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.
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.
...which sort of applies to a lot of Hot 100 artists as well. A good songwriter writes it, a talented producer makes it sound good, and a well-known personality sings it (with varying accuracy) and has their name put on it as the "artist".
It's a spectrum. At one end you've got The Velvet Underground playing around a single mic hooked directly to a reel-to-reel, and at the other end you've got neural-net generated lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to. If you sort artists by play count on Spotify, the top results will be all over this spectrum (but mostly in the middle, I think).
A lot of music these days is produced by one or two people with a computer sitting in a room by themselves. I sometimes listen to the Music Introducing programs on BBC Radio, especially BBC Music Introducing in London [1]. The music is submitted to the BBC by the musicians themselves—hundreds of tracks a week, apparently—and the DJs choose the songs to air on the program. Many of the songs, which are in a variety of genres, are created in the artists’ homes—hence the genre “bedroom pop” [2], which has been around for a while but seems to have taken off since COVID.
I’m an older guy with musical tastes formed in the 1970s, but I find a lot of this new independent music stimulating, enjoyable, and very competently made. When there’s a song I particularly like, I’ve sometimes looked up the artist online, and often he or she has had only a few hundred plays on YouTube and a few dozen followers on Instagram. It must be really tough for young musicians trying to make a career out of music now.
Similarly is the Beach Boys where one brother never left the studio and wrote all of the music while the other guys learned to perform the tunes to take on the road.
That's a huge number of artists. Take Britney Spears' Grammy winning Toxic for example. The song was written and produced by Bloodshy & Avant, with additional writing from Cathy Dennis and Henrik Jonback[1]. …Baby One More Time, another example of hers contains zero songs written by Spears. Is that the same kind of deception that an unknown artist makes when publishing an original song that makes it way onto a jazz playlist? It's hard to find the utility of such a distinction.
I don't know how true this is but it's been widely reported that the lyric "hit me baby one more time" was due to the song's writer (who is Swedish) believing "hit" was American slang for "call."
It's plausible due to the idiom "hit me up" meaning "call me."
Why couldn't anyone on Spears' team come in and smooth out that idiosyncrasy? If someone writes gibberish for lyrics, do singers just go ahead and sing gibberish?
There’s the other slang meaning as in, “I’d hit that”. Of course there is the darker physical hitting interpretation which advocates against domestic violence have a problem with.
Benny Blanco produced (often also wrote or co-wrote) 29 number one songs for artists including Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, Miguel, Halsey, and Camila Cabello.
How do you differentiate this sort of artists from 90+% of artists on the top 40? Isn't nearly the entirety of pop music built upon semi-fictional characters?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
If these people create real music, "fake" seems like the wrong adjective. It's very common for musicians to be involved in a bunch of different bands, or even for the same group of people to release music under different band names, for when they want to experiment with stuff that isn't their normal band's "brand". What's being described sounds like SEO optimization to me. A recent Reply All episode interviewed someone who is very successful at Spotify SEO: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv
But what if Spotify pays somebody a salary to create this music, then artificially pushes it up their search-results so people will play it which means they will play less of the music created by independent artists, which means Spotify has to pay fewer royalties to the independent artists.
It would be a bit like if Google-search for some product showed products created by Google on top of the list, but not really even revealing they were products by Google.
I have no information about if this kind of thing is happening but the article suggests there is evidence to suspect it is. Weird artists nobody knows about being on top of the list. How did they get to be top of the list?
> 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.
Streaming services betray their users expectations in many ways. For instance, Spotify has playlists that are called "This is [artist]" for many artists, and you could reasonably believe they were human made, or at least partially human made (unless Spotify served you up one for a very obscure artist, but they rarely do).
But they aren't even looked at by a human. If you have several artists with the same name, it all gets mixed up in the "This is X" playlist. "This is Glenn Jones" contains music both by the guitarist Glenn Jones, the soul singer Glenn Jones, and the Australian country singer Glenn Jones.
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.
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".
> 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.”
> It just seems interesting to see so many people shilling for Spotify by nitpicking about what they think the word "fake" means.
It's moreso that folks just don't like meaningless claims or unclear writing.
The article's titled "The Fake Artists Problem [...]", so it seems entirely reasonable for a reader to want to know is meant by a "fake artist".
Worse, near 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.
