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I listened to a few ambient playlists on Spotify and Youtube and they were just slop. Even when I was doing something else (e.g. programming) I became annoyed t

I listened to a few ambient playlists on Spotify and Youtube and they were just slop. Even when I was doing something else (e.g. programming) I became annoyed that the background music was so bad. Same with the lo-fi beats channel that is so popular. I'm not sure there is a problem if a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop. I do, however, think its a problem if Spotify is giving preferential treatment to slop, as is claimed in this post. I also would prefer a system that better supported musicians, while having the ease of use of Spotify.

blipvert 2y ago
Give Pye Corner Audio, Craven Faults and Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan a go
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  See also Lustmord, Detritus, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Poppy Ackroyd, Moon Ate the Dark
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    Just because I know RAI has talked about the crappyness of Spotify for artists for a number of years, here’s a snippet from a 6 month old interview that’s relevant to the original conversation. https://igloomag.com/profiles/five-questions-with-rafael-anton-irisarri-black-knoll https://igloomag.com/profiles/five-questions-with-rafael-ant... > In this day and age, it is incredibly challenging to start a label. Streaming has massively depleted the revenue potential for artists and labels, and even those with a good following are struggling. For those starting out, it’s an uphill battle to build an audience and be successful. > Only a small percentage of songs make a decent amount of money with streaming, so recording budgets for independent artists are next to none. I remember when an album had the support of a team of people devoted to realizing the artist’s vision. Something magical happens when you get that collaboration of people working together to achieve the same goal. Nowadays the artist/producer does the recording, the mixing, and in some cases, even the mastering. Consequently, the production quality has declined drastically over the last decade, and it’s not helped by how most people consume music (illegally downloading it, YouTube lo-fi, or paid streaming subscriptions) but rather contributes to the decline. > For those who remember the world before streaming took over, this is a very different one in which we now live. Music is no longer the product being marketed or sold, instead, it’s the listener’s data. The artist is a “brand” and they create “content.” We are in a time where we are constantly bombarded with “content” on social media and streaming platforms. Take the so-called “Spotify Ambient.” This sound has become watered down and generic, thanks partly to all the Muzak clearing houses creating material for most of the “sleep” and “stress relief” style of playlists. > Whenever an actual artist shows up on those playlists, let’s say the great Otto A. Totland for example, you can immediately hear the difference between his music and Muzak. Otto writes music that conveys rich and nuanced emotions with many layers of meaning. His music wasn’t solely written for the sake of playlisting it. His music was written because it genuinely meant something special to the composer. Muzak clearing houses have been discussed ad nauseam in many industry exposés about “Spotify fake artist” trends with companies like Epidemic Sound and their catalog of ambient rip-offs. > Some companies exist solely to create content for playlists. Think about that for a moment! Composer staff are paid to make royalty-free clones of well-established artists. The companies see which songs are performing well on Spotify-curated playlists, and the clearing house creates a similar-sounding song so Spotify can remove the original from their curated playlist without paying royalties. This practice exists in advertising, when agencies create music for an ad “inspired by” (i.e. ripping off) the music they don’t want to pay the licensing fee for. Somehow, this is legal. You end up with “artists” like Jonci (yes, that’s Jónsi with a “C”) who have millions of plays, sounding exactly like Sigur Rós, and you have zero information about the artist. > Clearing houses can now easily create thousands of meaningless ambient-adjacent tracks to be put on playlists with the unsuspecting consumer having no idea. AI technology makes this all even easier. The lack of credits on streaming platforms is another massive problem, particularly for music workers like myself who depend on album credits/credentials to generate business and get gigs as engineers, producers, etc. The music is stripped of production, artwork, recording, mixing, and mastering credits. I could go on, but the point is that there are many challenges for artists, labels, mastering engineers, and anyone making music now.
