This article is fascinating. But what's on display here is less of a nefarious plan from Spotify to replace famous Katy Perry with AI - instead we get to see something much more specific: a behind-the-scenes of how those endless chill/lo-fi/ambient playlists get created.
Which is something I've always wondered! How does the Lofi Girl channel on Youtube always have so much new music from artists I have never heard from?
The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing). Third-party stock music ("muzak") companies hiring underemployed jazz musicians to crank out a few dozen derivative songs every day to hack the algorithm.
> âHonestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,â he explained. âAnd then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And itâs usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.â With the jazz musicianâs 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, tooâacting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction.â
I think there's an easy and obvious thing we can do - stop listening to playlists! Seek out named jazz artists. Listen to your local jazz station. Go to jazz shows.
Interesting take.
For my part, I'm grateful for Spotify's "exclude from taste profile" feature. This lets me leverage my personally-curated "Flowstate" playlist ^1 for hours at a time while I'm working -- tracks that I've hand-picked to facilitate a "getting things done" mindset / energized mood / creativity or go-time vibe, and can stand to listen to on repeat -- without "polluting" my regular music preferences. It's apples and oranges, mostly - there's music I want to listen and attend to (as a guitar player and lifelong avid music listener across many genres including "serious" jazz), and there's audio (which could as easily be programmatically generated / binaural beats, whatever -- eg brain.fm) that I use as a tool specifically to help shape my cognitive state for focus / productivity.
I think it's kind of funny how some people get confused about the fact that there are many reasons to listen to many kinds of music.
When it comes to music discovery on Spotify, the "go to radio" option from a given track or album is a reliable way to surface new-to-me things. I usually prefer this proactive seeking to the playlists spotify's algo generates for me. (shrug)
1. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
> less of a nefarious plan from Spotify to replace famous Katy Perry with AI
actually, it's the same nefarious plan, just that AI wasn't yet up to the task. Now it is, and replacing those fake artists, who are still human beings as far as we know, with AI (and the same fake resumes) is the logical next step.
> Which is something I've always wondered! How does the Lofi Girl channel on Youtube always have so much new music from artists I have never heard from?
> The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing).
Sorry to break it to you, but there's actually tones of AI lofi music from Suno all over YouTube right now.
See this video for an explanation: https://youtu.be/_oxtFP2UUyM
And here are some examples of the content:
Check out Chillhop ( https://chillhop.com/radio/). Great little lofi studio out of Rotterdam. Good to the artists, from what I can tell.
Psalm Trees, an artist with them, just put out an interesting little 'double'-ish album here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmL9LvTYjMQ
He produced a whole jazz album just so he could sample from it for a lofi album. Absolutely mental workload.
There's a lot of crap in lofi, but also some real 'bangers' too : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3yBo2szD8 (yes, really, 10 hours of great work, IMHO)
This business model goes way back, to long before streaming. The Seeburg 1000 [1] was a background music player sold to restaurants and stores. Like Musak, it was a service, but used a local player. New sets of disks were delivered once a month or so. 1000 songs in a set, hence the name.
The music was recorded by Seeburg's own orchestra, using songs either in the public domain or for which they had purchased unlimited rights. Just like the modern "ghost artists". So this business model goes back to the 1950s.
The records had a form of copy protection - nonstandard RPM, nonstandard size, nonstandard hole size, nonstandard groove width. So they didn't file copyrights on all this material. As a result, there are sites on the web streaming old Seeburg 1000 content.
Seeburg made jukeboxes with random access, but the background player was simpler - it just played a big stack of records over and over. It's rather low-fi, because the records were 16 2/3 RPM, which limits frequency response.
And before this: self-playing pianos using perforated rolls, reducing the cost of hiring live pianists in saloons.
Interesting, I didn't know about Seeburg. Funnily enough, this business model is even older: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telharmonium
"As early as 1906, the Cahill Telharmonium Company of New York attempted to sell musical entertainment (produced by Dr. Thaddeus Cahill's "Telharmonium," an early synthesizer) to subscribers through the telephone"
The business failed miserably, but the Telharmonium is remembered as an early electronic music instrument.