So the author doesn't clearly define what they mean by "fake artists", and then they point out that the term isn't even a good match for what they were trying to say. Which just seems to invite the question: if the author doesn't even like their own wording, why did they use it?
I suspect that part of the problem is that the author's confused about what they're trying to critique. I mean, I get the sense that they're mostly just upset about music-platforms favoring low-cost content. But then they express that concern by instead talking about "fake artists", which seems largely tangential. But then they don't define what they mean by "fake artists", and even critique their own use of the term, making it just.. kind of a mess.
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?
> 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
> ...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.
The problem would be that the platform serving the music (and making recommendations of what to listen to) has a strong incentive to promote their own brand, creating a competitive disadvantage for "real" musicians on the same platform.
This is the music equivalent of Amazon Basics. If Spotify really is creating fake artists to avoid paying real artists, it's the same kind of monopolistic vertical integration as Amazon manufacturing their own products to avoid paying third-party sellers.
Think from a musicians perspective though. Real artists making real music lose out. Someone is looking for music in your genre, and Spotify just serves them their own stock music so they don't have to pay you for your music.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
This is a modern version of Seeburg background music. Seeburg was a jukebox company, and as a sideline, they also sold a background music system. This used a special purpose record changer that played a stack of records over and over.Seeburg made their own records, recorded by their own orchestra in Chicago, and distributed them through their own jukebox dealers. So they didn't have to pay anything to record companies. It was a subscription service; every few months, subscribers got a new set of records with 1000 songs, and the old set was taken back to Seeburg. The records were not copyrighted, which cost money back then. Instead, they were 9 inch diameter, 2 inch center hole, 16⅔ rpm, 420 grooves per inch, 0.5 mil diamond stylus, all of which were incompatible with record players of the era. They were not sold, just rented, although often nobody bothered to ship them back to Chicago for crushing, so many have survived. DRM, the early years.
We had a system like this when I worked at a retail store, and later a movie theater. It was a double-sided cassette that had 60 minutes of audio, and would auto switch from A/B side and back again. Most of the year it was just instrumental background music, but Christmas was a really hated time of year, as all those songs have lyrics (that's what makes them Christmas themed) and it was very obvious how long you'd been working your shift when the celebrity version of "Jingle Bells" played for the fifth time that day.
I note that streema.com is trying really hard to get me to install "easy search tool" by favouring the START button above the PLAY button. If it's not them directly, it's a dark-pattern ad they are running
The Seeburg 1000 could play a stack of 25 records, both sides, each side good for about an hour of music at the slow speed. Thus there was about 50 hours of audio in the stack, enough to keep it from being too repetitive.
Musak worked by distributing audio over phone lines, rather than using an on-site player.
Streaming no-name covers of songs as low-cost background music is not new at all. From a historical perspective, that's the history of music - mediocre musicians playing background music for little money. For a brief period of history in the 20th century, being in a famous band was a Big Deal. That started with mass-market record production, and ended when there were several million MySpace bands.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach.
Music historians note that the creation of the "cannon" of classical music occurred when public orchestral concerts arose around the early 19th century (and often paired with the rise of the middle class). Prior, you'd need an invitation to a private concert put on by a noble.
Mostly "old" music was played at these concerts. A public concert had to at least cover its cost from ticket sales, so eliminating commissions for new works was necessary, if a big break from tradition (most music was written expecting little more than a single performance). Because the pieces that kept getting played at concerts became part of a standard orchestral repertoire, a cannon emerged which became harder to update. A commonplace that circulated when I was a music student claimed that Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (1943) was the last thing to make it into the standard orchestral repertoire.
Maybe there's a similar underlying process at play in which any commercial process naturally tends to promote a smaller "cannon" of block-buster crowd-pleasers (why would you not promote your best-selling widget?). Our own listening (now) prefers not only music we already know, but the exact performance we already have heard.
Canon? (Unless you're talking specifically about the 1812 overture. :-) )
I wonder how copyright extension has affected this phenomenon. Works taking decades longer to enter the public domain, leading to the existing public domain (old) music becoming even more solidified as classical canon? If anybody knows about this I'd love to hear more.
His most played works are (I think) symphonies 5 and 7. The 7th was written in 1941. That said, I've seen a bunch of his later works performed too.
But this is just nitpicking. Without a good definition of "standard orchestral repertoire" and a good dataset of orchestral performances we're just making things up.
