[HN Gopher] The fake artists problem on streaming platforms
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The fake artists problem on streaming platforms
Author : jger15
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-04-12 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedgioia.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedgioia.substack.com)
| scantron4 wrote:
| 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."
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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".
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| cwkoss wrote:
| > 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?
| zeruch wrote:
| " 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.
| postingposts wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > John Coltrane is only good on paper
|
| "Cancel yourself with one terrible take" is a thing that
| only works on Twitter, I think.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > 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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| 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.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| 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.
| FabHK wrote:
| Shostakovich is not considered "standard orchestral
| repertoire"?
| nescioquid wrote:
| 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.
| autarch wrote:
| 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.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| 9 is pretty common as well I think
| macawfish wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| _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, 16 2/3 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.
|
| You can listen to them here.[1]
|
| [1] https://streema.com/radios/RadioCoastcom
| jrd259 wrote:
| 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
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Interesting, never heard of this service. Its purpose was to
| compete with Muzak, I assume? The use of nuclear weapons has
| been authorized.
| hadlock wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I avoid all shopping around Christmas for that reason, it
| is just too terrible to hear the same crap over and over
| again in every store.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| aimor wrote:
| 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.
| tyrfing wrote:
| > 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.
| aimor wrote:
| I definitely had the wrong impression of how much music was
| produced by the examples given. It's not just "two songs
| and dissolve".
| nikanj wrote:
| Sounds like the complaint boils down to "people on the
| playlists are not celebrities".
|
| Which I see as a positive thing.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| yes, thank you. this article struck me as just a musician who
| hates that corporate music is popular on large corporate
| streaming sites. so what?
| _Nat_ wrote:
| 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.
|
| Related:
|
| 1. [" _Ghost singer_ ",
| Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_singer ).
|
| 2. [" _Ghostwriter_ ",
| Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter ).
| rcoveson wrote:
| > ...someone else actually makes it.
|
| ...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).
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/britney-spears-
| tox...
| Clubber wrote:
| >They're just branding-icons
|
| Honestly that seems like a lot of music since the 2000s. Grab
| a pretty face with a good body and an autotune.
| quitit wrote:
| 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.
| yesitisfake wrote:
| > 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."
| vasco wrote:
| 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?
| _Nat_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This 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 apparently 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.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| How did he reach the conclusion that Hara Noda is a fictional
| character?
|
| I read the whole piece and I couldn't find any evidence to
| support this assertion.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| 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.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| then why did he insinuate that the artist is fictitious by
| casting doubts on the presumably inflated number of playbacks
| in the playlist?
|
| I want my 5 mins back.
| weeksie wrote:
| Wait until language models get in on the game.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| 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.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| There was a nice video where a bunch of YT musical blogging
| celebs made some "Advanced" music for kids.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC8KT07m5aY
|
| https://tupletsfortoddlers.bandcamp.com/album/tuplets-for-to...
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mathgenius wrote:
| I don't quite see what is "fake" about the "fake artists". They
| appear to be real artists. Did I missunderstand something?
| nikanj wrote:
| An artist is not real if we can't follow their life on the
| tabloits
| jaclaz wrote:
| No, you are right, at 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.
|
| and there is another article linked to from that one:
|
| https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/an-mbw-reader-just-bl...
|
| where the matter is explained, point #5:
|
| >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.
| jalk wrote:
| 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?
| gerikson wrote:
| Pretty much.
|
| 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.
| prova_modena wrote:
| 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.
| betaby wrote:
| Basically 'store brand' of music platforms. Where is the problem?
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| but with the labels mislabeled
| mkmk wrote:
| The ghost kitchens of music streaming!
| randrews wrote:
| 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.
| ttoinou wrote:
| And I hope these guys are making a fortune in royalties for my
| plays
|
| Where does the money come from exactly ?
| randrews wrote:
| 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.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| This guy would have a heart attack over Dall E.
| [deleted]
| tonguez wrote:
| "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
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Muzak. see Norman Spinrad's "Little Heroes"
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719900.Little_Heroes
|
| 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.
| prova_modena wrote:
| 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.
| pg_bot wrote:
| 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.
| iostream24 wrote:
| There are, but they are likely not on Spotify.
|
| 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
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| 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!)
|
| - user18081971
| zeruch wrote:
| "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.
| Marazan wrote:
| 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.
| bwooceli wrote:
| 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.
| iostream24 wrote:
| 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.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| 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.
| cwkoss wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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?
| razzimatazz wrote:
| There are steps missing, perhaps -
|
| 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.
| TomK32 wrote:
| 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?
| lostmsu wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is exactly what Spotify gives you, no?
| bsedlm wrote:
| 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?
| freetime2 wrote:
| 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.
| truffdog wrote:
| A podcast interviewing someone making this kind of music:
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv/183-the-veno...
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Fake? By what attribution?
|
| > 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.
| john_minsk wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-04-12 23:01 UTC)