    - Fluorescence 2y ago
      Interesting. Counter-intuitively, I think slop might have it's place in cultural development. There is always genre-death by exploitative cash-in slop and vomiting it out by machine might be an accelerant. When you start getting that visceral deja-vu dilution ick from slop or just a scene getting derivative and samey, that's what prompts head-snapping invention of brand new sounds that seek clear-blue water between themselves and the slop.
- wgx 2y ago
  Add to that: Floating Points, Rival Consoles, Brian Eno…
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
DyslexicAtheist 2y ago
> a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop this is perhaps the crux of the matter! Very few people in my social circle whose taste in music I share. The majority of them don't even have a "taste" and content with whatever their car-radio pumps out. Does that drive me mad? Mildly. Appreciating and recognizing great music is a deeply personal experience. Like appreciating different culinary tastes that requires training and exposure (ideally from a young age), it's also hard work (the older and more settled our tastes get).
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  Most people are stupid. What an unexpected discovery! Considering the fact that the crux of the problem is that people love slop and always have, does the fact that slop has become AI-generated change anything? Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music? I usually just wait to somehow stumble upon something.
  - jimmydddd 2y ago
    I think "stupid" may be overstating it a bit. I think it's more that people only have a limited mental bandwidth and can only focus on a limited amount of categories of life. Person A may think person B is stupid for not caring about the quality of background music. But person B might think person A is stupid for ordering a $5 glass of the house wine at a restaurant instead of some special French vintage. And person C might be aghast that that both A and B have standard factory tires on their cars instead of high performance low-profile racing tires.
  - tessellated 2y ago
    I love reading up on my fav musicians and have a listen at what their influences are and/or other fans recommend. Or, in 2012, I torrented the then whole discog of a British duo called Autechre that I liked a track from on the soundtrack of the film 'Pi'. 12 years later, I have several vinyls, bought every release on multiple [streaming] services/shops, have been to one concert in '16... still cannot get enough and listen to their new releases all the time. Funny to think about it this way, how a handful of beats in a movie can open you up to a world unseen, just gotta follow the tracks...
cogogo 2y ago
To me the really gross bit is the dishonesty around the slop. Same track with multiple different names appearing under multiple different artist names is egregious. Classic corporate disregard for customers.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  How is it harmful to customers? You can listen to whatever you want on Spotify. It containing shit music that you will never listen to harms you in which way? If people are genuinely listening to those tracks and are alright with it, how exactly are they harmed? I already consider most contemporary pop music to be slop anyway, and people seem to be fine listening to it.
  - noelwelsh 2y ago
    It's unfair in that allowing multiple instances of the same song will almost surely lead to that song receiving more plays than it otherwise would due to how recommendation algorithms work. I don't think this is the most egregious act of dishonesty in the article, though. I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace.
    - surgical_fire 2y ago
