Ghost artists on Spotify

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Y6OKy4AMc

Wow - that's an awesome video to watch how they automated playing the next records, thank you!

I was not aware that dated back to records. Appreciate the YouTube link.

Seeburg had the whole concept - blah music intended only for background use, total ownership of the content, several different playlists for industrial, commercial, and dining settings, and their own distribution system.

Their main competitor was Muzak, which started delivering blah music in 1934, and, after much M&A activity and bankruptcies, is still around as Mood Media.[2] Muzak won out, because they could deliver content over phone likes or an FM broadcast subcarrier, rather than shipping out all those records.

Here's a free stream from a Seeburg 1000, from Radio Coast.[1]

[1] http://198.178.121.76:8157/stream

[2] https://us.moodmedia.com/sound/music-for-business/

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.

> Here's a free stream from a Seeburg 1000, from Radio Coast: http://198.178.121.76:8157/stream

They are currently playing a seasonal Christmas playlist that gives me better vibes than any Spotify Christmas playlist.

https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/

https://tunein.com/radio/RadioCoast-s248470

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

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.

There is least one other common "bulk music factory" business model like this. Bands like Two Steps from Hell cranked out a whole lot of simple and generic "epic music" that didn't need to be licensed per use, with the purpose being studios could use in trailers for action movies and video games before the real scores were finished.

Amusingly, even though the band existed for the purpose of supplying music for trailers, they eventually became popular enough on the Internet that fans convinced them to release a couple albums and even play live shows.

The actual company that owns the Seeburg catalog has their own site and stream as well: https://seeburg1000.com/

And before this: self-playing pianos using perforated rolls, reducing the cost of hiring live pianists in saloons.

Different legal environment. Until 1908, player piano companies didn't have to pay royalties to composers. See White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co..[1] So, in its growth period, the player piano industry didn't need to acquire music rights. Then Congress changed the law, to create the "mechanical license" right to play out the song from a storage device.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-Smith_Music_Publishing_C....

I suspect they are claiming more ownership than they really have. Most of those records were made prior to 1976, back when copyright only applied if you made a copyright application. Seeburg didn't file copyright applications on them and they bear no copyright markings. They just stamped "Property of Seeburg Music Library" on the disks themselves, which were loaned out to customers but not always collected back.

Seeburg and its successors all went out of business decades ago, via court-ordered liquidation. The current "Seeburg 1000" site uses the name, but came along much later and does not seem to be a successor company. So these are now probably public-domain.

Their music was blah, but competently executed. Better than many modern low-end cover bands.

The Telharmonium dated from the "if only we had gain" era of pre-electronics. The thing was a huge collection of sizable AC generators running at different frequencies, run through a keyboard, and mixed with transformers. With no way to amplify a small signal, there was no way to downsize the thing. Once amps were invented, the Hammond Organ, with its tone wheels, was the same concept in a piano-sized package.

History of pre-transistor electronics:

- If only we had voltage.

- If only we had current.

- If only we had rectification.

- If only we had gain.

- If only we had frequency.

- If only we had power gain.

- If only we had reliability.

- If only we had precision.

- If only we had counting.

I know, right??

> So they didn't file copyrights on all this material.

Huh? I'm really surprised to see this misconception cropping up here of all places. You don't have to "file copyright". It's automatically attached to anything and everything anyone creates as long as it meets some threshold of originality.

Now, yes. But before 1978 in the us there were some extra steps (I think just attaching a copyright notice & publishing it, but I'm not 100% sure)

The article is an excerpt from an upcoming book, maybe it's part of it