The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
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I'm not sure there is a problem if a proportion of the listeners don't recognize they are listening to slop. I do, however, think its a problem if Spotify is giving preferential treatment to slop, as is claimed in this post. I also would prefer a system that better supported musicians, while having the ease of use of Spotify.
https://igloomag.com/profiles/five-questions-with-rafael-ant...
> In this day and age, it is incredibly challenging to start a label. Streaming has massively depleted the revenue potential for artists and labels, and even those with a good following are struggling. For those starting out, it’s an uphill battle to build an audience and be successful.
> Only a small percentage of songs make a decent amount of money with streaming, so recording budgets for independent artists are next to none. I remember when an album had the support of a team of people devoted to realizing the artist’s vision. Something magical happens when you get that collaboration of people working together to achieve the same goal. Nowadays the artist/producer does the recording, the mixing, and in some cases, even the mastering. Consequently, the production quality has declined drastically over the last decade, and it’s not helped by how most people consume music (illegally downloading it, YouTube lo-fi, or paid streaming subscriptions) but rather contributes to the decline.
> For those who remember the world before streaming took over, this is a very different one in which we now live. Music is no longer the product being marketed or sold, instead, it’s the listener’s data. The artist is a “brand” and they create “content.” We are in a time where we are constantly bombarded with “content” on social media and streaming platforms. Take the so-called “Spotify Ambient.” This sound has become watered down and generic, thanks partly to all the Muzak clearing houses creating material for most of the “sleep” and “stress relief” style of playlists.
> Whenever an actual artist shows up on those playlists, let’s say the great Otto A. Totland for example, you can immediately hear the difference between his music and Muzak. Otto writes music that conveys rich and nuanced emotions with many layers of meaning. His music wasn’t solely written for the sake of playlisting it. His music was written because it genuinely meant something special to the composer. Muzak clearing houses have been discussed ad nauseam in many industry exposés about “Spotify fake artist” trends with companies like Epidemic Sound and their catalog of ambient rip-offs.
> Some companies exist solely to create content for playlists. Think about that for a moment! Composer staff are paid to make royalty-free clones of well-established artists. The companies see which songs are performing well on Spotify-curated playlists, and the clearing house creates a similar-sounding song so Spotify can remove the original from their curated playlist without paying royalties. This practice exists in advertising, when agencies create music for an ad “inspired by” (i.e. ripping off) the music they don’t want to pay the licensing fee for. Somehow, this is legal. You end up with “artists” like Jonci (yes, that’s Jónsi with a “C”) who have millions of plays, sounding exactly like Sigur Rós, and you have zero information about the artist.
> Clearing houses can now easily create thousands of meaningless ambient-adjacent tracks to be put on playlists with the unsuspecting consumer having no idea. AI technology makes this all even easier. The lack of credits on streaming platforms is another massive problem, particularly for music workers like myself who depend on album credits/credentials to generate business and get gigs as engineers, producers, etc. The music is stripped of production, artwork, recording, mixing, and mastering credits. I could go on, but the point is that there are many challenges for artists, labels, mastering engineers, and anyone making music now.
Counter-intuitively, I think slop might have it's place in cultural development. There is always genre-death by exploitative cash-in slop and vomiting it out by machine might be an accelerant.
When you start getting that visceral deja-vu dilution ick from slop or just a scene getting derivative and samey, that's what prompts head-snapping invention of brand new sounds that seek clear-blue water between themselves and the slop.
this is perhaps the crux of the matter!
Very few people in my social circle whose taste in music I share. The majority of them don't even have a "taste" and content with whatever their car-radio pumps out.
Does that drive me mad? Mildly.
Appreciating and recognizing great music is a deeply personal experience.
Like appreciating different culinary tastes that requires training and exposure (ideally from a young age), it's also hard work (the older and more settled our tastes get).
Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music? I usually just wait to somehow stumble upon something.
Or, in 2012, I torrented the then whole discog of a British duo called Autechre that I liked a track from on the soundtrack of the film 'Pi'.
12 years later, I have several vinyls, bought every release on multiple [streaming] services/shops, have been to one concert in '16... still cannot get enough and listen to their new releases all the time.
Funny to think about it this way, how a handful of beats in a movie can open you up to a world unseen, just gotta follow the tracks...
Tracking down people involved in an album is a good one for me. Find the producer of a favorite tune and search out more of their work, or check if the bassist plays in other bands or has a solo project. Lots of fun and sometimes unexpected results.
My favourites are:
- Concertzender and all its theme channels. The main channel has a lot of classical during the day, but jazz, world music and electronic in the evening/weekend. I got deep into folk music thanks to their music. On Sunday evening there is even two hours with techno and adjecent music. Discovered a lot through that as well. The station is Dutch, but talk is minimal.
- FIP. A bit more main stream music, but also unexpected songs and generally very enjoyable programming. It's in French, but talk is usually minimal as well.
That one is my favorite, but there are lots of similar online radio stations out there that post track-lists of the sets. I use them for music discovery and I like it a lot. I find shows by people I like, listen regularly, when I hear things that jump out at me I'll look at the track-list and make notes, go to discogs, bandcamp, find other artists on the same label that released the thing I went searching for. So semi passively listening to a dj set and taking occasional notes leads to hours of exploration and frequent discoveries.
rateyourmusic.com has great yearly charts and genre charts and the best granular genre tags on the internet. If you like an album or artist, going through the charts related to their genre tags very often finds me a lot of great music.
The second thing that has proven indispensable for me are recommendations from "peers" on private music torrent trackers. I found a few people where I know that if they recommend something, even if it's a genre I don't listen to frequently, chances are I will like this as well. This spawned a lot of fun music adventures.
check lineups of concerts/festivals that you like.
seems a very reductionist take of what I actually said. but let me phrase it better using this request of yours:
> Different topic: any recommended ways to search for new music?
it's not different but directly related to my point:
The "pain" and boredom, of sitting through countless hours of "what looks like slop", is what it takes to appreciate music.