      > due to how recommendation algorithms work. You have to actively accept the recommendations from the algorithm. If the algorithm ia recommending slop, and you are fine with it, actively listening to it, who was harmed? > I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace. Nobody is forced to listen to the slop playlists generated by Spotify. Spotify puts them in the front page, but they can be ignored. If people are listening to those playlists and are satisfied with it, what is the issue? If the consumption is genuine and not bot activity, I fail to see any wrongdoing on Spotify. If people like listening to slop, who am I to judge?
      - 2y ago
shit_game 2y ago
>I'm not sure there is a problem if a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop. I do, however, think its a problem if Spotify is giving preferential treatment to slop, as is claimed in this post. I also would prefer a system that better supported musicians, while having the ease of use of Spotify. This is not only a problem for Spotify, but for every platform on the internet that publishes content, particularly for social media. Most people don't actively discern whether something they observe is slop or not, and it's a huge problem concerning the autheticity of information and the consequences of it. This issue began with text content back in the 90's when internet spam boomed after Eternal September and the reachable market audience for it boomed, but has been slowly evolving until recently until the "passable" capability of artificial content generation has both increased exponentially and become finacially feasible for bad actors. There have been reports of Spotify being gamed by gangs in Sweden (and iirc abroad) to monetize artificial engagement[0], which I found tied in very closely to some of the amateur research I've done regarding bots on Reddit. Before the public availability of LLMs and other generative AI, most content that was "monetizable" was mostly direct engagements (views, likes, followers, reposts, shotgunning ads, etc.); this resulted in bot farms all over the internet that focused on providing services that gave exactly these results. On Reddit specifically, many of the more sophisticated bot networks and manipulators would feature content that was scraped from other sources like Youtube, Twitter, Quora, and others (including Reddit itself) and simply consist of reposting content. Some of the more novel agents would use markov generators to get around bot detection tools (both first-party and third party), but they would often create nonsense content that was easily discernable as being such. After generative AI took off toward the late end of covid, these bot farms and nefarious agents capitalized on generative AI instantly and heavily. This is particularly known as an issue on Facebook with the "like this image because this AI generater "person" lives in a gutter and has a birthday cake and is missing all their 7 limbs" pictures, but the text content they can produce is insidiously everywhere on sites like Reddit and Quora and Twitter. Some small subset of these agents are either poorly made or buggy and have exposed their prompts directly, which is rather embarrassing, but others are incredibly sophisticated and have been used in campapigns that reach far beyond just gaming outreach on platforms - many of these bot farms are also now being used for political disinformation and social engineering compaigns, and to great effect. Witnessing the effects of these agents in such mundane places as a music playlist is a dismal annoyance, but learning that they are in fact being used to alter public opinion and policy on top of culture and the arts is disturbing. Many people have scorned large production studios such as A24 for their us of generative AI[1], but not being able to trust even assumedly-mundane content anywhere online is something that most people, and especially the the average consumer, is not prepared for. People who are genuinely interested in anything are going to soon recognize that there is a market for gatekeeping content, but they are not going to want to participate in it because the barrier for entry is going to be completely different from that of the classic internet that we have all generally come to accept and build upon. [0]: https://www.stereogum.com/2235272/swedish-gangs-are-reportedly-using-spotify-to-launder-money/news/ https://www.stereogum.com/2235272/swedish-gangs-are-reported... [1]: https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/a24-criticized-for-using-ai-generated-movie-posters-for-civil-war/ https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/a24-criticized-for-using-ai...

