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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

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.
aimor 5y ago
What makes the artists fake is that they are publishing only a couple songs for the specific purpose of providing the streaming platform with royalty free music, and then they disappear. The example pictures in the article show artists that have published 6 minutes and 8 minutes of music. There's also a statistic that 20 people created 500 artists. These artists are shells, facades, illusory, fake. Go looking for them and it's a dead end because apparently all the artist did was publish two songs and dissolve. The author does criticize the title: "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." If I were to run with it I'd say the streaming platform is also fake. People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.
- tyrfing 5y ago
  > What makes the artists fake is that they are publishing only a couple songs for the specific purpose of providing the streaming platform with royalty free music The article has 3 examples. Two have easily identified 3rd-party labels, the last is unclear. Neither is a traditional label, but there is also no indication they are owned by Spotify. > People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear. What bands would people expect in a playlist of background music? In fact, one is from a provider of royalty-free background music - which seems like exactly what you would expect in such a playlist. You could argue that it's not really jazz, which is understandable, but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore.
  - aimor 5y ago
    I definitely had the wrong impression of how much music was produced by the examples given. It's not just "two songs and dissolve".
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    > but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore. Metalcore is the top 100 music of metal, I doubt it’s going to change anytime soon. I’d guess what ever is not metalcore, is probably cheesy power metal like Sabaton or Gloryhammer.
_Nat_ 5y ago
Sounds like they're "fake" in that they're apparently fictional characters who aren't explicitly presented as such. They're just branding-icons, like the mascots who make a brand-name cereal. And then like with cereal, someone else actually makes it. I guess that this might be concerning for folks who feel like they form spiritual-connections to artists, if they then learn that there wasn't really a singular artist. Though I suspect that most folks probably don't care. Related: 1. ["Ghost singer", Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_singer ). 2. ["Ghostwriter", Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter ).
- Clubber 5y ago
  >They're just branding-icons Honestly that seems like a lot of music since the 2000s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and an autotune.
  - jkubicek 5y ago
    Honestly, this seems like a lot of music since the 1950s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and a nice suit.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      If you're going back to the fifties it was worse. It was common to have a model on the cover that is white when the artists are not just to sell albums to racists.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    Milli Vanilli, Boney M. just to name two. This isn't a modern phenomenon. It might not have been so easy to pull it off. Or maybe it was. It was the time before people played or sang live on TV. So there was less risk then in the years were live performance in a TV studio became somewhat of the norm. And for generated music to be profitable it probably "just" needs to have a lot of songs one would not skip when they are part of some automatic play lists or "radio stations" playing stuff similar to x or y. This way while any one song would only have few streams the overall oeuvre of the creator could be quite profitable. The same as with any auto-generated product targeting the long tail in Amazon (think T-shirts with quotes).
quitit 5y ago
My assumption here is that popular songs are covered then assembled into generic playlists which are then used to divert the lion’s share of revenue away from the original artist’s music. Thus providing Spotify or the labels a low-cost way of minimising their royalty payout figures for listeners that aren’t fussed if they hear the original or a cover (eg mindless background music). They are “fake” artists as they’re hired by Spotify, the label or a 3rd party to produce the cover for a fixed fee, which the rights are then held. To use various names also distracts from what would be highly repetitive production credits. The author notes that such investigation isn’t possible on services other than Spotify because they do not provide much background information such as play counts. However this information is not necessary, one can simply play the generic playlists made by the music services and check to see if they are the originals or covers. There is definitely large variation in the streaming industry here. It also wouldn’t surprise me if music services are favouring these playlists as a means to reducing their royalty payout costs.
- djur 5y ago
  If that's the case, it's not what's discussed in this article. I don't think there are popular original songs being covered in this list of "background jazz" songs, and if they were, the originals were presumably not the same kind of moody muzak that the playlists are designed around. This is a "scam" in the same sense that the CDs of generic mellow coffeehouse music you could get at Starbucks were "scams".
yesitisfake 5y ago
> 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. Then you missed the point, which was that Spotify diverts listening-minutes to these fake artists to lower the total amount of royalties they have to pay, thus increasing their bottom line. If the algorithm and business model are predisposed to choosing music that will increase Spotify's profitability, specifically using made-up artists, many of which coincidentally exist in the same country as Spotify, and some 500 of which are actually only controlled by 20 people, I'm not sure why you would bother to think they're "real." It's like saying fake tits are real because you can touch them. Of course, it's completely up to the Spotify listener to continue using their service, or to use their curated or generated playlists. So for that reason, I don't really care. It just seems interesting to see so many people shilling for Spotify by nitpicking about what they think the word "fake" means. > “The songwriters and producers of these tracks are either paid a fixed fee per track or a combination of a low advance and reduced royalty rate and it works because these ‘labels’ can guarantee millions of streams through their own network of search engine optimized DSP playlists and YouTube channels.”
- vasco 5y ago
  Are shows that Netflix comes up with the concept and produces fake? Is it only real entertainment if the platform buys it from someone else? Let's imagine these "artists" are all actually created by a team of software engineers at Spotify tweaking a GPT-3-like model for songs. If the songs get listens and users like them, so what? It's not like you think you're listening to Taylor Swift but instead get a fake. You're clicking a playlist, and that playlist has songs that have been crafted to fit well with the playlist and optimized for discovery. How is this more fake than a record label putting a bunch of young guys together, buying lyrics and songs for them and calling them Backstreet Boys?
  - yesitisfake 5y ago
    > Let's imagine these "artists" are all actually created by a team of software engineers at Spotify tweaking a GPT-3-like model for songs. If the songs get listens and users like them, so what? I don't think anyone has a problem if users listen to or like machine-generated music. Some people, including some paying customers, would have a problem with this music being presented to them opaquely as if it has gone through the same creative process as human-generated music. To your other point, re: Backstreet Boys, they're not any more authentic, at least not in my perspective. But the fact that I may find Backstreet Boys completely "soulless" or not a "genuine form of artistic expression" or "lacking in musical talent" is all my problem/opinion, and it's all orthogonal to the point, which is that the promotion of Backstreet Boys, by way of a record label allocating marketing spend to pay a radio station to play their music on repeat, ought to be transparent. There are even "payola" laws about this in the US, complete with a known and abused loophole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#Third-party_loophole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#Third-party_loophole > ...You're clicking a playlist... The question becomes, "How did the user find the playlist?" I don't know how organic the process is for getting these playlists in front of a user's face. If Spotify does any kind of algorithmic fuckery to present that playlist more prominently to a user -- while, on the backend, accounting for the fact that the playlist will benefit them financially because the royalties are lower because the artists are "fake" -- then that should be disclosed to the user in some form. I'm not actually suggesting a law or regulation here. But if I were still a Spotify customer, I'd prefer to know if they generated and presented content to me because it benefit them financially rather than because they think I'd enjoy listening to it.
lmm 5y ago
What Milli Vanilli did was scandalous enough that they were stripped of their Grammy. This seems directly analogous.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  I had to scroll awfully far to find a Milli Vanilli reference, which is what immediately springs to my mind when someone says "fake artist."
trimir2022 5y ago
The fraud is the streaming companies like Spotify, Amazon pushing music revenue towards non-existent artists by playing only this fake artists music and thereby pocketing the streaming revenue themselves. It's basically a case of anti-competitive platform hijacked by the platform owner.
bagels 5y ago
It should have opened with their definition of fake. But, apparently, it's music that the streaming services are commissioning at cut rates and using their platform to promote, as to reduce their costs?