Fun fact: there was a brief period after music recording, but before copies could be made with much quality, where if you wanted them to sound halfway decent each recording had to be a unique performance. Studio musicians were paid to perform popular songs over and over. When making copies became more feasible, there was backlash from some musicians, both for financial and artistic reasons - not unlike when recorded music started becoming popular in the first place. Not hard to see the similarities with modern distribution woes like piracy and streaming too.
Apparently there are no recordings of this telharmonium, which is a shame :/. There seem to be attempts at reproducing it though.
this would've been good context for the writer to share
Wow - that's an awesome video to watch how they automated playing the next records, thank you!
I run a label that has direct deals with certain major DSPs. We do over a billion streams a year.
The entire âwellnessâ music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.
I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. Itâs a volume play. Iâve made tracks that Iâm quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.
Itâs a wild system but weâve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.
Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.
Just curious, what kind of software do you use, and / or, what is this category of music based on? Brian Eno and the ambient movement as a whole?
It sounds like the kinda thing that'll earn you a paycheck, but not fame. Or the kind of fame that can land you work from e.g. Spotify, not the kind of fame that'll fill up concert halls.
I think it's a sobering look into the music industry (not just your whole comment but the article + comments); the perception is that if you're not filling up concert halls then you don't matter, but the truth is that good or successful music does not necessitate the accompanying fame or "interesting" personality / personal branding.
You cheated and sold out to get preferential placement... Who cares how many streams you got? The metric is meaningless now.
On one hand, itâs a way to guarantee visibility and streams... On the other, it seems like another symptom of how streaming has commodified music... (I'm talking about the reduced payouts for preferential playlist treatment)
Good on you for earning a living from music (which is hard) but I'm not sure the whole reduced payout thing should be legal.
Is it that far from payola?
I am the only one to be a bit upset by the term "fake artist"?
While AI is evoked, this is not what is talked about here. The article mentions Epidemic Sound, and looking at their page, it "doesnât currently use generative AI to create music".
It means that we are talking about real people here, there is nothing fake about them and their work, what they do takes skill and effort. That they focus on quantity over quality and are under-recognized does not make them "fake". Otherwise, I bet most of us would be called "fake engineers".
They are given fake names and identities in the platform in a deliberate intent to mislead the audience, deprive the real author of credit, and hide the real source of the work the major record labels. âFake artistâ is a generous term.
Lots of artists use "fake" names and don't write their music. Occasionally they don't even perform it.
> we are taking about real people here
the people are indeed real (well, for now, but soon to be replaced with AI -- it's the logical next step)
what is fake is that the bios are not who those people are; it's like me putting on my bio that I went to Julliard
One of the producers in the article describes making the music as âbrain-numbingâ and âpretty much completely joyless.â The process is described as â...I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,â he explained. âAnd then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And itâs usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.â
He's not a fake musician by any means. But I think he'd accept the work he creates for this being described as fake 'art' specifically. There's no thought, meaning, or passion injected into it. It's a conveyor belt. It's based on analytics. It's soulless.
So its an office job? I know people who makes this exact music described in the article and it's part of their daily work to earn a living as music producers. Other musicians play weddings for example. It's not fake. But you don't put your serious artist name on a track like for a chill muzak stream. Music is a product that fills many categories and I salute the ones that can find ways to earn a living doing with their passion. Some of the time you do a routine and other time you follow your dream
Mountain ranges and forests are soulless too, but they're still quite special and can be inspiring.
Reminds me of ghost restaurants where a kitchen would be used to prep food for dozens of virtual restaurants on food delivery platforms like DoorDash, grubhub, etc. They would artificially create what looked to be an array of choices, but in fact just a single kitchen taking on multiple brands. It's really evident when you look at these food delivery apps late at night.
Isn't this just like how supermarkets have their "house brands" that compete with name brands? If your consumption of music amounts to "whatever Spotify tells me to listen to" then chances are you were the type of person who used to just have the radio on for background noise anyway.