I rarely "stumble" over great new content by accident, either because of a friend (or an algorithm) recommending it. It's hard work learning to love music. This work is exactly what makes it special. I wouldn't feel comfortable using the word "love" in the same sentence as "music" if it wasn't also a massive pain.
Maybe I'm old but I recall times when I dedicated entire Saturday mornings going on a "hunt" at HMV, browsing for what was new.
Even I found something promising I still wasn't in love. Often realized there was only 2 out of 16 songs I really wanted to hear. But the 2 songs initially interesting quickly turn out to be short affairs. It's the 14 other tunes that require multiple listens that I end up appreciating for decades.
Streaming digital media changed that "hunt", for better or worse. The pain is still there. What changed is everyone thinking all good music must come not only gratis but also "effortless". Some app or magic gadget that will one day take the pain out of finding good content. If it only knows my taste well enough. It doesn't work like that.
Albert Camus, "we gotta imagine Sisyphus happy" and all that.
It's a bit funny because I feel that might be the difference between a child and an adult and how they consume content. or perhaps the difference between pre-internet and post internet.
Children do indeed stereotypically "watch anything you put in front of them". But they will still develop favorites and find things they dont like. For my millenial generation, Something like Spongebob wasn't just something that stuck because of the nostalgia of 10 year olds. The humor was simply very witty or very surreal, or just very funnny and managed to even scale to adult humor you'd miss until you re-watched it later (I'll spare you the entire video essay of "there will Never Ever be another cartoon like Spongebob Squarepants")
But all that shifted in adulthood. I'm anenthusiast who will keep tabs on media news, vibes of the people on social media and what they find, group to like-minded friends who give recommendaions, etc. The last time I simply "stumbled" into some unexpected piece of media was... well, kind of Puss and Boots 2. But that was simply because I liked the first film and then the sequel decided to deliver one of the best, tightly paced stories in over 15 years. Before that would have probably been Roblox way back in 2010, over a decade before it became this empire of gaming (and the talk of child exploitation and harassment).
>Streaming digital media changed that "hunt", for better or worse. The pain is still there. What changed is everyone thinking all good music must come not only gratis but also "effortless". Some app or magic gadget that will one day take the pain out of finding good content. If it only knows my taste well enough. It doesn't work like that.
indeed. I mostly agree and have some small reservations. All that old media was already vetted through multiple rounds of pitches and had some budget thrown at it for it to launch. The internet definitely changed that aspect to where I could technically pick up Audacity today and publish a song on Spotify next week. It truly is "effortless" in that sense if shipping is your goal.
But I think any craftman in any domain knows that there's a difference between shipping something and shipping a GOOD something. That's something many would never understand, as they never put that kind of effort into something. Or maybe understand in one industry but gets blinded by when they look at another.
It changes everything. "Sellouts" are still humans. AI isn't. This is just going to further spiral the idea of coporate needing human labor, which will cause extremely large questions about society that no one in power wants to answer.
You can listen to whatever you want on Spotify. It containing shit music that you will never listen to harms you in which way?
If people are genuinely listening to those tracks and are alright with it, how exactly are they harmed?
I already consider most contemporary pop music to be slop anyway, and people seem to be fine listening to it.
I don't think this is the most egregious act of dishonesty in the article, though. I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace.
You have to actively accept the recommendations from the algorithm. If the algorithm ia recommending slop, and you are fine with it, actively listening to it, who was harmed?
> I think Spotify deliberately seeding this music into its playlists is a worse abuse of its position as owner of the marketplace.
Nobody is forced to listen to the slop playlists generated by Spotify. Spotify puts them in the front page, but they can be ignored.
If people are listening to those playlists and are satisfied with it, what is the issue?
If the consumption is genuine and not bot activity, I fail to see any wrongdoing on Spotify. If people like listening to slop, who am I to judge?
Is consumers are actually listening to is, I fail to see harm.
Musicians are harmed only in the sense that consumers don't mind listening to slop instead of listening to their music.
Somebody works at Spotify, or is a hopeful Spotify wannabe themselves.
You may think I am excusing Spotify, but I am not. At least not really. I am just completely unsurprised that people listen to bottom of the barrel musical slop as background noise and are okay with it.
Spotify was smart that they figured out to give people what they wanted in a way that costs them less.
But people in this thread act as if Spotify is committing a crime, using some very charged language. My approach is from another angle - if users are legitimately listening to crap, and they are alright with the crap they listened to, why are we making a fuss about it?
Your angle is "enshittification isn't illegal, peopel still buy it. Why complain?"
By deinition, complaints are always brought up by a minority. If we ignored that minority, we wouldn't have acts like GDPR and its offshoots. Nor recent enforcement on making it easy to unsubscribe. We may not even have physical consumer protections, like refund windows or false advertisement".
Well that's the issue. I don't accept slop but it will sure keep trying to push it to me, no matter how many thumbs down and dislikes I throw at it. I'm still fighting all the stupid crypto recommendations from Youtube despite years of "I'm not interested in this" that I post everytime it comes up. In the end, the only proper fix was to remove my entire history.
Algorithms these days stopped even pretending they appeal to me, they appeal to what advertisers want you to consume.
>Nobody is forced to listen to the slop playlists generated by Spotify.
in the sense that "nobody is forced to use spotify, I suppose". But if spotify is the house and the dealer, spotify listeners have to go under a lot of friction to push back even if they don't like what is being dealt.
Then again, if people are using these features and they are fine with the results, I fail to see the issue.
If this is only a little bit worse, people will likely not notice. But they will miss out on new music. Certainly this is how I normal find new music.
You see, I don't like Spotify. I don't trust any of those huge platforms, I expect them to actively work against my interests. I always disable or avoid anything they want to suggest me, and view it with suspicion, if now outright contempt.
More people should act the same way.
I thought that was always the default behavior unless you paid or something? You find a song you wanna listen to, and then Spotify just spits out a playlist for you, in a Pandora esque radio way where you don't have control over the susequent songs played.
