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I wonder if this was Spotify's plan all along: grow market share using real musicians, then switch to fake ones. If so it's a uniquely sinister version of the strategy of focusing on growth first, then margins.

tedgioia.substack.com

The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize

Recent revelations from an alleged industry insider paint a disturbing picture

12:08 PM · Apr 12, 2022Twitter Web App

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Malcolm Ocean is in Victoria (14/100 vids)

@Malcolm_Ocean

15h

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@paulg

yeah, I really feel like there could be a better way for streaming services to differentiate, by actually having the best experience for people to listen & organize their music

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Malcolm Ocean is in Victoria (14/100 vids)

@Malcolm_Ocean

· Jun 21, 2020

Design Rant time! Today: audio streaming services. Why are they all the same old boring things and stuck in the same old metaphors of "playlists" and "radio"? Virtual ports of old music-library managers. Lots of improvements to be made—in particular, tags! #ThingsIWantToExist twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…

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Their plan was to be default alive vs apple. Spotify has declined significantly in product leadership. After a decade I've recently been trying

@TIDAL

@AppleMusic

purely on audio quality...can't go back to Spotify. Why own high quality airpods and device etc and have

streaming

Just some guy

@iamwhoisme

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@paulg

I'm not sure what's fake about any of this. People just want generic background music so they play the cheapest music that the people aren't even really listening to. The cost of music has always been artificially high because a few sources controlled distribution.

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The tone of this article is extremely inflammatory for what seems like a valid feature of Spotify. There are playlists of genre music (e.g. jazz, study music, etc) that contain no name artists. This blog implies it's a scandal because the music isn't from artists on major labels.

Rob Leathern (robza.eth)

@robleathern

18h

Article does seem a bit trumped up, but there are some interesting dynamics of these platforms. I heard an artist talking about Spotify reporting they get which tells them the names of the playlists their songs are on. I bet one could dig a lot deeper here

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I never saw this coming, but I also haven't asked for context specific music in this way. I'm still curating playlists the old fashioned way.

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Spotify pays out of label % and all labels share. Spotify would only make money if they negotiated much smaller label % for those labels. False plays and 'gaming' the music Metadata import process are the unscrupulous'cover' label tactics

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That article kept framing "fake artists" as incredibly nefarious, so I kept waiting for it to explain what the negative effects are, and it never did. What's so bad about it?

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There's very little too distinguish "real" popular musicians from "fake" ones aside beyond the marketing engines behind them. If Spotify has discovered that audiences are happy listening to unmarketed musicians, I see nothing wrong with that.

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and

And all this time I assumed my subscription fees were going right into the pockets of musicians who have been dead 50 years - shame on you Spotify

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Pat Kane

@thoughtland

· 22h

Interesting—ads don’t often go so close the dystopia that underlies their products offer. Perhaps relevant that this is being pitched to advertisers themselves

0:14

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Who knows. It’s the K-Tel strategy in digital clothes. The trouble with the streaming business (were one a streamer) is the value is captured by large labels with catalog. The trouble with the streaming business (as an indie artist) is streamers do not emphasize indies.

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Spotify's initial plan was to just copy all the music and pay the artists nothing. They had to eventually settle with the labels, but they've never been a friend of musicians

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Reminds me of the time I elected to convert to a yearly membership when I added a couple users because my membership plan defaults changed from monthly to yearly without my knowledge. Tens of thousands gone in a moment. Immediate disruption to my startup’s budget.

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Mass AI-generated music hill-climbing for streams is next, and we may not even realize it's there for a while.

Ser Jeff Garzik

@jgarzik

19h

Some startups offer it as a service: boomy.com

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I wonder if music videos will make a large comeback? Visual aesthetics enhance the audible experience and marks authenticity, humans want to connect with the makers of their music, right?

Daniel Orias

@dannyo152

15h

People make them, but the ability to create sales isn’t commensurate with their costs, so it’s vanity or getting experience with a lower barrier form of cinema. At peak music video, they were advertising (charged against artist royalties). MTV paid nothing for them.

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That's THE SAME thing the recording industry has been doing for more than half a century! That's why you had orchestras till the '60s, a handful in a band till the '90s, and a few artists imposed to the whole world in the last decades.

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This was a problem with radio DJs and music industry for a long time: payola. The more you listen to something, the more you like it. Thus insiders can pick the music and artists. But they make the good point this is more sinster because humans can't be held accountable.

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Surely Spotify still wants the known musicians to attract users, but yeah, to the extent they can provide background sound for which they pay no royalties (epic music to work out to or whatever), they can help their margins a ton.

Amogh Vaishampayan

@amogh42

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@paulg

To be honest I am not surprised. This is simply the streaming equivalent of a platform creating private label products based on what's selling well. Amazon does it all the time.

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Intuitively this doesn't seem right. People founding Spotify do it for the love of music more than likely. My best guess is that the margins of their business are terrible (app store tax + abusive record labels) so they have to optimize for cost savings over time.

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if an artist is delivering so little actual value that they can be replaced without the consumer noticing at all with some random low effort sounds then the artist should not be paid much to begin with.

Obedience Praisegod

@FrancoB411

18h

Would that logic apply to Chinese off-brand knockoffs on Amazon as well? Or does innovation in cultural domains inherently deserve a different premium?

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Platforms / marketplaces grow big enough and end up competing with their providers. Didn’t see it coming in music though, cc:

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Wow, I had no idea. As an old school vinyl nerd, I still bring those find/dig/discover/share habits to digital music, and never use curated lists, and so am totally ignorant to this kind of thing.

