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Ghost artists on Spotify

(harpers.org)
556 points greenie_beans | 4 comments | 19 Dec 24 14:12 UTC | HN request time: 1.028s | source
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doctorpangloss ◴[19 Dec 24 23:31 UTC] No.42466844[source]▶
> Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this.

True, but there is more music than any group of people can ever listen to. Is aggregating blogs like Hype Machine, or reviewing songs like Pitchfork or the New Yorker, any better? The alternatives to collaborative filtering are different shades of nepotism; or, making barriers to entry much, much higher.

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1. tommilburn ◴[19 Dec 24 23:38 UTC] No.42466900[source]▶
i’d argue yes, definitely. those blogs are, at least historically, written by real people with individual taste and preferences that you can use to understand their critique. one might find themselves agreeing with Siskel, and not Ebert.

reading a review is not the same level of passivity as something being algorithmically inserted into your existing Spotify playlists (“smart shuffle”) or something else that will inevitably be used to shut out artists to juice quarterly reports

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2. doctorpangloss ◴[20 Dec 24 03:39 UTC] No.42468070[source]▶
Yeah. But it is meritocratic? You have to know somebody to get a review in a thing people actually read. My POV is that artists choose the collaborative filtering system because “knowing someone” suits them poorly, and the average musician knows no one, so the average musician is poorly served by nearly all reviewers in blogs.
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3. Vegenoid ◴[20 Dec 24 09:17 UTC] No.42469445[source]▶
I think that “meritocracy” is not such a useful concept in the realm of art, where there are not good objective measures of what makes something have “meritocracy”.

I think you’re on to something with “consolidation/centralization is bad”, and that’s what this article is about: the centralization of music discovery into Spotify resulting in a situation where they choose what people get to discover, in an unnatural way. Unless I’m misunderstanding, the article is about Spotify putting their thumb on the collaborative filtering scales, to the benefit of themselves and their business partners.

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4. doctorpangloss ◴[20 Dec 24 15:08 UTC] No.42471689{3}[source]▶
This article is saying that a bunch of nobodies found an audience via collaborative filtering on Spotify. “Organically.” But then, to save money, and because these nobodies have no power, Spotify authored similar music. On its route to organic charts, real musicians who were nonetheless nobodies were displaced by these fake ones.

Spotify put its thumb on the scales by changing the contents of named playlists, which are more like radio stations. They are Spotify creations and curations, and they are choosing to curate more explicitly.

The alternative is that the New Yorker authors a playlist of its daily new tracks you should listen to. 100% of those tracks that belong to nobodies / bonafide new artists, those artists would have to know someone at the New Yorker to appear on such a playlist. In radio, this took the form of pay to play.