I liked Pandora back in the day, but there was something offputting about how Spotify implemented this. So I never really bothered and made my own playlists.
I’ve used Spotify since it was a closed beta and their library was from the pirate bay.
But they instead treat this process as an assembly line instead of an artistic pursuit. They give a template, so every song is going to sound similar, only giving a few freedoms to each artist.
Templating is almost second nature in tech, but in something like art it feels like there's this ethereal barrier being breached. It's like making a song then paying 10 other people to remix it. But worse because at least remixes disclose the template.
This is not only a problem for Spotify, but for every platform on the internet that publishes content, particularly for social media. Most people don't actively discern whether something they observe is slop or not, and it's a huge problem concerning the autheticity of information and the consequences of it. This issue began with text content back in the 90's when internet spam boomed after Eternal September and the reachable market audience for it boomed, but has been slowly evolving until recently until the "passable" capability of artificial content generation has both increased exponentially and become finacially feasible for bad actors.
There have been reports of Spotify being gamed by gangs in Sweden (and iirc abroad) to monetize artificial engagement[0], which I found tied in very closely to some of the amateur research I've done regarding bots on Reddit. Before the public availability of LLMs and other generative AI, most content that was "monetizable" was mostly direct engagements (views, likes, followers, reposts, shotgunning ads, etc.); this resulted in bot farms all over the internet that focused on providing services that gave exactly these results. On Reddit specifically, many of the more sophisticated bot networks and manipulators would feature content that was scraped from other sources like Youtube, Twitter, Quora, and others (including Reddit itself) and simply consist of reposting content. Some of the more novel agents would use markov generators to get around bot detection tools (both first-party and third party), but they would often create nonsense content that was easily discernable as being such.
After generative AI took off toward the late end of covid, these bot farms and nefarious agents capitalized on generative AI instantly and heavily. This is particularly known as an issue on Facebook with the "like this image because this AI generater "person" lives in a gutter and has a birthday cake and is missing all their 7 limbs" pictures, but the text content they can produce is insidiously everywhere on sites like Reddit and Quora and Twitter. Some small subset of these agents are either poorly made or buggy and have exposed their prompts directly, which is rather embarrassing, but others are incredibly sophisticated and have been used in campapigns that reach far beyond just gaming outreach on platforms - many of these bot farms are also now being used for political disinformation and social engineering compaigns, and to great effect.
Witnessing the effects of these agents in such mundane places as a music playlist is a dismal annoyance, but learning that they are in fact being used to alter public opinion and policy on top of culture and the arts is disturbing. Many people have scorned large production studios such as A24 for their us of generative AI[1], but not being able to trust even assumedly-mundane content anywhere online is something that most people, and especially the the average consumer, is not prepared for. People who are genuinely interested in anything are going to soon recognize that there is a market for gatekeeping content, but they are not going to want to participate in it because the barrier for entry is going to be completely different from that of the classic internet that we have all generally come to accept and build upon.
[0]: https://www.stereogum.com/2235272/swedish-gangs-are-reported... [1]: https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/a24-criticized-for-using-ai...
I learn about new music the old school way, opening and supporting acts at concerts and recommendations by friends. Sometimes I read a music magazine.
I think I never even clicked on anything on the app front page. I only ever go to library or playlist tab.
They are being given what they are promised.
But I don’t really get the part about “someone should tell Congress”—sir, this is an IKEA.
And I think that's the core of the "problem" here - one group of rentseekers being angry at another because they don't get enough of their cut.
The term “slop” is deliberate—music that sounds bad. Now, if Spotify manages to make music that is better than the music that they can get from the Music Industry? Good for them. I’m a music listener. I just want good music.
And honestly I don't want anyone making cheaper music directly for spotify. I want an even playing field where everyone gets the same rates. (But preferably with a way to kick out spammers.)
So no freedom for artists that want to market themselves with higher or lower rates? Should the Taylor Swifts of the world not be free to negotiate higher rates? Should not the upstart be able to accept a lower rate in hopes that doing so will get their music more recommended/played by the service?
The unknown upstart's stuff is not being searched for and played. Is that not already the lower rate that they accept? Does the revenue also have to be lower from those few plays they got?
Practically, the big names are not going to accept less than the maximum they can get. Just like almost all people would if they were negotiating multiple equivalent job offers.
If they did it proportionally per subscriber you’d suddenly find money being distributed in a much fairer way.
Instead they divvy it up on a global aggregate basis so even if I were to pay the subscription and just listen to indie artists, my money goes towards pop megastars and artificial slop.
I would hope that the money I paid, after the Spotify cut, went to the artists/labels that own the music I actually listen to, proportionally.
The fact that it goes to some Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga annoys me more than Spotify adding their own slop to slop playlists.
Excessive copyright terms go from incentivizing creating art to incentivizing rent seeking. Society also spends a ton more resources litigating disputes and avoiding them.
> music streaming services have to spend most of their money on artists that performed many decades ago, otherwise no one will buy it
Music streaming services should spend their money on artists their customers are listening to, however old that music happens to be.
Eh, I don't think there's a very convincing argument that the world is better off paying artists for things that were made more than 50 years ago.
(Yes I know the person above said 10, I think 10 is too aggressive.)
For negotiating a lower rate... I wouldn't try to make it illegal, but I still don't like it. I have no particular reason to think it will be an upstart or an entity that you could say 'deserves' more attention. And taking less money for more exposure doesn't sound like something I want to encourage.
If you don't want the royalties from Spotify, you can do something like donate them to charity.
Giving Spotify a discount is something I'm not fond of, because you're either hoping they give you better placement which is basically payola, or you're getting nothing back so you're making a donation to a giant corporation.
If this is a metaphor to "I want to work for free", then no. You technically can, but the company will get into trouble for allowing that. Same deal here. Personal projects on your own free time is different from a billion dollar company hiring interns "for exposure".
like how it currently is if you're not some 7+ figure earner? Sure, why not? There was no marketing to Spotify to begin with.
