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This article is trash. Here’s the original reporting expose you want to read: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-mu

This article is trash. Here’s the original reporting expose you want to read: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin... Money quote: > Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.

awfulneutral 2y ago
Isn't that a different phenomenon? This article is about hit songs that have cheap AI covers, almost identical sounding, presumably to poach royalties from the real musicians. The "ghost" thing is interesting too, that sounds almost like the industry from before The Beatles, when bands were just people hired by the record companies to record songs written by others, and the companies owned pretty much everything.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  There is zero evidence in the article to support the claim of AI artist. It’s far far more likely the “AI Artists” are actually Spotify funded ghost artists. The best evidence for “AI artist” is just as supportive of “Spotify ghost artists” as it is AI.
  - awfulneutral 2y ago
    I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.
    - leoc 2y ago
      The reporting suggests that the "Perfect Fit Content" scheme began in 2017 and had been rolled out on a large scale by 2023, so it's unlikely that it has been reliant on AI music. (It does seem very likely that Spotify is now at least experimenting with replacing or augmenting the ghost musicians with AI.) I don't at all accept that Spotify running a kind of self-payola system with own-brand music is only a big controversy if AI-generated tracks are involved.
      - awfulneutral 2y ago
        I didn't mean it would be a big controversy because it's AI, I meant because they would be replacing major label/artist songs with their own karaoke versions, and then manipulating their own algorithms to promote them. That seems like something the labels would really fight against.
        leoc 2y ago
        But they don't have to target individual musical acts or individual songs for replication to drain their purses. Time spent listening to Spotify's own-brand lo-fi is time not spent listening to playlists full of expensive third-party musicians, including musicians in whole other genres. And if they did want to make and promote close covers of individual songs then they'd probably call humans: people are already very good at that (many such covers exist already) and (IANAL!) the legal risks are probably smaller and better-understood. After all, copyright defences of unlicensed generative AI seem to rely on the notion that its output is transformative, but presumably it would be hard to make that claim when you ask an AI to produce a near-exact replica of a song you put into its training data.
leoc 2y ago
This summary of the book excerpt/Harper's article https://futurism.com/spotify-accused-promoting-ghost-artists https://futurism.com/spotify-accused-promoting-ghost-artists provides a short, punchy summary: > Spotify Employees Say It's Promoting Fake Artists to Reduce Royalty Payments to Real Ones [...] > According to a shocking new book, Spotify has been promoting so-called "ghost artists" so it can avoid paying its piddling royalties to real artists. > In an excerpt from "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" published in Harper's, author Liz Pelly reveals that the streaming platform has a secretive internal program that prioritizes cheap and generic music. > Dubbed "Perfect Fit Content" or PFC for short, this program not only involved a network of affiliated production firms creating tons of "low-budget stock muzak" for the platform, but also a team of employees who surreptitiously placed tracks from those firms on Spotify's curated playlists. I think the mods should change this post to link to the Harper's piece, or even the Futurism one. More broadly, it is interesting how Spotify is following the path blazed by supermarkets, then by video streaming services, in starting to sell (and promote, and prioritise) own-brand content. (Of course the Futurism summary is itself an example of a related problematic practice ...)

awfulneutral 2y ago

Isn't that a different phenomenon? This article is about hit songs that have cheap AI covers, almost identical sounding, presumably to poach royalties from the real musicians. The "ghost" thing is interesting too, that sounds almost like the industry from before The Beatles, when bands were just people hired by the record companies to record songs written by others, and the companies owned pretty much everything.

forrestthewoods 2y ago
There is zero evidence in the article to support the claim of AI artist. It’s far far more likely the “AI Artists” are actually Spotify funded ghost artists. The best evidence for “AI artist” is just as supportive of “Spotify ghost artists” as it is AI.
- awfulneutral 2y ago
  I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.
  - leoc 2y ago
    The reporting suggests that the "Perfect Fit Content" scheme began in 2017 and had been rolled out on a large scale by 2023, so it's unlikely that it has been reliant on AI music. (It does seem very likely that Spotify is now at least experimenting with replacing or augmenting the ghost musicians with AI.) I don't at all accept that Spotify running a kind of self-payola system with own-brand music is only a big controversy if AI-generated tracks are involved.
    - awfulneutral 2y ago
      I didn't mean it would be a big controversy because it's AI, I meant because they would be replacing major label/artist songs with their own karaoke versions, and then manipulating their own algorithms to promote them. That seems like something the labels would really fight against.
      - leoc 2y ago
        But they don't have to target individual musical acts or individual songs for replication to drain their purses. Time spent listening to Spotify's own-brand lo-fi is time not spent listening to playlists full of expensive third-party musicians, including musicians in whole other genres. And if they did want to make and promote close covers of individual songs then they'd probably call humans: people are already very good at that (many such covers exist already) and (IANAL!) the legal risks are probably smaller and better-understood. After all, copyright defences of unlicensed generative AI seem to rely on the notion that its output is transformative, but presumably it would be hard to make that claim when you ask an AI to produce a near-exact replica of a song you put into its training data.

leoc 2y ago

This summary of the book excerpt/Harper's article https://futurism.com/spotify-accused-promoting-ghost-artists https://futurism.com/spotify-accused-promoting-ghost-artists provides a short, punchy summary: > Spotify Employees Say It's Promoting Fake Artists to Reduce Royalty Payments to Real Ones [...] > According to a shocking new book, Spotify has been promoting so-called "ghost artists" so it can avoid paying its piddling royalties to real artists. > In an excerpt from "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" published in Harper's, author Liz Pelly reveals that the streaming platform has a secretive internal program that prioritizes cheap and generic music. > Dubbed "Perfect Fit Content" or PFC for short, this program not only involved a network of affiliated production firms creating tons of "low-budget stock muzak" for the platform, but also a team of employees who surreptitiously placed tracks from those firms on Spotify's curated playlists. I think the mods should change this post to link to the Harper's piece, or even the Futurism one. More broadly, it is interesting how Spotify is following the path blazed by supermarkets, then by video streaming services, in starting to sell (and promote, and prioritise) own-brand content. (Of course the Futurism summary is itself an example of a related problematic practice ...)