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Back in the day, I recall talking to an exec of a Spotify-like startup whose plan was to do signal analysis of famous records, & then use that trace to generate "new" recordings, in real-time, in order to avoid paying mechanical and other royalties.

Fish Out Of Water Series

@TheWaterSeries3

19h

I'm confused by all this

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The problem isn't the 'fake artists' (The term is inaccurate IMO) The problem (if one views it as one) is people settling for (assumedly) lower quality music.

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Doubt it. Thats a very cynical perspective

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and

People making music today almost instantly start calling themselves a "producer" instead of an "artist" because the focus has shifted from process to the 'product' as a result music arts & its industry is in nightmare neo-fabian phase. music has been stripped of its danger

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I released a single earlier this year and it was an expensive ton of work to try and get on as many Spotify playlists as possible. I can only imagine what artists are going through who are trying to make a living of it.

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The all-too-common trajectory of modern startups is "(1) disrupt existing industry by temporarily offering value beyond what current market can offer; (2) destroy existing market, become the new market; (3) realize the value proposition isn't sustainable, abuse monopoly power."

Daniel Orias

@dannyo152

15h

Spotify is nowhere close to a monopoly. Digital distribution disrupted the music industry, but streaming took over because the UX for most is better than internet radio. The in-house artist thing is about reducing costs and relies on a weighted search and inattentive users.

craigtopicalthemestar

@craigsuperstar

17h

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@paulg

To be fair, Akaishi is perfectly good at filling the "relaxing jazz" slot. It's no more ephemeral than any other music piece.

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The gossip at the bar of the 2019 Audio Developer Conference in London was that most of Spotify's "relaxing piano music" is AI generated.

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I also wonder what kind of royalties artists are paid for their work to be used in machine learning datasets. Probably zero or price of a single copy.

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spotify is an atrocious company. look at its founder. co-founder of utorrent (the problem), then one day decides to build the solution - spotify

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How long before AI generated music will dominate the “background” music genre and be a massive margin booster for the DSPs?

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Slightly unrelated but related: Spotify is the only big tech platform still not supporting 2FA. How this security hole is still unpatched is beyond me.

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Music NFTs will need to work hard to exhibit actual artist authenticity Vs the Tyson-ification in what we see with 800 NFTs that are largely the same thing. Just when we get excited for new artists, we all seem to be living in grand new age of con. #NFTCommunity

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I don’t think they are that smart doing it by design. Most likely, they just stumbled onto it and found out it’s so addictive.

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That presumes they care about the music part at all. Grow the market share of ears. Pivot to podcasting. Sell ads. Become the Facebook of audio. Always been their play.

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Seems much like the Netflix strategy :-)

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The accusation seems to be that people are choosing the "wrong" music and are happy to listen to the Café Latte Trio over John Coltrane. Huge problem!!!

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Similar to what happens in retail: a. Attract customers by selling popular brands. b. Analyze categories that sell well. c. Extend assortiment with own brands. d. Rank own brands higher. I doubt this was the plan all along. It just makes sense once you optimize for margins.

Geezer Soze

@plinytheelder_t

18h

*inferior* own brands. which I guess is the point of the article.

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So I go to a curated trance list and there are little known DJs instead of well known DJs. Let's say my enjoyment is 85% (not my belief but I'll posit it) of the big names. Is the claim 15% of my enjoyment is forceably taken from me in exchange for unsolicited novelty?

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Wait till AI fills those streams with unique compositions.

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At some point, marketplaces will not need human sellers anymore. You type "Rock song about dolphins flying to the moon. Performed by Metallica with Billie Eilish doing the vocals" into Spotify and get the song created by a musical Dalle-E. While sitting in an uber driven by AI.

Patrick Flanagan

@PatrickFIanagan

16h

I'm not sure that this hasn't already happened.

francoispachet.fr

François Pachet - Director of Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab

François Pachet - Director of Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab, former director of SONY CSL, creator of AI music and tools for artists.

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Feel's like Hanlon's Razor.

en.wikipedia.org

Hanlon's razor - Wikipedia

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What about Uber using real drivers, then switching to autonomous cars?

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I think about this a lot.

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Kind of like Uber, hoping to replace drivers

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Khm, so same as…Facebook?

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If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?

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thoughts?

I’ll look into it. Thanks for sharing

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Thrasio for music

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and

Uniquely sinister? Hardly.

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More than enough people claim that musicians should work for the art and not to "sell out". But calling an artist who works for hire a "fake" is detrimental to musicians everywhere. Let's focus on getting all musicians paid.

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So ppl who don't care so much about music play pre-fab playlists and get pre-fab music. I'm not seeing a huge problem.

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Lol! What’s a “real artist” then? I guess Netflix has a ton of “fake movies” too.

willieram

@willieram

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@paulg

What do you mean by "fake"?

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Yes, they tend to mix in cheap music of others while listening to top artists. Also, the way they devide plays and pay is statistically unjust. You can call this democratization of music.

Good article.

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Read the article. Still no clue what the problem is. Definition of'fake artist'? not given. Seems ppl creating tracks are doing so with optimisation for the algorithm in mind. What a surprise. Yes, even more benign than piracy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gavanmac

@gavanmac

Sure for decades visual 'artists' have been creating work that is esp. conducive to pseudo-intellectual verbiage, thereby adapting to the real-world algorithm of the 'A'rt market, where art has to be consumed through the ears. It's a disaster for art, but works for the money ppl.

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They use the phrase fake artists but that's not true. They are real enough. A more accurate phrase would be house bands. They are artists contracted by Spotify to perform. So?