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Ghost artists on Spotify

(harpers.org)
556 points greenie_beans | 2 comments | 19 Dec 24 14:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.487s | source
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marcus_holmes ◴[20 Dec 24 03:25 UTC] No.42468007[source]▶
> This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era.

Sorry musicians, but approximately 50% of the time, this is exactly what I want. I'm not actually listening to the music, it's just aural wallpaper.

I see this as two separate markets:

- there's music I actively want to listen to, even sing along to, maybe even dance to, that needs to be full of emotional resonance and relatable lyrics. Stuff I'll talk to my friends about, or ponder the meaning of at length, and dig into.

- then there's the background stuff that should be (in the words of the article) "as milquetoast as possible". It's just there to cover up incidental sounds and aid my concentration on some other task (usually coding). If it makes me feel anything or it snags my attention at all then it's failing.

So it's not a devaluation of music in the streaming era, it's just a different, possibly new, way of listening (or not) to music.

I really don't see the harm in Spotify sourcing this background stuff cheaply and providing it in bulk. As the article says, this is not "artistic output" from a musician expressing their soul.

It's the difference between an oil painting and wallpaper - both are pictures put on the wall, but they serve very different purposes and have very different business models. We don't object to wallpaper being provided cheaply in bulk, without crediting the artist. But we would consider treating an oil painting in the same way as borderline immoral.

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1. munchler ◴[20 Dec 24 04:56 UTC] No.42468395[source]▶
Yes, and this is what Brian Eno had in mind when he coined the term "ambient music":

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

I think the only semi-valid complaint here is that some (most?) of Spotify's ambient music isn't actually interesting, so it only works at the level of background music. But if people are happy listening to that, I don't see a problem with it.

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2. klabb3 ◴[20 Dec 24 10:43 UTC] No.42469948[source]▶
There is a problem though. If you mix high effort with low effort content you will get a distortion compared to the perceived initial market. The economic equilibrium in any platform is the bang for the buck in effort-per-engagement. This holds true for YouTube as well, where the most serious channels (like MentourPilot) can’t rely on YouTube rev-share alone. So they use different revenue channels, like Patreon etc. Without it, we would not see the amount of quality content that we do today. The highest engagement per effort is clickbaity. Now, go to LinkedIn or Facebook, where the dials are tuned differently, and observe a barrage of absolute garbage.

Profit seeking will land you in blandness, and here Spotify is even exacerbating by playing in a conflict of interest market, through playlists with massive reach that they control. Not even Zuck does that (afaik), but rely on high volume content farms that at least he has plausible deniability to claim that it’s not his hand moving the needle. It’s well known musicians pay a lot to be featured, so the monetary value of playlist placement is really high.

Anyway, this may not be enough to cause an exodus yet. But artists will become more aware and rightfully complain, and perhaps find different platforms. It also weakens Spotifys own market position since algorithmic low effort music is fungible and much easier to disrupt (although Spotify still incredibly dominant today). It’s not impossible that ambient music streaming breaks out to a cheaper alternative service, with white noise and yoga tunes. That may be a better tradeoff in the long run.