> Should the Taylor Swifts of the world not be free to negotiate higher rates?
Debtable, but given that Taylor swift gets millions times more listens than the average artist, I'm not going to pretend she's somehow being ripped off here. Those kinds of people do indeed have the power to jump to another platform, or make their own.
>Should not the upstart be able to accept a lower rate in hopes that doing so will get their music more recommended/played by the service?
to be frank, no. Just like how some deperate would-be employee should not be able to accept below minimum wage to "kickstart their career". We made these laws precisely because "work for exposure" has failed spectacularly and only hurts the working class.
The owners of Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift’s music are not going to agree to this deal.
If they do, what is the issue?
People are fine consuming shit, they always were. Why would I be surprised that they are fine consuming shit music that Spotify add to slop playlists with the purpose of increasing their own profits? This is just a logical consequence of how things always were.
Similarly, this isn't an active choice of users. And the harm isn't that they are listening to filler, it's that during their random listening, they aren't coming across any new good music. They are prevented from widening their horizons.
They aren't actively choosing this. Spotify deceives them into thinking this is music chosen because it is likely the users will like this music.
What I buy in the supermarket is very much an active decision. I pay a premium on the bottles of milk because the ones I pick taste better than the supermarket branded ones. I do buy some things that are supermarket branded when I perceive the quality to be similar (or sometimes even better).
This might be different from consumers that due to budget limitations have to buy the cheapest things available, which is why food regulations are very important.
> And the harm isn't that they are listening to filler, it's that during their random listening, they aren't coming across any new good music. They are prevented from widening their horizons.
I presume that people that are actively listening to filler are not appreciating music in their cozy living room while sipping on a glass of fine whiskey.
They just want background noise while they drive, work, study. Something to make their hours more tolerable, or to improve their focus. Apparently the issue is that generic slop from Spotify serves that purpose just as well.
> They aren't actively choosing this.
If the music was bad for them, they would stop listening to it. They don't.
That feels like a false dichotomy. Certainly for myself I can put on a generated playlist hoping to find new stuff I like, whilst still putting on the music as background. As filler.
If spotify has been serving me slop, then they have likely reduced the amount of new music I have added to my collection of things I like. That harms me, and it harms real artists whose music I might like.
In other words, I don't always actively choose the music I listen to. But serving me slop when I don't harms me.
Instead of blaming the company that provided the turds, you should perhaps reconsider your habit of eating feces.
Why do you willingly give a company such as Spotify power over what music you listen to? There are better ways to discover new music if that's what you are after.
Try finding communities of people with similar tastes, sometimes they share their own curated playlists.
Spotify suits my needs perfectly. Even if they do this fake music, it still works well enough. I doubt my half apathy is uncommon. The assumption of prevalence of this attitude is why this change by spotify is so damaging. It will harm my experience a little, and harms artists quite a bit.
Step 1: create a music service and get on-board as many musicians as possible with attractive rates and the promise of a future with big audiences and less intermediaries
Step 2: the business grows because you have many famous/good artists in your catalogue
Step 3: Congrats, you are now the #1 musical service in the world! Many people associate "music streaming" with your brand. You get a lot of "musical normies" as customers in the process.
Step 4: start lowering royalties you give to musicians. They will stay anyway because you are the #1 brand and bring listeners
Step 5: add your own music to places where normies just listen to music, without caring who the hell the author is. So, you have to pay less revenue to the rest of artists, because they are now getting less listenings, even if the royalty per listening stays exactly the same.
People can listen to whatever they want- artists that are not being listened to aren’t being stolen from if the money is instead going to other artists that are being listened to. If people don’t care who the artist is but like what they hear, that seems great.
That's why (I assume, I'm not in the music biz) labels stay relevant for now, because they act or sell themselves to artists as some kind of union to protect them from draconian streaming services. But I might be totally wrong on this.
Some really do function like unions: groups of artists sharing the functional/procedural/admin burden that comes with keeping their publishing as Saint Francis of Zappa advocated, or paying someone who cares (perhaps a small indie record shop owner) to do that for them as a side gig.
Some are little more than asset classes for private equity at this point.
that's very likely not the case. hence the issue.
Even if it was, keep in mind these are focused in Sweden. This model may only get worse if an american "label" tries this.
That isn't disintermediating recordlabels. That is just serving customers worse music. Heck, it is disintermediating artists from their audience.
There is no music monopoly and customers have a choice in which music they listen to and what service they use (Spotify, Apple, Google/Youtube, Amazon, Bandcamp, buying CDs).
Surely if users get served worse music, they will dislike it, and move to another service or another way to listen to music.
Changing to another streaming service requires learning a new app, moving over all playlists, and likely means still a pretty bad music suggestion service. Because spotify has a pretty good recommendation engine.
it's not for me. YT was. SoundCloud too. (Now SoundCloud also wants folks to sign in aggressively. I think you can't fast-forward otherwise, but at least listening works without signing in.)
Also ... you can upload to YT and SoundCloud, but not to Spotify. So their catalog is just meh. (So even if their recommendations are great in some genres, in general they are not for everyone.)
for now. Spotify is a market leader with 32%, though.
>if users get served worse music, they will dislike it
how many more twitters, facebooks, and youtubes do we need to show that this is not historically the case?
Ok stop it. This is too much.
the confidence made in this statement is jarring
nah, they will cut out the artist when they figure out how to AI generate this process. It's just begging to be automated.
> artists that are not being listened to aren’t being stolen from if the money is instead going to other artists that are being listened to
you see no conflict of interest with Spofity potentially paying specific "studios" to mass produce slop? The platform that has control over algoithms of what to listen to?
Not the worst idea for a business that has lost money every year for 20 years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
Does it actually happen?
I presume those playlists based on mood and Genre is what these songs have been added to.