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.

aimor 5y ago

What makes the artists fake is that they are publishing only a couple songs for the specific purpose of providing the streaming platform with royalty free music, and then they disappear. The example pictures in the article show artists that have published 6 minutes and 8 minutes of music. There's also a statistic that 20 people created 500 artists. These artists are shells, facades, illusory, fake. Go looking for them and it's a dead end because apparently all the artist did was publish two songs and dissolve. The author does criticize the title: "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." If I were to run with it I'd say the streaming platform is also fake. People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.

tyrfing 5y ago
> What makes the artists fake is that they are publishing only a couple songs for the specific purpose of providing the streaming platform with royalty free music The article has 3 examples. Two have easily identified 3rd-party labels, the last is unclear. Neither is a traditional label, but there is also no indication they are owned by Spotify. > People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear. What bands would people expect in a playlist of background music? In fact, one is from a provider of royalty-free background music - which seems like exactly what you would expect in such a playlist. You could argue that it's not really jazz, which is understandable, but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore.
- aimor 5y ago
  I definitely had the wrong impression of how much music was produced by the examples given. It's not just "two songs and dissolve".
- Semaphor 5y ago
  > but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore. Metalcore is the top 100 music of metal, I doubt it’s going to change anytime soon. I’d guess what ever is not metalcore, is probably cheesy power metal like Sabaton or Gloryhammer.

_Nat_ 5y ago

Sounds like they're "fake" in that they're apparently fictional characters who aren't explicitly presented as such. They're just branding-icons, like the mascots who make a brand-name cereal. And then like with cereal, someone else actually makes it. I guess that this might be concerning for folks who feel like they form spiritual-connections to artists, if they then learn that there wasn't really a singular artist. Though I suspect that most folks probably don't care. Related: 1. ["Ghost singer", Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_singer ). 2. ["Ghostwriter", Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter ).

