Ghost artists on Spotify

The article is far far less bad than I think most people would assume. The meat of the article is one single sentence.

> David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.

I really don't see the issue with this. We can talk about AI or whatever but there's no indication it's anything other than a company that makes b-roll music realizing that there's a niche of listeners who desire their content and then partnered with Spotify through an intermediary (a label perhaps) to get them on official playlists through a sweetheart royalty deal.

I think more to the point, there's not a lot of artists who would intentionally and willingly make forgettable ambient music.

As if labels weren't treating 85% of artists bad enough. This just seems like the further corporatization of music, with even more money going to suits.

It's bad because these types of practices directly contribute to the degradation of culture and is destroying the market for quality music. Putting aside TikTok for a moment, spotify is largely filling the role that radio used to play. The problem is that by doing this kind of thing, they are taking advantage of a largely captive audience to feed them derivative, second rate music, knowing that many can barely tell the difference.

This ultimately lowers the quality for everyone, in no small part because it makes it so difficult to make a living as a musician (not that it was easy before streaming). This then makes a feedback loop where in order for most musicians to make money, they must feed the algorithm. Then of course the streaming services get to say, look, people can't tell the difference! In fact, they prefer the algorithmically generated music, our listening stats say so! This increasingly just becomes a circular argument. Feed people the algorithm and then say that the algorithm is just giving them what they want which is a good thing.

Really what they are doing is capturing whatever little profit exists in the industry and redirecting it from artists to executives. It's really not very different from what uber did to cab drivers except that there is far, far more intrinsic value in music than in cab driving.

> a company that makes b-roll music realizing that there's a niche of listeners who desire their content and then partnered with Spotify through an intermediary (a label perhaps) to get them on official playlists through a sweetheart royalty deal.

If that isn't payola then it's pretty damn close.

> the degradation of culture and is destroying the market for quality music.

I dislike almost all pop music with vocals and rock and metal and all that overly guitar-y stuff. I very much prefer the music available to me today compared to what I had an option to listen to in the 1990s.

you had all the music leading up to the 1990s to listen to, was that not good enough?

No. The actual meat is mentioned once, and then completely dismissed as irrelevant and inconsequential:

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In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start.

But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70 percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options: raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding ways to attract new subscribers.

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This is what so infuriating about all these articles: they never ever address the actual problems in the music industry

No, you didn't really have all the music: you were very limited by what was playing on the radio (fully influenced and often paid for by large labels) and in the local record store.

Now you can chose to listen to almost anything: https://everynoise.com/