blipvert 2y ago

Give Pye Corner Audio, Craven Faults and Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan a go

iamacyborg 2y ago
See also Lustmord, Detritus, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Poppy Ackroyd, Moon Ate the Dark
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  Just because I know RAI has talked about the crappyness of Spotify for artists for a number of years, here’s a snippet from a 6 month old interview that’s relevant to the original conversation. https://igloomag.com/profiles/five-questions-with-rafael-anton-irisarri-black-knoll https://igloomag.com/profiles/five-questions-with-rafael-ant... > In this day and age, it is incredibly challenging to start a label. Streaming has massively depleted the revenue potential for artists and labels, and even those with a good following are struggling. For those starting out, it’s an uphill battle to build an audience and be successful. > Only a small percentage of songs make a decent amount of money with streaming, so recording budgets for independent artists are next to none. I remember when an album had the support of a team of people devoted to realizing the artist’s vision. Something magical happens when you get that collaboration of people working together to achieve the same goal. Nowadays the artist/producer does the recording, the mixing, and in some cases, even the mastering. Consequently, the production quality has declined drastically over the last decade, and it’s not helped by how most people consume music (illegally downloading it, YouTube lo-fi, or paid streaming subscriptions) but rather contributes to the decline. > For those who remember the world before streaming took over, this is a very different one in which we now live. Music is no longer the product being marketed or sold, instead, it’s the listener’s data. The artist is a “brand” and they create “content.” We are in a time where we are constantly bombarded with “content” on social media and streaming platforms. Take the so-called “Spotify Ambient.” This sound has become watered down and generic, thanks partly to all the Muzak clearing houses creating material for most of the “sleep” and “stress relief” style of playlists. > Whenever an actual artist shows up on those playlists, let’s say the great Otto A. Totland for example, you can immediately hear the difference between his music and Muzak. Otto writes music that conveys rich and nuanced emotions with many layers of meaning. His music wasn’t solely written for the sake of playlisting it. His music was written because it genuinely meant something special to the composer. Muzak clearing houses have been discussed ad nauseam in many industry exposés about “Spotify fake artist” trends with companies like Epidemic Sound and their catalog of ambient rip-offs. > Some companies exist solely to create content for playlists. Think about that for a moment! Composer staff are paid to make royalty-free clones of well-established artists. The companies see which songs are performing well on Spotify-curated playlists, and the clearing house creates a similar-sounding song so Spotify can remove the original from their curated playlist without paying royalties. This practice exists in advertising, when agencies create music for an ad “inspired by” (i.e. ripping off) the music they don’t want to pay the licensing fee for. Somehow, this is legal. You end up with “artists” like Jonci (yes, that’s Jónsi with a “C”) who have millions of plays, sounding exactly like Sigur Rós, and you have zero information about the artist. > Clearing houses can now easily create thousands of meaningless ambient-adjacent tracks to be put on playlists with the unsuspecting consumer having no idea. AI technology makes this all even easier. The lack of credits on streaming platforms is another massive problem, particularly for music workers like myself who depend on album credits/credentials to generate business and get gigs as engineers, producers, etc. The music is stripped of production, artwork, recording, mixing, and mastering credits. I could go on, but the point is that there are many challenges for artists, labels, mastering engineers, and anyone making music now.
  - Fluorescence 2y ago
    Interesting. Counter-intuitively, I think slop might have it's place in cultural development. There is always genre-death by exploitative cash-in slop and vomiting it out by machine might be an accelerant. When you start getting that visceral deja-vu dilution ick from slop or just a scene getting derivative and samey, that's what prompts head-snapping invention of brand new sounds that seek clear-blue water between themselves and the slop.
wgx 2y ago
Add to that: Floating Points, Rival Consoles, Brian Eno…
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

DyslexicAtheist 2y ago

> a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop this is perhaps the crux of the matter! Very few people in my social circle whose taste in music I share. The majority of them don't even have a "taste" and content with whatever their car-radio pumps out. Does that drive me mad? Mildly. Appreciating and recognizing great music is a deeply personal experience. Like appreciating different culinary tastes that requires training and exposure (ideally from a young age), it's also hard work (the older and more settled our tastes get).

anal_reactor 2y ago
Most people are stupid. What an unexpected discovery! Considering the fact that the crux of the problem is that people love slop and always have, does the fact that slop has become AI-generated change anything? Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music? I usually just wait to somehow stumble upon something.
- jimmydddd 2y ago
  I think "stupid" may be overstating it a bit. I think it's more that people only have a limited mental bandwidth and can only focus on a limited amount of categories of life. Person A may think person B is stupid for not caring about the quality of background music. But person B might think person A is stupid for ordering a $5 glass of the house wine at a restaurant instead of some special French vintage. And person C might be aghast that that both A and B have standard factory tires on their cars instead of high performance low-profile racing tires.
- tessellated 2y ago
  I love reading up on my fav musicians and have a listen at what their influences are and/or other fans recommend. Or, in 2012, I torrented the then whole discog of a British duo called Autechre that I liked a track from on the soundtrack of the film 'Pi'. 12 years later, I have several vinyls, bought every release on multiple [streaming] services/shops, have been to one concert in '16... still cannot get enough and listen to their new releases all the time. Funny to think about it this way, how a handful of beats in a movie can open you up to a world unseen, just gotta follow the tracks...

cogogo 2y ago

To me the really gross bit is the dishonesty around the slop. Same track with multiple different names appearing under multiple different artist names is egregious. Classic corporate disregard for customers.

