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Swedish composer becomes Spotify's most-famous musician you've never heard of
- adawg4 3y agoSeth everman was my first guess...
- iamsanteri 3y agoYeah, nothing fishy here at all. Why pay tribute to other artists if you can make a deal with one and promote him on all the playlist to pocket back your money. Just give him the machinery and funding to create all of it and voila!
- petesergeant 3y agoIs there the suggestion that he’s getting a sweetheart deal there? I missed it if so
- tolerantgravity 3y agoNo, this is just an evidence-free speculative conspiracy theory that is now my new head-canon
- pastage 3y agoThere are contracts that have been seen by major news outlets but they have not been confirmed/commented on by Spotify.
- l33tman 3y agoYou can apparently trade off 3/4 of your royaltys for a higher placement on the coveted Spotify-owned playlists of different types of ambient music, childrens songs etc. According to the article. But stuff like that is not very transparent I guess..
- jjallen 3y agoHow is Spotify “pocketing back the money”?
- iamacyborg 3y agoSmaller revenue share with these SEO artists.
- wafflemaker 3y agoJust a guess but maybe not all deals between Spotify and artists are the same (% royalties paid)? If that was the case and Spotify music picking algorithms chose artists with lower % royalty, Spotify would save money.
- petesergeant 3y agoMy understanding is that that's not really how Spotify's financials work, in that how much will be paid as royalties _in general_ to everyone is calculated first as the "royalty pool" (something like 66% of revenue), and then how that money is split and to whom is calculated secondarily (using an algorithm called "streamshare"). So in this case, its affecting the "streamshare" calculation, but not the "royalty pool" one, and so not affecting how much money is in Spotify's pocket.
- iamsanteri 3y agoTo answer your question, they pocket it back by paying it to themselves. The artist is only formally an external ”artist”, but in this case he’s essentially one of their own. They curate him, let him on all the most promoted playlists and keep an appearance as if they’re paying it to some artist just like they do to anyone else. That artist gets all this firepower by agreeing to keep less of the cut while paying more of it back to Spotify in some other ways and it is all kept under the radar. That’s what I suppose.
- vasco 3y agoWhy wouldn't Spotify just do it themselves then? As they are doing: https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/spotify-confirms-test-of-prompt-based-ai-playlists-feature/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/spotify-confirms-test-of-p...
- spiderice 3y ago> A “secret” composer who has released music under hundreds of different names has been identified as Sweden’s most-listened-to artist on Spotify – pulling in more plays than Britney Spears or Abba. Wow.. this is sketchy as hell.
- resolutebat 3y agoHe's basically SEOing Spotify. Search for "peaceful piano" or whatever, and you'll likely find the guy's tracks. At home, whenever we eat X, we have a habit of asking Spotify to play X. We've made some great discoveries this way (Cornflakes 3D is an Israeli psytrance group, while The Dumplings is a Czech indie band), but these days almost all the searches have been hijacked by "playlist called Italian Restaurant Music" etc.
- sdfhbdf 3y agoThe Dumplings is a polish band :)
- resolutebat 3y agoWhoops, I stand corrected!
- MrJohz 3y ago> At home, whenever we eat X, we have a habit of asking Spotify to play X. I love this idea! It's a shame it doesn't work so well any more, but I love finding new ways to find music that you'd just never listen to normally. It reminds me of the guy who made it is mission to listen to every album that was made in 2016 specifically, and now has hundreds of albums with so much variety, just by picking some specific theme and going wild with it.
- tetha 3y agoI've recently been pointed at the 1001 album generator[1] I just started on thursday and so far it has shown me Rage against the Machine, and some Jazz 20 years older than I am. Quite the experience. 1: https://1001albumsgenerator.com/ https://1001albumsgenerator.com/
- dvh 3y agoSwedish did with music what Japanese did with the cars.
- mrtksn 3y agoYep, most people never heard of Max Martin - another Swede - but probably listed to his songs so many times. The Weeknd, Katy Perry, Bon Jovi, Usher, Pink and many more have their hit songs made by this guy. It's amazing, he somehow trained his neural networks to produce global hit songs. He is doing this straight from 1998 to this day starting with "...Baby One More Time" of Britney Spears. This year he already has 2 songs as #1 on the Billboard HOT 100.
- martindbp 3y agoAm I just old to think names like Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys would be bigger names on that list?
- nadermx 3y agoWhat I wonder is if Spotify's algorithm works in such a way that it ranks based on users fully listening and liking most songs, wouldn't he have actually been better off releasing all his music under one name, vs many? Because he is still releasing quite a bit of volume to achieve this
- nojs 3y agoNot necessarily, it might be better to stratify by genre (like buying a separate domain for different product verticals), to make the algorithm think each one is super relevant and specific.
- chongli 3y agoExactly. Listeners expect an artist to stay in their lane. A cross-genre artist would be wildly unpopular. Think of a guy releasing both country and hip hop music: he would be disliked by both listeners.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rightbyte 3y agoIt seems to be some sort of common principal component analysis. E.g. A likes a. B likes b. B likes c. A maybe likes c. But with many more nodes. I think they use it for recommendations and subgenre sorting etc.