Clubber 5y ago
>They're just branding-icons Honestly that seems like a lot of music since the 2000s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and an autotune.
- jkubicek 5y ago
  Honestly, this seems like a lot of music since the 1950s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and a nice suit.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    If you're going back to the fifties it was worse. It was common to have a model on the cover that is white when the artists are not just to sell albums to racists.
- sdoering 5y ago
  Milli Vanilli, Boney M. just to name two. This isn't a modern phenomenon. It might not have been so easy to pull it off. Or maybe it was. It was the time before people played or sang live on TV. So there was less risk then in the years were live performance in a TV studio became somewhat of the norm. And for generated music to be profitable it probably "just" needs to have a lot of songs one would not skip when they are part of some automatic play lists or "radio stations" playing stuff similar to x or y. This way while any one song would only have few streams the overall oeuvre of the creator could be quite profitable. The same as with any auto-generated product targeting the long tail in Amazon (think T-shirts with quotes).

quitit 5y ago

My assumption here is that popular songs are covered then assembled into generic playlists which are then used to divert the lion’s share of revenue away from the original artist’s music. Thus providing Spotify or the labels a low-cost way of minimising their royalty payout figures for listeners that aren’t fussed if they hear the original or a cover (eg mindless background music). They are “fake” artists as they’re hired by Spotify, the label or a 3rd party to produce the cover for a fixed fee, which the rights are then held. To use various names also distracts from what would be highly repetitive production credits. The author notes that such investigation isn’t possible on services other than Spotify because they do not provide much background information such as play counts. However this information is not necessary, one can simply play the generic playlists made by the music services and check to see if they are the originals or covers. There is definitely large variation in the streaming industry here. It also wouldn’t surprise me if music services are favouring these playlists as a means to reducing their royalty payout costs.

djur 5y ago
If that's the case, it's not what's discussed in this article. I don't think there are popular original songs being covered in this list of "background jazz" songs, and if they were, the originals were presumably not the same kind of moody muzak that the playlists are designed around. This is a "scam" in the same sense that the CDs of generic mellow coffeehouse music you could get at Starbucks were "scams".

yesitisfake 5y ago

> 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. Then you missed the point, which was that Spotify diverts listening-minutes to these fake artists to lower the total amount of royalties they have to pay, thus increasing their bottom line. If the algorithm and business model are predisposed to choosing music that will increase Spotify's profitability, specifically using made-up artists, many of which coincidentally exist in the same country as Spotify, and some 500 of which are actually only controlled by 20 people, I'm not sure why you would bother to think they're "real." It's like saying fake tits are real because you can touch them. Of course, it's completely up to the Spotify listener to continue using their service, or to use their curated or generated playlists. So for that reason, I don't really care. It just seems interesting to see so many people shilling for Spotify by nitpicking about what they think the word "fake" means. > “The songwriters and producers of these tracks are either paid a fixed fee per track or a combination of a low advance and reduced royalty rate and it works because these ‘labels’ can guarantee millions of streams through their own network of search engine optimized DSP playlists and YouTube channels.”

vasco 5y ago
Are shows that Netflix comes up with the concept and produces fake? Is it only real entertainment if the platform buys it from someone else? Let's imagine these "artists" are all actually created by a team of software engineers at Spotify tweaking a GPT-3-like model for songs. If the songs get listens and users like them, so what? It's not like you think you're listening to Taylor Swift but instead get a fake. You're clicking a playlist, and that playlist has songs that have been crafted to fit well with the playlist and optimized for discovery. How is this more fake than a record label putting a bunch of young guys together, buying lyrics and songs for them and calling them Backstreet Boys?
- yesitisfake 5y ago
  > Let's imagine these "artists" are all actually created by a team of software engineers at Spotify tweaking a GPT-3-like model for songs. If the songs get listens and users like them, so what? I don't think anyone has a problem if users listen to or like machine-generated music. Some people, including some paying customers, would have a problem with this music being presented to them opaquely as if it has gone through the same creative process as human-generated music. To your other point, re: Backstreet Boys, they're not any more authentic, at least not in my perspective. But the fact that I may find Backstreet Boys completely "soulless" or not a "genuine form of artistic expression" or "lacking in musical talent" is all my problem/opinion, and it's all orthogonal to the point, which is that the promotion of Backstreet Boys, by way of a record label allocating marketing spend to pay a radio station to play their music on repeat, ought to be transparent. There are even "payola" laws about this in the US, complete with a known and abused loophole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#Third-party_loophole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#Third-party_loophole > ...You're clicking a playlist... The question becomes, "How did the user find the playlist?" I don't know how organic the process is for getting these playlists in front of a user's face. If Spotify does any kind of algorithmic fuckery to present that playlist more prominently to a user -- while, on the backend, accounting for the fact that the playlist will benefit them financially because the royalties are lower because the artists are "fake" -- then that should be disclosed to the user in some form. I'm not actually suggesting a law or regulation here. But if I were still a Spotify customer, I'd prefer to know if they generated and presented content to me because it benefit them financially rather than because they think I'd enjoy listening to it.

lmm 5y ago

What Milli Vanilli did was scandalous enough that they were stripped of their Grammy. This seems directly analogous.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
I had to scroll awfully far to find a Milli Vanilli reference, which is what immediately springs to my mind when someone says "fake artist."

trimir2022 5y ago

The fraud is the streaming companies like Spotify, Amazon pushing music revenue towards non-existent artists by playing only this fake artists music and thereby pocketing the streaming revenue themselves. It's basically a case of anti-competitive platform hijacked by the platform owner.

bagels 5y ago

It should have opened with their definition of fake. But, apparently, it's music that the streaming services are commissioning at cut rates and using their platform to promote, as to reduce their costs?