It was a claim I heard numerous times as a music student, and find it to be a pretty good fence-post. I always understood it to refer to the "usual suspects" that turn up on concert programs, but it would be interesting to work out what today's standard orchestral repertoire actually is by collating and analyzing orchestral concert programs.
I'd say Shostakovitch 5 might be considered to be part of the "standard" repertoire, but that was composed in the '30s. Maybe his later symphonies turn up more frequently on programs today than does Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra - I'm skeptical but don't actually know.
Are these artists even "fake"? Are they "bad"? Or are they just mediocre and good enough for background music?
I guess the complaint is that jazz is still kind of a niche genre, compared to "background music that generally resembles jazz". But maybe real jazz is actually less good as background music compared to not-quite-jazz. Otherwise, why aren't actual jazz labels putting effort into playlist placements like these so-called fake artists are?
Or is the assertion that Spotify themselves is populating their platform with no-name artists, to avoid paying record label royalties? Maybe you can take issue with vertical integration, but that doesn't make the artists involved "fake".
I believe the most apt analogy would be Amazon promoting Amazon-commissioned knockoffs of its merchant's products, something that's already drawn the attention of antitrust authorities.
It will be interesting to see whether antitrust law can be applied to Spotify in this context, since its actions are arguably anticompetitive.
Most people I've run across who say they like jazz do not like music by contemporary musicians who consider themselves to create jazz. Jazz right now is wildly diverse but overall pretty weird, pretty electronic, very sonically influenced by hip hop, metal, and pop. Lotta sampling, drum machines, even autotune.
> Jazz right now is wildly diverse but overall pretty weird, pretty electronic, very sonically influenced by hip hop, metal, and pop. Lotta sampling, drum machines, even autotune.
This sounds interesting, have any artist recommendations?
> I personally get annoyed if more than 20% of a mix is songs I haven't already upvoted
I am at the complete other end of the spectrum-- I prefer to hear music I've never heard before at least 80% of the time, provided it fits with my taste (which is broad but picky). There is so much great music I will never hear, I want to be exposed to as much of it as possible rather than going over familiar ground all the time.
I have a feeling I'm in the minority on this, but my point is that there are definitely those of us who appreciate algorithms which bring in more "weird knockoff artists" to our streaming mixes. Another factor is that it opens up greater possibilities for seeing live shows.
" 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.
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.
Which is still a warmer sense than the room temp take you just attempted.
Your entire comment was either trolling, or some seriously petulant, and gap-laden understanding of both Miles AND Trane. Not saying you have to like Trane, but damn if your comment was just musically and historically ignorant as all be damned.
I just can't figure out what it would even mean for a jazz saxophonist to be "good on paper". What does it mean? Did he hit 100 RBIs? A take such as "I don't care for Coltrane's improvisational style" would be beyond debate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltrane_changes
He and The Beatles and a lot of other musicians from this era have been subjected to a form of schizophrenic post-hoc pattern matching.
In English: someone doodles on the sax or does a tune a little different and suddenly there are 100 papers about the specific and intricate genius of The Rolling Stones making a love song in the Second Person!!! and it’s the same sort of crap in the end, one is doodling on the sax and the other are playing some guitar chords.
These people are also somehow ignorant and independent of Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and of all famous literary authors and poets who have done the same before.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t like The Rolling Stones or John Coltrane but they’re just something you like.
Thats it.
I see you getting a few downvotes, but for the record I agree completely, to the extent that your complaint is about the members of the cult and not the object of their veneration.
Yeah like I said, if you like him that’s great! If you like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones I will happily listen with you!
Because that’s just taste and I think in general most people make pretty good music. It’s all these really weird arguments that have to tell me “no, it’s not doodling on the sax it’s something else!”. When again I feel like you’re extracting patterns to justify the doodling rather than justifying the sound or melody. (Often, people like that don’t care about melody)
I think it moreso goes to show that value is subjective and contextual, not that the music you like "doesn't have the the value you ascribe to it". Things always have the value people ascribe to them. It's just that one person's trash is another person's treasure. And that context matters.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Grammy awards are indicative of some popularity and renown, why is music created by black artists so popular in the US, yet black artists are extremely under-represented when it comes to being nominated or winning Grammy awards?
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.
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.
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
“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
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.
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.
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!)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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).
>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:
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.