being honest about it is a different question Whether they should inform people / people should inform themselves is a different question But I see the perverse incentives as a problem, and the the misleading behavior as another the problem...the incentive is universal in any platform that has to pay for the content it hosts, and while folks may be okay with this one, whats the limit? If they really stood behind this they would be transparent 'here I'm playing you music created by spotify to fill your home with generic low-engagement sound. The fact that they are obfuscating it is telling.
- p1necone 5y ago
  Netflix doing it bothers me less than Spotify and Amazon for some reason. I think it's because TV/Movie production needs a proportionally much larger crew of people and budget behind it to produce content. So Netflix is both enabling things to be created that couldn't be without their help and there's actually a significant cost to them to produce said content. Also, the in house content that Netflix puts out strikes me as much more unique than HDMI cables and background music jazz playlists. I guess I'd be more okay with Spotify doing this if they approached it more like a genuine record label, as opposed to what seems like anonymous session musicians + graphic design? Basically the problem I have is that they're able to get away with putting out low effort content because they can algorithmically recommend it to people. If they had to compete for listeners on an equal playing field with all the other artists on the platform it wouldn't really be a problem.

marstall 5y ago

fake journalist (100% aggregated facts) exposes fake artists. What a fucking era we live in.

smackeyacky 5y ago

Anyone who has dug through record bins in charity shops would have seen endless numbers of weird cover records of popular songs. Like "The xxx orchestra performs Burt Bacharach" with Burt Bacharach in huge writing and the actual orchestra listed low on the cover. Sometimes with a fetching picture of some young lady on them, sometimes not. Sometimes it's just instrumentals, occasionally an un-named vocalist on there. This is not a new phenomenon, it goes back at least 60 years.

locusofself 5y ago

My wife is a (professional) musician. She has achieved some organic popularity and her music has been in TV/movies, but having some songs featured on curated Spotify playlists has been one of the most profitable things for her career. Musicians rightfully complain that spotify pays fractions of a penny per play, but if your music ends up on a front-page playlist for months/years you can at least make many thousands of dollars.

Rastonbury 5y ago
The argument here is that Spotify is adding to their curated playlists songs/artists that they do not need to pay royalties to. So they end up paying out less royalties to musicians like your wife
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Royalties will still be paid though. And royalties are paid from a revenue share model AFAIK, it's not a strict 0.0X cents per stream, etc. It's probably a bit of a better deal than the royalty agreements with the big 4 record labels, but I'd be surprised if it's so much so to organise this sort of conspiracy.
  - Rastonbury 5y ago
    If 3 songs out of 30 on every curated playlist was royalty free that's 10% less royalties. It's the same business rationale as Amazon Basics

aulin 5y ago

Spotify has a bigger way more real scammer issue with their default playlists... For each of their discovery weekly, release radar, daily mixes there's a scammer album or playlist with the very same name stealing plays and royalties. Last I checked 9/10 asking for such a playlist to google assistant would get you to the scammer one. I stopped using it out of frustration and now I only select playlists manually from the app. Never understood why they don't just ban those as it's a blatant scam, there must be some term of service they are violating.

arrakeen 5y ago

it might be useful for those having a hard time understanding what "fake" means here to think of it in terms of the shovelware games found on our modern app stores. sure, they're still technically games and they were technically made by actual people and you can technically have fun playing them, but they were created with the intent of siphoning off attention from the well-known games they were inspired by.