I noticed this and the ghost artists in my recommendations after playing some ambient.
I'm done with Spotify. I've had the service since it was beta in the Nordics, maybe 2008? It was amazing to be able to stream almost every piece of music there is.
I love music, I'm an amateur musician and I respect artists. This treats music as a fungible commodity. That's not what music is to me, so I choose not to support that.
I also understand the predicament they are in. I had friends who worked at Rdio, and I briefly worked at a startup doing music recommendation until the big 3 quoted us how much royalties they wanted in advance to stream their catalogue one time to learn from.
The record labels are the root cancer on the industry, but the alternative for Spotify might be to become a better label, not become another bad actor.
Fundamentally, there is just way too much supply of music for it to be a well-compensated endeavor for most. I don't think any economic arrangement will make it well paying when there are so many people who are happy with doing it for free for recognition.
Maybe so, but Spotify is especially bad at paying artists a fair share even amongst their peers. If Apple and Amazon can afford to pay artists twice as much per stream, and Tidal can afford to pay three times as much per stream, then the problem with Spotify is... Spotify.
The difference is that Spotify has a free tier (lower revenue from those users), their users listen more, and they may also have more customers in lower-income countries with lower subscription rates.
Which is to say - of you took a specific category of users - say, US-based paying subscribers and kept their listening activity the same - every streaming service would pay out roughly the same amount of royalties per-stream for that group of listeners.
It's quite obvious the CEO being paid reportedly around $300m a year is pocketing money that indie artists generate for the site. Most of these tech sites aren't really interested in delivering value into the communities they serve... Musicians need to wean themselves off of jumping into these types of old "gig economy" schemes, as they really don't provide any return on the huge amounts of time invested in building them up... :/
i frankly do not understand how Apple pays as much as it does - both Spotify and AM pay 70% of revenue to artists, so it might just be that there are far fewer streams on Apple. (plus Apple is a premium only service)
On an AM family plan, if they are really paying out 0.01 per stream... then anyone streaming more than 19 songs/day is a money loser for apple.
Spotify has cheaper family and student plans. To my knowledge there’s no way to make AM cheaper. In addition there’s no ad free version of AM that’s being supported by paying subscribers like there is for Spotify - though I haven’t heard the numbers on P&L on these free users.
paying Spotify subscribers don't support the plays from free subscribers. it's two separate pots of money. they explain this in their section for artists
Musicians are already undercompensated. Spotify playing AI music means those musicians aren't compensated at all. Someone who funneled their music into an n-dimensional matrix gets the money, and how much do you want to bet that's Spotify?
I'm scared artists will give up because audiences won't have enough trust to pay enough attention to distinguish them from AI spam. But I wonder how that equation changes when artists can authenticate that something came from them. (This goes for other kinds of art too.)
Artists create because they have an innate drive to create and express something. They need enough pay to get by so they can keep creating. AI will eat into their pay but their drives will keep driving. Yes they would love to be paid more but the only people driven by money are the corporations. Artists understand life is more than money, and that there is something else to live for besides more money. Unfortunately, that is also why they get taken advantage of by the money folks.
Bandcamp seems to have survived changing ownership and is still a good service. More specialized e-tailers like boomkat and bleep are also good for some genres.
music.youtube.com is fantastic. My playlists are 80% classics from the 60s to 2000, so the source actually probably doesn't matter. I'm not interested in most styles of new music anyway I suppose!
The algorithm still suggests some forgotten classics. On YT music I can find entire albums of somewhat more obscure yet excellent artists that are completely missing from Spotify.
I pay for Youtube with a family sub. Good value for me.
I'm a YTM subscriber too, have been since Google Play All Access beta. While it works for my needs, I fear that AI is coming, if not already, since anyone can upload anything and classify it as Music. I usually stay with well-known artists, but like to listen to ambient stuff, which is a prime target for AI generation.
I've been using soundcloud since forever and pray it never goes, plus with soundcloud paid you get access to a lot of music that isn't just "soundcloud dj music"
There is no source saying they don’t promote cheaper music just like Spotify does.
