Wow.. this is sketchy as hell.
At home, whenever we eat X, we have a habit of asking Spotify to play X. We've made some great discoveries this way (Cornflakes 3D is an Israeli psytrance group, while The Dumplings is a Czech indie band), but these days almost all the searches have been hijacked by "playlist called Italian Restaurant Music" etc.
I love this idea! It's a shame it doesn't work so well any more, but I love finding new ways to find music that you'd just never listen to normally. It reminds me of the guy who made it is mission to listen to every album that was made in 2016 specifically, and now has hundreds of albums with so much variety, just by picking some specific theme and going wild with it.
They don't need to collude to do this - if Spotify and the guy follow self-interest, you get this outcome.
- Each artist has different royalties, some are more expensive than others.
- appearantly people do listen to ”cheaper” artists, in right circumstances
- consumers prefer that cost of subscription would be lower
- I assume scenario in the article saves money for spotify, and in turn allows to remain profitable without increasing subscription prices.
Seems it aligns well with interest of consumers in the long run.
By the way, last.fm radio exists again, though YouTube is the music source these days.
I miss curating my collection and playlists. It seems that the convenience of having almost all music available in a couple of clicks is making the listening experience less valuable.
I still use Spotify for background music but when I cook or am in another situation where I want to appreciate the music, I put on a record and it feels a lot better. There are a number of psychological effects in play there, like the fact that I am forced to listen to the tracks in the set order, that I've made a commitment by purchasing the record and that it adds atmosphere to the room to have a visibly rotating disc.
I also have navidrome set up so I can easily stream it from anywhere (my server is internal + WireGuard to access it remotely)
I’m now using a service called Roon to stream my local library, any other track I don’t own gets streamed from Tidal via Roon.
Like all those "$bandname for kids" releases that are just midis played through xylophone, marimba patches, or occasionally strings. Credited to legitimate sounding "artists" like the "Vitamin Quartet".
That’s art.
I mean: your gripe is basically Spotify's entire raison d'etre. On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to hide your true identity to such an extent, except to be able to act as your own competition.
That is, I think this person knows very well that by using different artist names, he will get Spotify revenue the listeners think is going to different artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christopher
Aside from the sketchy issue with faking 750 artist names, apparently the music is good and has good artistic intent within the genre.
According to the article, you can do deals where you trade away part of your royalty for a higher placement on those Spotify-owned playlists, which in his case seems to be the right business choice to make by far.
Why would this be problematic? Artist commonly work under one or more pseudonyms. 750 is quite a lot for sure, but is there material difference between that and just a few?
If it's focusing on SEO, they could be spreading their platform risk to not be across one or a few accounts.
Although if people feel pop music is authentic they might feel betrayed
I would suspect the best SEO consultants have worked at Google or have friends inside.
Maybe this also explains UK success in music :)
It's a pretty well known secret that a large part of why there is a Swedish cottage music industry is the historical ease of welfare fraud, on top of the already generous grants for cultural activities. You could basically get the government to not only pay for your rent, but your studio and equipment as well. Generations of Swedish musicians were living off unemployment checks while getting started. That era has drawn to a close, but there's still significant momentum left in the music industry it spawned.
So in this case, its affecting the "streamshare" calculation, but not the "royalty pool" one, and so not affecting how much money is in Spotify's pocket.
Doesn't look much
It’s a life changing amount of money for something like 90% of humanity.
This makes me wonder how big musicians make most of their money actually. Live concerts? Selling merchandise? Genuine question. For all I know it's not topping the Spotify.
$2.4mil puts you in the top 2% of Americans.
[1]: https://www.allabolag.se/5569664575/j-pipe-productions-ab
The Weeknd, Katy Perry, Bon Jovi, Usher, Pink and many more have their hit songs made by this guy. It's amazing, he somehow trained his neural networks to produce global hit songs.
He is doing this straight from 1998 to this day starting with "...Baby One More Time" of Britney Spears. This year he already has 2 songs as #1 on the Billboard HOT 100.
E.g.
A likes a. B likes b. B likes c. A maybe likes c.
But with many more nodes. I think they use it for recommendations and subgenre sorting etc.
Daniel Ek has his background in ads, SEO and related stuff –basically every possible way to make a buck using this newfangled internet thing – including selling virtual clothes for virtual dolls to kids age 9-17.
The teaming up with Martin Lorentzon was never about music, but simply finding an untapped market, a niche in which to apply their particular set of skills of hawking stuff online. They teamed up with the guy behind µTorrent and eventually convinced the major labels to buy into the idea (by getting a cut). The idea that they are on the side the art form, let alone artists, is pure mythogenesis to serve their brand.
Recently, music hasn't been enough to feed the growth. They want to colonize podcasts, an open ecosystem, and have put billions of dollars into investments and deals locking popular podcasts onto their platforms. They now intend to do the same with audio books.
Spotify has from the very start had an incestuous relationship with labels and various middlemen. It was never a fair game, they make special deals whenever it serves their purpose (driving the price down). Everyone involved is guaranteed to make a cut before the artist, and the entire ecosystem is built upon the idea that the less they pay out to the artist, the better their numbers look. Nowadays they don't even pay out anything at all unless you have 1000 streams, which just happens to be about two thirds of the catalogue. Is it in their best interest to keep songs with 500 streams from getting more streams, or not?
Why would they care about money laundering, or legitimate artists having their entire body of work deleted by a middleman because someone maliciously sent a bot their way?[1] The cheaper they can amass content, the better. Hence these backroom deals with what are basically content farms. What the featured article describes is not only sanctioned, it's the entire strategy going forward.
Once generative AI comes further along, what their algorithm will push will continue to be what serves their bottom line, i.e. the cheap stuff. You'll soon see the audio book equivalent of Johan Röhr, churning out thousands of books, narrated in real time by a non-human voice, algorithmically pushing out authentic works from all the lists.
Spotify allows me to listen to music. Why would I care that the CEO previously worked with ads?
And obviously a company like this will try to create deals which are cheap to them, so that they can make more money.. they run a business, so...yes?