If the time-horizon is the next listen, it's terrible, as it doesn't care if it revolts the user so badly that they leave the platform immediately. This is bad for the platform, too, so they won't do it for long.
If it's very long term, then it's not as bad because it takes into account users listening more often and over a longer period of time. One way of getting additional longer term listens is including signals like tastes of similar users and other things many of us music-lovers would consider "good". And the profit part means including signals like cost-per-stream of each song. A very long time-horizon requires finding good tradeoffs between all these signals.
My guess is the time-horizon is monthly to quarterly. This is because of market pressures (public markets demand quarterly results) and the practicality of measuring the results. You can't measure/improve infinite time-horizon optimization.
This will still have the effect of selecting for users that aren't as sensitive to what they are hearing. They will not leave as quickly. These are the users the platform wants, as these users afford the platform more leeway in shifting the tradeoff from quality signals to cost-per-stream. Eventually, this will push out many of us music-lovers and the artists we love. Once this reaches a tipping point, there will be room in the market for another service to cater to music-lovers. But, given market pressures, they will almost certainly walk the same path as Spotify in the long term.
For me, the implication is to own my own music. I always have and always will. I only use streaming platforms for discovery. But as soon as I decide I like something enough, I buy it. I almost always buy albums, not individual songs. That lets me see if I want to follow that artist more deeply. This is expensive and time-consuming relative to streaming. It's dirt cheap relative to what I get out of music.
This enshittification of the streaming industry comes after decades of enshittification of radio (all clear channel owned in the U.S. now) and the total collapse of any revenue opportunities for making an album for a new artist.
It’s no wonder that the arts are dominated by nepo babies today. People who can treat creativity as an unpaid hobby, taking all risks with no consequences, and short cutting the path to popularity thanks to having family connections and wealth.
Taylor Swift had a rich daddy buy a record label for her. For everyone else, why bother?
Is this actually happening, or is this just a baseless claim?
Taylor Swift (an insanely hard-working artist) started gigging when she was like 12 or 13, and her dad invested in (didn't buy) a startup record label, that built up a roster of artists and did very well on its own terms. (Despite being attached to Toby Keith)
Record labels, publishing companies etc., do not cost much money to start up, actually. His investment was likely small, and also likely comparable to the cost of seeing a child through a college education. Less, perhaps.
A quick google suggests he got 3% ownership for perhaps as little as $130K, which indeed is comparable to the total cost of getting a child through higher education in the USA.
And of course her parents were helping her: she was 13. Did her dad make a pretty smart decision to ensure some influence over the people responsible for his daughter? Of course he did. You would.
More generally: hang around your local (proper) music scene sometimes, and pay attention to which young starter bands have helicopter parents, and which do not. And then try to correlate that with success. Pushy helicopter parents are very often an active disadvantage, because promoters hate working with them. And they are inherently uncool. Even -- perhaps especially -- when they used to be cool.
Despite all this, I had an issue for a while where some of the play buttons didn't work. I would click the play button and nothing would happen. Other users posted about the same issue in the "Spotify Support/Complaint Megathread" on Reddit's r/spotify.
I don't know how to adequately describe how ridiculous it is that they managed to break their music player's play button, of all things.
I truly ask myself what their development team is doing.
This is nothing else than enshittification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484
For me, I just use Spotify for music and that's what used to have real struggles with offlineness. Kept updating the app until a version worked properly and now I've stopped. I'm on 8.8.96 (installed December 16th 2023, going by apk file modified time) whereas 9.0.2 is the latest
No problems with this version, so I like the app currently. Let's see how long the servers work with this version. The only downside I've experienced so far is that the yearly overview requires updating every year again
That aside, it feels to me the same, some versions work, some don't.
When spotify has access to your filesystem and the spotify app would get hacked and owned by another party due to an unfixed security hole, your filesystem still would get owned. (or are all android apps really sandboxed nowdays? I doubt it)
But also how would the client be vulnerable in a way that leads to a compromise? Connecting to a domain that doesn't exist anymore? Even then it would need to download executable code, or exploit a bug that leads to it reading and uploading arbitrary files—if it had filesystem access in the first place. Working in the security industry, I never hear of people needing to update mobile apps for such a bug, it seems to be exceptionally rare. Most issues are server problems, direct object access (missing permission checks on invoice pdf downloads or so) or such
I do update things like SSH (yes, on my phone) because that actually exposes a port on the network, or email/messaging clients where anyone can send arbitrary content (how many times have we heard of image parsing bugs being exploited through a messaging system like SMS or WhatsApp?); that's not really the case for Spotify. There's attack vectors like the URIs that the app can handle, but it's not wormable in the same way because it requires user interaction and so won't go viral. It would be a specific attack and there's easier ways to target me
> (or are all android apps really sandboxed nowdays? I doubt it)
You might want to read up on this. They've always been isolated.
Besides security:
There are apps that don't like you lagging behind with updating, like whatsapp and epocrates. Since whatsapp needs internet, there is no way around it. Old versions of Epocrates could be isolated from internet for the offline content, but they fixed that this year, and you can't download the databases with an older version.
As a former (paid) composer, I know how, pardon my words, the music industry is utterly fucked up today.
That said we shouldn't just be cool with what Spotify is doing. Let me put it this way, what is happening is similar to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Personally I don't think much of Spotify today, and hope that we go back to buying music on medias and owning the music purchases. That is the key, to bringing back some sense to the Music (and Game btw) industry.
There’s a coop Bandcamp alternative being built right now: https://subvert.fm/
Hopefully
It hasn’t changed yet, it’s still good, but it’s scary for the future.
Which is why you'll never see me get off the comfy "local only" train, buying CDs and sailing the high seas with my skull & crossbones flag if needed.
There were ads, but as you mention, people don't seem to care much.
The quality check was the non personalized streams cathered to please its audience and competition among stations. So, the solution is to kill targeted algorithms and monopolies, ha.
1) the word payola isn’t technically correct to describe Spotify “optimizing” its cost of goods sold by replacing with mass produced, farmed content. It’s more similar to Amazon Basics category of goods.