EDIT: If you think about this "scandal" in reverse, that is that Spotify was started as a background, inert restaurant playlist app that paid session musicians to record 50 songs a day for lo-fi chill ambient jazz playlists, and later tried to expand their reach by allowing musicians to upload their songs, it wouldn't be a scandal at all.
> Isn't this just like how supermarkets have their "house brands" that compete with name brands? I
1) A supermarket does not bill itself as a neutral discovery platform. It's not comparable to Spotify.
2) A supermarket can't make up fake information about the provenance of its products. The information on the cereal box is regulated to be truthful (well, we hope).
3) Most importantly, this is about discovery. The store has its brand of cereal next to some other non-store brands on the shelf, the customer has the opportunity to discover both. What Spotify is doing is taking the non-store-brand cereals off the shelf and putting them in the stocking room where you only get them if you happen to ask one of the store employees.
Its not in reverse though.
If a upscale steak restaurant is known for using quality meats and then they decide to include something like Beyond Meat but make it hard to tell that's what you're ordering.
Expectations were set.
Personally I have no issue with it.
If you walk into a steakhouse and order the porterhouse and you get taco bell Beefy⢠meat, that's one thing. If you pay the restaurant a monthly retainer to feed you steak whenever you feel like wandering in and you get such treatment, you weren't really ripped off.
Someone tells Spotify "I want to listen to the latest Lil yachty album" and it plays, expectations were met. Someone says "play whatever I just need background noise", expectations were also met. You can't ask for elevator music and be upset that that's what you get. The fact that you can still pay a flat monthly rate and get access to almost any music you'd want to hear, that's like still getting the porterhouse every day for a monthly fee. That's amazing and fantastic. Don't expect it to last much longer. And don't ask for the soup of the day if you want something fresh.
I don't know how I feel about this, but the people that are upset about this seem to be upset for musicians. Which, I don't know how I feel. It feels like the outsourcing of the music industry.
Beyond Meat is a weird analogy here. It's relatively expensive, and having a Beoynd Meat alternative to steaks would open up new markets (vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, groups of people who include vegans and vegetarians and pescatarians) so it's something restaurants tend to feature prominently on their menues as a vegan or vegetarian alternative.
A better alternative would be a steak restaurant known for using quality meats and then they decide to include cheap meat to reduce cost, and not make it clear that that's what you're ordering.
I'll play along. It's like ordering a beer flight at a bar and they start out with craft beers and 3-4 beers in they start slipping in Natty Lights and Busches.
In that specific scenario, if the customers can't tell, I'd say the beyond meat option is better: still gives you the experience, the proteins, less cruelty and better for the environment. Win win to me.
Unlike here the topic in question, I'd assume cows too would prefer you having a beyond meat instead of them. But I'm just projecting, I'm not actually sure about that.
> If a upscale steak restaurant is known for using quality meats and then they decide to include something like Beyond Meat but make it hard to tell that's what you're ordering.
That sounds like an analogy worth belabouring!!
I think this is more like if you had an upscale steak restaurant and then they opened up a series of food trucks that used the same branding but sold sausages instead.
If you are a Spotify user please make an active effort to seek and listen to artists _albums_. Playlist are a worse experience (unless you make them) and only play into Spotify's pocket.
A few key points with albums:
- You are listening to the artists vision/journey. The songs are not played in isolation but as part of a collective arrangement.
- Artists get payed more per play than individual songs.
- Albums don't degrade like playlists which can be changed by users or spotify to inject some newer commercial push.
>> If you are a Spotify user
I would recommend switching to Apple Music if you want to stream. They're continuing to lean into the idea of human curation (with the launch of three new live radio stations this month) and I find their human curated playlists lead to me discovering a lot more music I like than Spotify's. Apple Music also works well with local files so music you purchase of Bandcamp, bootlegs etc. will work across devices.
Is the software still garbo on Windows and Android? Last I tried it, it would crash after a couple hours and I have no valid airplay targets in my home. They were generous about the 2 month trial but I only needed 2 hours to realize that I wasn't the target market.
For all of spotify's faults, it runs on EVERYTHING and Spotify Connect is effectively borderless.