Also they pay to the rights-holders exactly the same as Spotify, which is 70% of your subscription. It just happens that Spotify has on average a lower revenue per stream, but for your particular use they both pay the same thing.
Built a collection of favorites via Lidarr and search for similar acts
My Analog Journal is a great YT channel to zero in on old world music hidden behind the marketing noise of American pop
As for new artists yeah, making art to pay bills is not making art. It’s boring capitalism. IMO it’s why music by humans sucks now. Back in the day there was financial demand to unicorn off one album.
Marketing and advertising, VC are a box. Middle men with no skills but keeping that hand out
I'm referring to the Ticketmaster / Live Nation monopoly.
If you're not familiar, the company has a corner on the market for concert venues and all associated services (booking, ticket resale, food and liquor vendors, point of sale, etc.) They use this to inflate ticket prices.
Hmm, I wouldn't summarize it that way on first read, but I can understand and perhaps agree with the interpretation.
How I read it, the second comment is saying that AI music competes with machine-replicable human music, a subset of human music, but not all.
Frankly, while Brian Eno's Music for Airports was monumental in the history of ambient music, in 2024 people unfamiliar with it aren't going to be able to tell it apart from select AI clips (as much as that will hurt to admit). That's less about it being generic and more about how good AIgen can mimic humans. Just like how humans couldn't tell apart human from AIgen in impressionist art: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... -- we wouldn't use that example to say that human art is just generic slop.
On re-read, I do think the thread started off on the wrong foot by using the word generic. Ambient music is simply some of the easiest music to machine generate being minimalist with heavy use of synthesizers, and much of it was machine generated in the first place in a DAW.
Fair. Your characterization of AI music is a bit ambitious. AI still can't write a breathtaking short story or poem: it can write a mediocre one of standard themes indistinguishable from a student, but that's it. I would argue that AI images is a special case: a photograph is after all not truly "art".
I have absolutely zero interest in listening to any music that is defined by the words "ambient" or "generic" or that is in any way at risk of being outcompeted by AI. I prefer interesting music.
I think your categorical dismissal of a genre that defies categorization (including one of the undisputed most influential eletronic artists ever!) disqualifies you from being able to identify "interesting" music. You sound like a boring person.
Over the past year I’ve become a big fan of Japanese music. I started with Yoasobi and then Spotify led me to Vocaloid (I knew of Hatsune Miku but I'm not into that). Nowadays I mostly listen to Vocaloid because it’s so expressive and different. This is why I'm excited about ai music - it’s a powerful and accessible tool that can help talented people explore new forms of music. That’s what music is all about for me.
Vocaloids are specialized synthesizers in the traditional sense, the producer has a huge amount of control over the sound. They're not even remotely comparable to typing a prompt into Suno and letting it barf out whatever.
I think this has become slightly more nuanced as of late. For example Synthesizer V now has an AI edition that produces retakes with deep learning.
I wonder how people will feel about this long-term as it blurs the line between generated from scratch and tool-assisted. Clearly the intent is to make it easier for producers to get the results they want. How easy is too easy?
I believe in the near future there will be more discussion about specific parts of songs being derived from AI even if the rest is traditionally composed. Because that is the natural result of creating more efficient tools to solve specific needs that artists have, when "generate my song for me" is not an option they would ever consider (given today's rapidly changing norms, at that point it becomes an issue of integrity over efficiency).
I think it is also interesting how revered Vocaloids have been in certain fandoms stretching back to the late 00's in spite of their artificiality. Whereas a lot of the autogenerated content today is derided for being artificial, "not the real thing." I guess because the vastly wider gap and set of limitations of Vocaloid compared to human singers causes creative workarounds that wouldn't be considered otherwise. But the creator is the one who needs to plan and execute those workarounds, as it confirms to their artistic preference.
Maybe in the future the AI art tools that are seen to be most ethical are the ones that preserve the artistic vision of the user. An aspect that artists are lamenting the loss of. Less outsourcing and more deliberate collaboration.