So payola is not the right term, since no one’s paying them to promote some music on the platform. Actually there’s real payola and that’s from companies like Universal music promoting drake etc
2) calling the Spotify owned content “slop” is kinda unfair to the creators. Afaik it’s not AI generated and there is real musicians making money off of this (albeit little)
3) I’m almost positive that Spotify will just start using AI exclusively for creating this slop very soon
> As he described it, making new PFC starts with studying old PFC: it’s a feedback loop of playlist fodder imitated over and over again. A typical session starts with a production company sending along links to target playlists as reference points. His task is to then chart out new songs that could stream well on these playlists. “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction. The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
No artists are proud of having to create Muzak.
Remember when the music labels themselves were the baddies?
I remember when the biggest problem in music was how middlemen like labels had an oppressive role on music and didn't allowed artists to express themselves or even earn a buck from their work.
As far as I know, that didn't changed.
Precisely. What changed between then and now is that major labels no longer control distribution, and thus they no longer hold a oligopoly over what music we can consume. This is clearly something that benefits everyone, except the major labels.
This fact alone makes me very sceptical of this blend of blog posts. It clearly pushes to go back to a time where everyone was screwed over by the music industry.
Creators hate them until they face the consumers directly. And then they'll realize what consumers want is actually slop, and the only entities keeping slops from being even slopper are the gatekeepers.
I’ve warned repeatedly that this is a huge mistake. Spotify is their adversary, not their partner. The longer they avoid admitting this to themselves, the worse things will get.
I think this confuses record labels with artists. I don't see labels having a problem with replacing their artists with AI, as long as they still get the royalties.
Spotify replaced artists with ai, they have no need to pay labels to do it.
Any service without the biggest music acts of ~1970 to 2020 isn’t going to go far.
I’ve discovered a ton of great stuff I never would have otherwise come across by looking at what a record label I’m familiar with is releasing.
Now my YouTube Music is more used by the kids and the family than Spotify
I've learned what Youtube Premium is: "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"
For me, that's nothing as I can already view with no ads, and download whatever I want.
To me, it's a matter of principle that evolved over the years. I grew suspicious of free services. So, I pay for what I use, at least, in the terms that the provider lays out. I pay for my domain, I pay for my email, and I pay for YouTube as well, as I use it heavily. I still think that the subscription cost absolutely doesn't compensate for my usage, there is just no way in hell. But I do really like the service, and so, I would like to contribute, so I like that I can have this subscription relationship with it. I also like to express my opinion with my wallet: "I don't like being sold to advertisers, I would rather pay directly". I think youtube is fair for offering this alternative, I wish more providers did.
Untrue. I pay the largest marketer in the world (debatable, but not the point) to consume content on-demand, of which some, negligible percentage is ads. And usually I don't care about those being ads either. For example, I enjoy Abroad in Japan, and he is sometimes sponsored, invited to present a Japanese restaurant or tourist place. I don't mind at all.
>I agree with paying for things, but subscription model provide no ownership and limited value.
I know exactly what I get, and I don't mind that at all. I desire no ownership over these videos. It's very rare that I re-watch them, and I am comfortable that if, for any reason, it all goes away in an instant, I can move on to other things, with not feeling that I have lost my money in it or anything.
I do understand that the value proposition doesn't work out for you personally, but since the original question was "why would you pay money to use YT", this is why. It's an excellent service for an excellent price.
For one, there is nothing wrong with a subscription model, in exchange for a service. How else is a continuous service supposed to be funded, if not continually? This is not encouraging bad behavior, it's a fair exchange. It's not anti-consumer at all. I don't see how it's different from my electricity bill, for example.
>all that is available for free.
The free opportunity does not mean that it's the best course of action automatically, same as how not every legal thing is moral or encouraged also. For example, computer games are also available to me for free, even legally, because in Hungary, I'm entitled to have my personal copy of an intellectual property, no matter how I got it. Going on with this, choosing to pirate all my games would be optimal, as it would require the least amount of resources from me. But then, I don't just want to maximize my own gains, I want to see a healthy gaming ecosystem, where the creators of the games are financially rewarded for their effort, so that they are enabled to create more or better games. So, I contribute to this ecosystem with my money. Even subscriptions, so to say, for example I always buy the "game pass" for my multiplayer game of choice, because while I bought the game also, they host the servers, do matchmaking and create in-game content continually - so I participate continually as well.
I kinda get the point that with these subscriptions, we don't get to own what we "buy". But I think that if one realizes this, and consciously goes into a transaction like this, then it is not a problem. In fact, I don't want to own many things, for example, the YouTube videos I watch I specifically don't want to own. What I enjoy is the access, and the experience, and I don't mind at all to pay for those.
I too have a pet revenge peeve like this though, and for me, it's Microsoft. I'm using Windows for my multiplayer games, and I refuse to ever pay a cent for the piece of shit. Right now I'm activating it with my own activation emulator, for example.
YouTube does nothing but rely on the crowd for quality and it’s rubbish.
But sure, I’m sympathetic when they ask me to pay for “premium” - I’m sure it’s a premium rate.
The underlying problem that makes it tempting to promote cheap music is the flat rate.
First, that Spotify doesn't make clear when a track is produced by a Spotify "ghost artist".
And second, Spotify is in an unfair position as both the controller of the marketplace/platform, and as a participant on it. The allegation in this article is that Spotify are using their platform position to promote their own PFC program tracks over third party artists/labels.
To be clear, it's not necessarily consumers who are being harmed here. These tracks are supposedly targeted to cases where the consumer doesn't really care that much about the songs that are being played. Rather the party harmed are third party artists/labels who are competing for Spotify playlist space on an uneven playing field.
GP asked how it was different from what Walmart or Amazon are doing, but what you describe is precisely the same as what Walmart and Amazon do. I go to my local Kroger and there are a bunch of Kroger brand knock offs of the “name brand” stuff, being promoted heavily. Kroger makes more money off that stuff because they don’t have to split the profits. Nobody’s complaining that this is unfair.