> - You are listening to the artists vision/journey. The songs are not played in isolation but as part of a collective arrangement.
I think this is less of the case nowadays. The latest albums I've listened to have all been just a complication of the artist's latest EPs with a couple of new tracks.
That's nothing new though, a lot of the big name artists' albums are a collection of most of their singles (idk how the album vs single market works); e.g. Taylor Swift with 7 singles made from the 13 tracks on '1989'.
I don't know what is normal, but releasing singles or EPs before the full album seems like a common way to generate hype beforehand. Also, the Spotify model - assuming against what the previous comment says and every stream counts for the same revenue - doesn't differentiate between singles, EPs or albums, so it's whatever from that point of view. I've seen a few artists start releasing demos, songs-that-didn't-quite-make-it, and all kinds of unusual material that wasn't good enough for a full album onto streaming platforms, which then ends up in the long tail of their repertoire. It ties in with the article though, in that these songs will also start appearing in the playlists related to those artists.
Another interesting one is a single artist releasing songs under different names; Devin Townsend comes to mind, who can fill up a related playlist with songs released under his own name, Strapping Young Lad, Devin Townsend Band, Devin Townsend Project, Casualties of Cool, etc. And given he does many different genres, he'd appear - theoretically - on many different styles of playlists too, although I think the algorithm would get confused when the artist name gets associated with both hourlong ambient tracks and seven minute chaos metal genre mashups.
> I don't know what is normal, but releasing singles or EPs before the full album seems like a common way to generate hype beforehand.
I think this arose in the radio-and-CD era of music. Maybe even earlier?
The radio stations that drove sales of new music wanted to play the latest releases. By releasing three singles before your 12-track album, you got more radio play, more shots at doing well in the sales charts, and hence raised your album sales.
This tends to be true of mamy of the artists that chart, but less so for indie bands. I see Major Parkinson's Blackbox and Magna Carta Cartel's The Dying Option as two of the best albums of the century so far, for example.
I don't think that's an accurate distinction. I think maybe it has more to do with the genre (e.g. more common in rock and less so in the electronic music that I listen to, where it's mostly EP driven).
If we're talking popularity vs indie, those bands seem pretty mainstream. In my head indie artists that put out single songs on Soundcloud etc don't do albums until they grow big, so pretty much the opposite (more popular = more album focused).
Do they really get paid more âper playâ on an album vs. a playlist? That seems quite tricky to figure out the accounting.
Is it as simple as per play? I only know whatâs posted on the loud and clear website but stream share isnât quite the same thing from what theyâre saying in the FAQ.
Also consider paying for music on bandcamp or elsewhere.
Another thing that happens with Spotify playlist is that someone will post something like:
"epic hip hop bangers"
Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.
That's why I typically only listen either to whole albums on spotify, or DJ sets on soundcloud or youtube. There are too many individual human beings out there with great taste to bother with the algorithmic stuff.
Are you seeing that on individual playlists created by users or official Spotify playlists? Iâve only seen the former so far trying to get their band exposure, etc by making a playlist popular.
> Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.
Not sure if I understand your argument. Is it the following: "epic hip hop bangers 1-13 and 15-23" are the boring millionth replay of all the genre-defining tracks of the past 40 years, and only tracks 14 and 24 are the precious new finds? If that is the argument, I totally agree.
I don't know if it's still common but I used to run into this with album playlists on Youtube: all the tracks from something famous and then the creator's tracks tacked on the end.
I mean that's not unusual either I suppose, it's a self promo strategy. Spotify does it themselves as well, mixing in relatively unknown artists into generated playlists to give them a bit more exposure which they would never get if "existing popularity" was the metric to include them in generated playlists. The article implies that artists can accept lower royalty payments to get more exposure like that too, so it's intentional by Spotify and the artists themselves. I mean personally I don't care for it, but good for them.
What I really don't like is the spam where they add a random well-known artist's name to their song to make it look like it's a collaboration, but it's either a low effort cover or has absolutely nothing to do with it. At least I've stopped gettring random basement mumble rap in generated metal playlists.
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