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Ghost artists on Spotify

(harpers.org)
556 points greenie_beans | 1 comments | 19 Dec 24 14:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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Animats ◴[20 Dec 24 06:57 UTC] No.42468901[source]▶
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

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spacechild1 ◴[20 Dec 24 09:53 UTC] No.42469627[source]▶
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.

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1. ksymph ◴[20 Dec 24 15:07 UTC] No.42471680[source]▶
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.