The fake artists problem on streaming platforms
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
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.
Which I see as a positive thing.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ).
Honestly that seems like a lot of music since the 2000s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and an autotune.
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).
...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).
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 one together, when she toured.
I suspect that many artists do the same.
Not quite the same, but in that world though
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.
1. https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/britney-spears-tox...
It's plausible due to the idiom "hit me up" meaning "call me."
Am I missing something?
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.
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.”
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?
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.
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.
Spotify associated labels and playlists should have a disclaimer as well.
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.
I allege Spotify agents here doing paid work.
It's basically a case of anti-competitive platform hijacked by the platform owner.
But, apparently, it's music that the streaming services are commissioning at cut rates and using their platform to promote, as to reduce their costs?
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."
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.
"Cancel yourself with one terrible take" is a thing that only works on Twitter, I think.
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.
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.
Edit: also you saying something like “you’re wrong” and then not giving reasons is actually what trolling is. Go look in the mirror my friend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
This sounds interesting, have any artist recommendations?
Interested in other recommendations too!
It will be interesting to see whether antitrust law can be applied to Spotify in this context, since its actions are arguably anticompetitive.
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.
You can listen to them here.[1]
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.
Here's the raw audio stream: http://198.178.121.76:8157/stream
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
And I hope these guys are making a fortune in royalties for my plays
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.
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
“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's Payola but where the streaming platform is paying itself.
This is not a new phenomenon, it goes back at least 60 years.
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.
I resent your world view.
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?
This is exactly what Spotify gives you, no?
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.
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
I read the whole piece and I couldn't find any evidence to support this assertion.
I want my 5 mins back.
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
He has an artist name, he produce his music, googling him show you some songs in YouTube, but nothing is fake about him.
This is similar to me calling all popular Twitter users who got famous just from Twitter fake celebrities.
Can we really call software developers developers? Maybe they are just potted plants in disguise?
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.
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.
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?
Popular artists are mainly ruthless businessmen.
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.