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The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

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Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#111

Post by Animats »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #45
Animats wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting, never heard of this service. Its purpose was to compete with Muzak, I assume? The use of nuclear weapons has been authorized.

Its purpose was to compete with Muzak, I assume?

Yes. See [1]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#112

Post by avs733 »

p1necone wrote: post #94

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 j…

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#113

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #98
rcoveson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 e…

I remember listening — really listening — to a Debbie Gibson song, in the early nineties. She was never an artist I cared about. I just assumed she was a “teenybopper queen.” The song clearly had one -maybe two- musicians in the background, playing a sampler, while she sang. Maybe she played the sampler. I realized it probably cost almost nothing to record that song. She didn’t have a regular band, and probably threw…

There are musicians for hire to play in studio and on the road. Very common practice.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#114

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

lmm wrote: post #91
brundolf wrote: post #16

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.

What Milli Vanilli did was scandalous enough that they were stripped of their Grammy. This seems directly analogous.

I had to scroll awfully far to find a Milli Vanilli reference, which is what immediately springs to my mind when someone says "fake artist."

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#115

Post by captn3m0 »

nerdponx wrote: post #107
vasco wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 Amaz…

AmazonBasics products are branded so the consumer knows that they’re Amazon products. Same for Netflix originals.

Spotify associated labels and playlists should have a disclaimer as well.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#116

Post by galaxyLogic »

larkinnaire wrote: post #89
aimor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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 someo…

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?

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#117

Post by razzimatazz »

nwsm wrote: post #105
razzimatazz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 willi…

> 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).

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#119

Post by TOMDM »

_Nat_ wrote: post #50
brundolf wrote: post #16

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…

Like the Gorillaz?

Am I missing something?

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#120

Post by p1necone »

avs733 wrote: post #112
p1necone wrote: post #94

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 j…

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 /…

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.

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