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The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

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Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#141

Post by nivenkos »

Rastonbury wrote: post #135
locusofself wrote: post #130

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 o…

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

Royalties will still be paid though.

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#142

Post by iostream24 »

dmz73 wrote: post #81

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.

That is a bizarre take.

Can we really call software developers developers? Maybe they are just potted plants in disguise?

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#143

Post by iostream24 »

davidgerard wrote: post #83

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…

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

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#144

Post by lifeformed »

vasco wrote: post #66
yesitisfake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 predi…

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…

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#145

Post by aulin »

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#146

Post by yesenadam »

iostream24 wrote: post #134
yesitisfake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 predi…

That’s the point we all smell here: some very fishy bandwagonning going on here defending Spotify by trying to water down the allegations. I allege Spotify agents here doing paid work.

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#147

Post by rjknight »

p1necone wrote: post #93
nikanj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the complaint boils down to ”people on the playlists are not celebrities”. Which I see as a positive thing.

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#148

Post by drewzero1 »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #73
drewzero1 wrote: post #56

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 ge…

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 R…

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#149

Post by arrakeen »

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.

Re: The fake artists problem on streaming platforms

#150

Post by onionisafruit »

mc32 wrote: post #123
astura wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t know if that story is true, but if it is the lyric still works even if it doesn’t match the songwriter’s intent.
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