I understand that and how Vocaloid works. The point I am trying to make is that AI will allow people without technical musical knowledge create music. If that means writing a prompt to create a banger then so be it.
There is no aspect of creation. All of the creative process is offloaded to something else. It's the middle management of art, people pretending they're creators by doing none of the work. Fundamentally what you are doing is no different than sending money to an artist to request them to draw you something. Except instead of a transaction which involves an actual artist doing work somewhere down the line, you are dictating to a model using stolen art to create something for you and then claiming you made it.
I have seen amazing works of art and music from people with zero technical knowledge. It may be rough or weird but the jagged edges is what makes it art.
This right here exemplifies my fundamental issue with GenAI.
Paint a picture without painting a picture!
Write a novel without writing a novel!
Compose a melody without composing a melody!
There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true? They didn't compose the melodic motif, figure out the chord progression, structure the song, or even write the lyrics. The world is getting a bit too kafkaesque for my liking.
Suno to me has only produced the most trivial garbage but music is really hard to produce.
I could see how someone with no background in music could feel a sense of accomplishment with this.
It is like a gen z version of playing the ironman or smoke on the water riff on guitar. It is just not that hard to play the ironman riff either.
As someone who has put thousands of hours into learning music, anything that gets people into music is a positive to me.
It seems like generative AI art and music really triggers tech people who have nothing to do with art and music.
"Kids these days starting off programming a web app with a language model. In my day we had to take adderall and debug assembly code just to print an underscore to a dot matrix printer. That is the right way to start and anything else is WRONG"
It's a bit like taking a photo and it coming out surprisingly good.
You just pointed the thing and pressed a button. Yet you feel accomplishment.
Sure you might have chose a lens, depth and tried to point the things somewhat precisely. Then you sat at your computer to cut enough of the edges and fiddled with some curves so it feels nice for you. But ultimately you didn't make any of it. Machine made it all. You just guided it with the knobs provided for you. Yet you feel accomplishment if you make something good because you also made hundreds of it that were crap.
> There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true?
They "created" something that, until now, would have required skills they didn't have. You don't see how someone could feel a sense of accomplishment for the end result, the thing they poofed into existence and like?
We use tools to make things (even art) easier to create. I don't make my paints from scratch (anymore), or string my paintbrushes (anymore), or now sometimes choose my color palettes or general composition -- tools (like genAI) exist to let artists create art easier, and saying "you didn't put in enough thought/work/etc for it to count as art!" feels dismissive of the creative process and the joy people find in expressing themselves, regardless of how they got there.
Eh, a novel has to hold coherence over many hours, while a song only runs for a few minutes.
It was possible to do a credible job composing algorithmic music in many genres before the current AI frenzy. Before long, you won't be able to tell the difference between human-composed and machine-composed music in any genre.
It will be quite a while before that happens with novels and screenplays. Wouldn't bet against it in the long run, though.
Spotify's app is bloated. I've been premium since 2014 but I'm reaching my limit of all the garbage the app has. I wish I could deactivate all podcasts and audiobooks. I don't care about it. I don't mind AI music and ghost artists but I wish looking for some sort of music would bring up playlists from actual people instead of the bubble generated AI from Spotify. I feel instead of exploring and expanding my limits when I search for music I'm just self padding myself.
Agreed, and the Apple Music Desktop App suffers from being a legacy franken-iTunes nightmare.
After cancelling Spotify I surprisingly ended up on Tidal, and it's been amazing so far. Feels like how Spotify used to feel before they started shipping the org chart like all big companies eventually do. Plus its cheaper, offers higher quality streams, and gives bigger payouts to artists.
The app is terrible. It is so hard to do what most people want to do. There is so much content in the way. Simple things like adding music to playlists is awkward. It’s incredible that this company has the arrogance to brag about their org structure, when the output is so dysfunctional
Spotify would probably argue that Apple has control of the OS, so they can surface all of their apps, pre-install them, whereas Spotify has more pressure to leverage their existing install base by bundling everything into one.