- alexey-salmin 3y ago> How much Röhr, who has worked as a conductor on pop stars’ tours and on TV, has earned from his agreement with Spotify is not known. However, his private company reportedly made 32.7mn kronor (£2.4m) in 2022, when it had a record year. Doesn't look much
- the_other 3y ago> Doesn't look much It’s a life changing amount of money for something like 90% of humanity.
- pests 3y agoLmao yep. $2.4mil puts you in the top 2% of Americans.
- eberkund 3y agoTry 99.99%
- alexey-salmin 3y agoWell Britney Spears and Abba are not 90% of humanity and he is reportedly listened-to more than them. This makes me wonder how big musicians make most of their money actually. Live concerts? Selling merchandise? Genuine question. For all I know it's not topping the Spotify.
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoThose 32 mSEK is the turnover, not profits. The profits are a mere 27 mSEK.[1] And he runs two more companies[2][3] that made another 21 mSEK. [1]: https://www.allabolag.se/5569664575/j-pipe-productions-ab https://www.allabolag.se/5569664575/j-pipe-productions-ab [2]: https://www.allabolag.se/5566338496/j-pipe-music-ab https://www.allabolag.se/5566338496/j-pipe-music-ab [3]: https://www.allabolag.se/5593406852/j-pipe-holding-ab https://www.allabolag.se/5593406852/j-pipe-holding-ab
- kwhitefoot 3y agoSounds pretty good, especially when you consider that they only have one employee.
- publius_0xf3 3y agoOkay, what is it with Swedes min-maxing their way to the top of pop music? How do they do it? Even Pewdiepie is like another case of chasing algorithmic success.
- juitpykyk 3y agoMy conspiracy theory is that the weather is so depressing that you stay inside and make music. Maybe this also explains UK success in music :)
- hhmc 3y agoWhy is this conspiratorial? It’s simply a theory, no?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Aromasin 3y agoIt's also no surprise that Iceland has the highest number of authors per capita!
- marginalia_nu 3y agoProbably one of several factors. It's a pretty well known secret that a large part of why there is a Swedish cottage music industry is the historical ease of welfare fraud, on top of the already generous grants for cultural activities. You could basically get the government to not only pay for your rent, but your studio and equipment as well. Generations of Swedish musicians were living off unemployment checks while getting started. That era has drawn to a close, but there's still significant momentum left in the music industry it spawned.
- rightbyte 3y agoIn this case he maybe have insider knowledge of how the algorithm works due to friends inside Spotify? I would suspect the best SEO consultants have worked at Google or have friends inside.
- choonway 3y agothe publishing under psuedonyms parts sounds a lot like overemployment.
- tdudhhu 3y agoI wonder if this is the same for all those fireplace and aquarium movies on streaming services.
- non-nil 3y agoWhether you think music streaming in its current form is a net good or bad for humanity, consider not supporting Spotify the company. From the very start, they're nothing but grifters. Daniel Ek has his background in ads, SEO and related stuff –basically every possible way to make a buck using this newfangled internet thing – including selling virtual clothes for virtual dolls to kids age 9-17. The teaming up with Martin Lorentzon was never about music, but simply finding an untapped market, a niche in which to apply their particular set of skills of hawking stuff online. They teamed up with the guy behind µTorrent and eventually convinced the major labels to buy into the idea (by getting a cut). The idea that they are on the side the art form, let alone artists, is pure mythogenesis to serve their brand. Recently, music hasn't been enough to feed the growth. They want to colonize podcasts, an open ecosystem, and have put billions of dollars into investments and deals locking popular podcasts onto their platforms. They now intend to do the same with audio books. Spotify has from the very start had an incestuous relationship with labels and various middlemen. It was never a fair game, they make special deals whenever it serves their purpose (driving the price down). Everyone involved is guaranteed to make a cut before the artist, and the entire ecosystem is built upon the idea that the less they pay out to the artist, the better their numbers look. Nowadays they don't even pay out anything at all unless you have 1000 streams, which just happens to be about two thirds of the catalogue. Is it in their best interest to keep songs with 500 streams from getting more streams, or not? Why would they care about money laundering, or legitimate artists having their entire body of work deleted by a middleman because someone maliciously sent a bot their way?[1] The cheaper they can amass content, the better. Hence these backroom deals with what are basically content farms. What the featured article describes is not only sanctioned, it's the entire strategy going forward. Once generative AI comes further along, what their algorithm will push will continue to be what serves their bottom line, i.e. the cheap stuff. You'll soon see the audio book equivalent of Johan Röhr, churning out thousands of books, narrated in real time by a non-human voice, algorithmically pushing out authentic works from all the lists. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY7-Ti77UQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVY7-Ti77UQ
- tuwtuwtuwtuw 3y agoIt's funny that you mention AI, because your comment reads like generative AI to me - longwinded and with lot of vague claims. Spotify allows me to listen to music. Why would I care that the CEO previously worked with ads? And obviously a company like this will try to create deals which are cheap to them, so that they can make more money.. they run a business, so...yes?
- justanotherjoe 3y agoyou have to remember this is the tactic food industry have understood for decades by selling multiple branda of potato chips masquarading as 'choices' to capture as wide a market as possible. Can you blame a person for doing the same.
- djmips 3y agoMuzak - most famous muzakian you've never heard of.