surgical_fire 2y ago
How is it harmful to customers? You can listen to whatever you want on Spotify. It containing shit music that you will never listen to harms you in which way? If people are genuinely listening to those tracks and are alright with it, how exactly are they harmed? I already consider most contemporary pop music to be slop anyway, and people seem to be fine listening to it.
- noelwelsh 2y ago
  It's unfair in that allowing multiple instances of the same song will almost surely lead to that song receiving more plays than it otherwise would due to how recommendation algorithms work. I don't think this is the most egregious act of dishonesty in the article, though. I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    > due to how recommendation algorithms work. You have to actively accept the recommendations from the algorithm. If the algorithm ia recommending slop, and you are fine with it, actively listening to it, who was harmed? > I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace. Nobody is forced to listen to the slop playlists generated by Spotify. Spotify puts them in the front page, but they can be ignored. If people are listening to those playlists and are satisfied with it, what is the issue? If the consumption is genuine and not bot activity, I fail to see any wrongdoing on Spotify. If people like listening to slop, who am I to judge?
    - 2y ago

shit_game 2y ago

>I'm not sure there is a problem if a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop. I do, however, think its a problem if Spotify is giving preferential treatment to slop, as is claimed in this post. I also would prefer a system that better supported musicians, while having the ease of use of Spotify. This is not only a problem for Spotify, but for every platform on the internet that publishes content, particularly for social media. Most people don't actively discern whether something they observe is slop or not, and it's a huge problem concerning the autheticity of information and the consequences of it. This issue began with text content back in the 90's when internet spam boomed after Eternal September and the reachable market audience for it boomed, but has been slowly evolving until recently until the "passable" capability of artificial content generation has both increased exponentially and become finacially feasible for bad actors. There have been reports of Spotify being gamed by gangs in Sweden (and iirc abroad) to monetize artificial engagement[0], which I found tied in very closely to some of the amateur research I've done regarding bots on Reddit. Before the public availability of LLMs and other generative AI, most content that was "monetizable" was mostly direct engagements (views, likes, followers, reposts, shotgunning ads, etc.); this resulted in bot farms all over the internet that focused on providing services that gave exactly these results. On Reddit specifically, many of the more sophisticated bot networks and manipulators would feature content that was scraped from other sources like Youtube, Twitter, Quora, and others (including Reddit itself) and simply consist of reposting content. Some of the more novel agents would use markov generators to get around bot detection tools (both first-party and third party), but they would often create nonsense content that was easily discernable as being such. After generative AI took off toward the late end of covid, these bot farms and nefarious agents capitalized on generative AI instantly and heavily. This is particularly known as an issue on Facebook with the "like this image because this AI generater "person" lives in a gutter and has a birthday cake and is missing all their 7 limbs" pictures, but the text content they can produce is insidiously everywhere on sites like Reddit and Quora and Twitter. Some small subset of these agents are either poorly made or buggy and have exposed their prompts directly, which is rather embarrassing, but others are incredibly sophisticated and have been used in campapigns that reach far beyond just gaming outreach on platforms - many of these bot farms are also now being used for political disinformation and social engineering compaigns, and to great effect. Witnessing the effects of these agents in such mundane places as a music playlist is a dismal annoyance, but learning that they are in fact being used to alter public opinion and policy on top of culture and the arts is disturbing. Many people have scorned large production studios such as A24 for their us of generative AI[1], but not being able to trust even assumedly-mundane content anywhere online is something that most people, and especially the the average consumer, is not prepared for. People who are genuinely interested in anything are going to soon recognize that there is a market for gatekeeping content, but they are not going to want to participate in it because the barrier for entry is going to be completely different from that of the classic internet that we have all generally come to accept and build upon. [0]: https://www.stereogum.com/2235272/swedish-gangs-are-reportedly-using-spotify-to-launder-money/news/ https://www.stereogum.com/2235272/swedish-gangs-are-reported... [1]: https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/a24-criticized-for-using-ai-generated-movie-posters-for-civil-war/ https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/a24-criticized-for-using-ai...