Your point #1 still stands though, and if the slop in question was clearly labeled as “spotify originals” or something and was something you could easily filter out, I’m sure far fewer people would have an issue with it. The issue is the deception, not that they are pushing their own slop on people.
I think calling this payola, as the article insinuates,is wrong.
I was always more interested in finding artists than I was in finding songs. I've noticed Spotify recommendations being worse and worse, and I can happily say I've left the platform half a year ago. Didn't regret it a single bit.
Between Bandcamp, Tidal and YouTube (latter are more likely to face these same issues), I've never looked back. The odd exception is when a friend wants to share a song but I can usually find it elsewhere.
For anyone considering leaving Spotify for Tidal but fearful of losing their followed artists, playlists, etc., there are a number of (paid) services which will programmatically export and link your data. They're not perfect but I think my success rate was 80%.
I presume the artists have been paid a fair wage, but as the article describes, are focusing on derivatives.
I'm not sure why discourse around this seems to be coming from the perspective that people have no choice but to use Spotify and that Spotify will secretly replace all the good music with bad music and no one will be able to do anything about it, all musicians will be out of work, all will be lost. Spotify is just one music service, and we don't even need to use a music service to enjoy the music we like. If Spotify destroys itself with slop music, what's the sinister plot, the "ugly truth", really?
If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...
And yet it is different, because of the production scale involved. Own brands are actually hard work, especially own brand food, which has to be reverse-engineered at some expense. Own brand food provides price discrimination and usually does not particularly impact the sales of the headline brands.
Netflix’s own content, presumably, pays a large number of creative people’s wages and is of a quality. It is often scratching a creative itch that major studios won’t risk.
Music and music tech, on the other hand, is such that if your audience doesn’t care, it’s quite easy to churn out songs —- one person who particularly hated human culture could write half a dozen fully produced songs in a day.
> If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...
I do wish this particularly nihilistic new form of argument was considered to be toxic itself.
But to answer the point: many outstanding, culturally significant musicians have small fan bases for their personal work. They know they do. That is in the nature of diverse culture. They rely on complex chains of discovery systems —- word of mouth, eclectic radio, old style auteur playlists, live gigs, to find their people, and they often support that by writing songs for major musicians who love their work and who want to do one song they wrote.
It is not their failure at all if the system that is supposed to deliver some of that discovery starts cynically acting against them. While every musician wants a hit and many will dedicate at least some time in their lives to exploring what is necessary to write a hig record, “You should have had more mass market appeal” is not universal creative guidance.
It is not that listeners have no choice in music services. Musicians have no choice but to engage with Spotify. If it is secretly working against all musicians simultaneously at the most basic level —- drowning them out with slop that is deliberately inserted into playlists to water down everyone’s incomes —- then how is it you are more interested in the way musicians are somehow failing, when nothing they do can stop it?
Honestly I am terrified for culture that so many people in the tech world seem to be so aggressively jealous of creativity that they are taking the "anti-anti-slop" stance (to borrow a phrase from politics used for the "yeah well all this criticism validates the choice I am not in any way saying I am making" argument).
Why shouldn’t people be exposed to good music? Maybe they’ll get into it.
Does that slop mentality extend to other things? Food, clothes, consumer goods? Do people deserve rubbish just because it’s not something they’re particularly interested in?
Nobody is forced to listen to slop playlists. I never did, I only listen to albums and playlists that I either curated myself, of that were shared to me by people with similar tastes.
I don't think that people that are fine with slop are the kind of people that niche musicians would appeal to.
If your argument was against the egregious and exploitative way Spotify demonetizes tracks with less than 1k streams, then yes. This is abusive and should be considered illegal. But this mostly benefits large musicians and is detrimental to a long tail of niche ones.
They are harmed because part of the intrinsic deal with Spotify is that you put your music on there so that their discovery systems make it possible for people to hear it who might not otherwise.
If Spotify is deliberately diluting that mechanism it is bad enough. But they are doing it IN SECRET which they would not do if they didn't think artists, industry people, musicians unions etc., would construe that as harm.
If the music they are listening to satisfy their musical tastes for the monent, again, what is the issue?
If generic slop Spotify created to increase their own profits satisfies the listener the same way a song created with labor and love by an actual artist, well, this is saying something. I am not sure either of us will like the message.
2) > If generic slop Spotify created to increase their own profits satisfies the listener the same way a song created with labor and love by an actual artist, well, this is saying something. I am not sure either of us will like the message.
Again: users do not know they are being fed this stuff.
If this was an official, named Spotify product, and users preferred it, then your anti-anti-slop argument might have some weight.
Spotify are doing this in secret because they know it is fraud on likely a contract level but certainly on a cultural level. They'd be rolling it out with press releases if they didn't know it was underhanded.
That is the issue. But then again HN is a place where people really don't mind if companies break laws on an epic scale, destroy worker protections, and deliver worse products like AI chatbots replacing human support, if customers don't really notice.
So maybe I shouldn't be too surprised by (veiled as much as full-throated) endorsement of secret padding prole-feed.
Does the contract say anywhere that Spotify would never provide their own generated music to users of their platform?
If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
> Again: users do not know they are being fed this stuff.
Users are actively listening to those slop playlists. It does not seem to bother them (otherwise they would stop listening). If they are satisfied with the offering, what exactly is the issue?
> Spotify are doing this in secret because they know it is fraud on likely a contract level but certainly on a cultural level. They'd be rolling it out with press releases if they didn't know it was underhanded.
This is plain bullshit. The claim is that people are listening to those songs when they are added to Spotify generated playlists. It wouldn't matter if the song had, say, a tag indicating that it was published by Spotify themselves. Most likely people are not even looking at the names of songs and artists when the slop playlist they are listening to is playing as background noise.
> That is the issue. But then again HN is a place where people really don't mind if companies break laws on an epic scale, destroy worker protections, and deliver worse products like AI chatbots replacing human support, if customers don't really notice.
If you saw my comment history, you would be surprised.
The problem here is that users are actively listening to slop, but they don't seem to mind it. They are fine with slop. They keep listening to slop. For those users, it really does not matter. There is no abuse taking place.
I am a Spotify user. I think their app is bloated, but it works alright? I can find albums I like, I can create my own playlists, and I can completely ignore whatever Spotify generates I always did. How exactly are they abusive in their relationship with me as a customer?
What you are really angry with is that Spotify found a way to give users that are fine with slop their own cheap slop.
> If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
Then why does Spotify refuse to talk about it? It's clearly outside of the spirit of the deal they are striking with artists generally.
Ultimately, they will get away with it because of just the same quasi-justification you're offering: Oh we're not screwing any of them individually, we are screwing them all at once.
Congratulations I guess, your argument is on the winning side!
But certainly Congress, the UK parliament, EU parliament, Swedish parliament etc. should be looking at this through the lens of regulation and competition law. And for once I hope the record labels -- big and small, because so many of them are small -- sue.
I am always in favor of proper regulation. If the EU sees this as abusive and detrimental to competition, they should definitely put restrictions on platforms offering their own content. I wonder if this would extend to, say, supermarkets offering products under their own brands. It is important that regulations don't harm the consumers.
As for record labels suing... Well, they will have this problem which is proving that any fraud took place. Unless the numbers were rigged (and no users actually streamed the slop, and it was actually fraud), I fail to see how they would win anything. What would be the allegation? That users are listening to bad music?
I didn't, particularly. It's just another angle on it.
I do think "defrauded" has both legal and moral dimensions, don't you? This is obviously abject shitty treatment or they wouldn't have been secretive about it.
I'm not convinced this isn't both dimensions, though -- not clear who is being defrauded but both the labels and the musicians unions should do their best to establish whether it could be them.
Spotify have crossed a pretty obvious line here. Weird that you appear to think it's, like, no harm no foul if the customers don't notice. Fast food service logic.
There is already quite extensive legal precedent and practice about supermarket own-brand stuff; fifty years of it, with supermarkets retaining teams of lawyers, operating proper clean-room reverse-engineering processes, etc. It's well-trodden legal territory. Supermarkets work right up to the line. But it's no secret that they do, and brands sometimes push back against own-brand deceptions. Mostly supermarkets threaten each other over their own, own-brand stuff. Caterpillar cakes, vodkas etc.
If Spotify were honest that they were adding "own brand" music into the mix, then this would be a different discussion.
(Amazon are required in the UK and EU to identify which are their own brands, and they mostly comply)
I would bet that it would make zero difference in the amount of plays those tracks got.
Well given that they are inserted into generated playlists and offered up as "similar" playlist suggestions instead of tracks by authentic artists, probably not.
For this to really be resolved they would have to stop putting these tracks in those lists or suggestions panels.
The fact that they evidently list the same track under completely different titles suggests that they are not going to act ethically here.
in addition, its original stream2own model allows you to automatically spend more on the artists you listen to more and even own (= stop paying for) and download the tracks you listened to at least 9 times. i think that it is a much fairer revenue-distribution model than “the big money pot” model used by spotify (and almost all other music streaming platforms out there) where people listening to the highest amount of tracks decide where other people’s money goes.
But sure, if you don’t care that a human isn’t involved in doing it. Personally it’s not negotiable to me and I think more people believe this than you might expect.
Actually AI hasn’t even made anything I’d call very good thus far in my personal experience.
The other thing here is that while it is a continuation of industrialization of artisan work like furniture and textiles, we are finally going into the area of commoditizing the work of the artists. Admittedly the split between artisans and artists only happened recently in the Renaissance, but it’s still a different threshold, where culture itself is mechanized. And instead of asking if it is a good idea to take the humanities out of the hands of humans, the only real consideration will be short-term shareholder value.
The point about algorithms driving culture is more interesting.
No new AI content generation advance has so far escaped being used for the equivalent of SEO spamming, long-tail flooding the market to mislead consumers and lazy “passive income” bullshit.
No AI content generation advance ever will; it’s not like industry is going to hold back and say: not this one, guys. It’s too good. We’re going to let it have three years in a custom built home studio to make its magnum opus.
Your confident prediction of the future limitations of models sounds like what the chess and go masters said.
On a Spotify-level scale, web-level scale, slop can be the only outcome.
Exactly where the slop is generated, or by whom, is essentially irrelevant: at scale, slop is the only outcome from these tools. It always will be.
And presumably in a resource-limited environment, slop quality is even more likely.
A popover will randomly cover the controls with a signup banner so that you can’t play the next song without saying no.
It’s a subtle tell but when you see even a small dark pattern you know the company behind it has no moral compass.
Have nothing to do with them.
The people behind it. Companies have no sense of morality, everything you see was conceived and implemented by individual people.
This seems vaguely important?! Yet this story got utterly nuked off HN (can't find it on the first 10 pages). Meanwhile this still lingers on page 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
Yeah I know discussing votes and flags and rankings and all that stuff is very boring. However we're dealing with people who throw money around to manipulate what people see and hear so they can make more money, so.
Which of course will also eventually push Muzak on the bgm playlist/channels
I don't see that happening though.
Maybe something like “I don’t see the problem with this app being buggy and almost unusable - I just like having nice icons on my HomeScreen. I don’t see anything unethical about this [MEGA-CORP] fixing the market with their own cheap and poor quality programmers - most people don’t care if their apps work anyway”.
The solution is simple - curate your own playlists, or find people with tastes similar to yours that shared theirs.
Don't give a company power to pick music for you, then complain that they have such power.
Another worthwhile solution is to listen to independent radio -- locally or online. You'll find more new interesting artists and music in an hour of listening to (quality, non-Clear Channel/i-heart) radio than you'll ever find using Spotify or any other service's suggestion algorithms.