I would bet every dollar of my net worth that they are critically wrong on this; its such a beautiful little package that some VP can sell a higher-up to explain away why something they're responsible for isn't performing as expected. I've heard dozens of people complain about how crowded the Spotify app is becoming. I don't know anyone who actively and regularly uses Spotify as a podcast platform; when Joe Rogan was exclusive to Spotify for a bit, I heard a couple people complain about that, which means they were (begrudgingly) using it; but that isn't the situation anymore.
How these complaints convert into behavior changes, subscription cancellations, etc; I don't know.
While I don't disagree about bloat: I like the podcast features, but I hate audiobooks. My wife doesn't listen to podcasts, but loves audiobooks. I understand appealing to a range of users. Some configuration options might be warranted.
What's wrong with specialist services? I love audiobooks, use audible a lot, yet that keeps trying to push it's podcasts on me. I also like podcasts but I have a different app for that, with different features and demands as required by podcasts. I don't often listen to music so have never bothered with Spotify, but music player apps are rarely good for playing audio books or podcasts so why are they all trying to combine them just because they're audio? It's like making a fridge-freezer-oven-microwave-blender device just because they're all kitchen things, so there must be synergy.
Ghost artists? Aren't they called a studio artist which makes up the majority of paid works produced. Selling art and the copyright happens in every area. Most visual art produced for money doesn't have an artists name attached either.
At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed; and to get that metric as low as possible. That's why they push podcasts so hard (and why they aren't in a separate app); Premium subscribers barely noticed when they still get ads in podcasts, beautiful double-dipping Spotify! It's why they want to get big into audiobooks; they're going to be a keystone in their justification for an even higher $20+/mo subscription.
Netflix was well on the same course; but instead made what was absolutely not an obvious pivot at the time, to just become a studio like those dozen other guys. In retrospect, it was a genius move because their access to fine-grained data on what their users watch became a differentiating factor to feed back into what the studio greenlights. But, it would have been the right move even if they didn't capitalize on that data, because there genuinely is no business to be built being a middle-man who has to pay for content. Spotify knows this, but they don't have the same escape hatch Netflix had; but they're tearing their app and users apart trying to find one.
>At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed
Where did you get this from? All available answers when searching seem to point out "Time Spent Listening" being the north-star metric for Spotify, not whatever you said. Did you just make this up?
When I first heard about it on /x/ about 6 years ago I thought it was a bit of a morbid joke around how if all your human interaction is online you can't definitively state that the universe exists outside your front door. But recently it's started to look like more of a true statement that, at least as far as the internet goes, it will soon be impossible to know if anybody you interact with actually exists.
FWIW I'm actually looking forward to this happening, for every social activity that is often claimed to have been better before the internet (ie dating, casual debates about politics, etc) has a potential to return to its pre-internet status quo as people come to the conclusion that none of it is real and gradually drop out. Internet will still exist as a valuable tool for transmitting data but the concept of online communities and social networks will suffer and degrade until there's nothing but spam like usenet did.
While I appreciate the claims about GPT and Google search-bots-first designed web, I couldn’t agree less with the „coordinated international effort“ part.
I much prefer Maggie Appleton‘s Dark Forest writing and talk on the matter:
> The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
> It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.
I dunno, I’ve never seen any of these sort of “things will get better by getting worse” theories pan out. I’d wager that if it becomes difficult to tell real from fake on the internet, people may just become more atomized and paranoid, retreating away from social interaction altogether. So for that reason I hope the Dead Internet Theory doesn’t come to pass.
Before articles about this started to show up on the web, I've noticed that my weekly suggestion playlist (which refreshes every monday) sometimes had music with either low quality or encoding artifacts (just like AI music).
But after reading about this phenomenon, I also started to dig deeper into which artists were actually suggested each week. And to my surprise there were quite a bit of artists I've never heard of, and were hard to find further information on.
Hopefully Spotify won't touch weekly release playlist (the one which refreshes every friday) of artists you already listen to and have saved into personal playlists.
> Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
> Spotify Employees Say It's Promoting Fake Artists to Reduce Royalty Payments to Real Ones
[...]
> According to a shocking new book, Spotify has been promoting so-called "ghost artists" so it can avoid paying its piddling royalties to real artists.
> In an excerpt from "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" published in Harper's, author Liz Pelly reveals that the streaming platform has a secretive internal program that prioritizes cheap and generic music.
> Dubbed "Perfect Fit Content" or PFC for short, this program not only involved a network of affiliated production firms creating tons of "low-budget stock muzak" for the platform, but also a team of employees who surreptitiously placed tracks from those firms on Spotify's curated playlists.
I think the mods should change this post to link to the Harper's piece, or even the Futurism one.
More broadly, it is interesting how Spotify is following the path blazed by supermarkets, then by video streaming services, in starting to sell (and promote, and prioritise) own-brand content. (Of course the Futurism summary is itself an example of a related problematic practice ...)
Isn't that a different phenomenon? This article is about hit songs that have cheap AI covers, almost identical sounding, presumably to poach royalties from the real musicians.
The "ghost" thing is interesting too, that sounds almost like the industry from before The Beatles, when bands were just people hired by the record companies to record songs written by others, and the companies owned pretty much everything.
There is zero evidence in the article to support the claim of AI artist. It’s far far more likely the “AI Artists” are actually Spotify funded ghost artists. The best evidence for “AI artist” is just as supportive of “Spotify ghost artists” as it is AI.
I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.
The reporting suggests that the "Perfect Fit Content" scheme began in 2017 and had been rolled out on a large scale by 2023, so it's unlikely that it has been reliant on AI music. (It does seem very likely that Spotify is now at least experimenting with replacing or augmenting the ghost musicians with AI.) I don't at all accept that Spotify running a kind of self-payola system with own-brand music is only a big controversy if AI-generated tracks are involved.
I didn't mean it would be a big controversy because it's AI, I meant because they would be replacing major label/artist songs with their own karaoke versions, and then manipulating their own algorithms to promote them. That seems like something the labels would really fight against.
But they don't have to target individual musical acts or individual songs for replication to drain their purses. Time spent listening to Spotify's own-brand lo-fi is time not spent listening to playlists full of expensive third-party musicians, including musicians in whole other genres. And if they did want to make and promote close covers of individual songs then they'd probably call humans: people are already very good at that (many such covers exist already) and (IANAL!) the legal risks are probably smaller and better-understood. After all, copyright defences of unlicensed generative AI seem to rely on the notion that its output is transformative, but presumably it would be hard to make that claim when you ask an AI to produce a near-exact replica of a song you put into its training data.
Yes, but... I used to discover great new (to me) artists on Spotify. Now I'm pigeon holed by "the algorithm", to the point where when I start a new playlist based on an artist or song it's 90% songs already in my liked list.
The recommendations used to feel like magic, now it's very limited in what it considered similar to something I'm listening to, like it fixates on one attribute of a song, but not the broader context or genre.
Personally, Discover Weekly went super downhill for me about a year ago. I used to get about one really good song a week, which I was really impressed by. But now, it's a deluge of songs with obviously fake instruments (the strings are a giveaway) and (presumably) AI-generated album covers. And the weird part is that sometimes a real, big name artist will be co-credited, but I highly doubt they had anything to do with it. (I've specifically noticed this with Audiomachine in particular, for some reason.)
I don't know if this phenomenon is related to the main article, but I've been wanting to rant about it for a while :-P
AI-generated music can be acceptable in certain contexts, such as white noise for coding, running, or working out, where the primary goal is background ambiance rather than active listening.
However, AI-generated fake podcasts are a different story—they're often frustrating and a waste of people's time.
Unfortunately, platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify are increasingly populated with these spammy, AI-created podcasts. For those interested, here's a small subset (4,000+) of such AI-generated fake podcasts available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak....
Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids.
To your point, I actually used to run CPU Bach (a 3DO game that tried to procedurally generate contrapuntal classical music) as a good background music generator while studying as a kid. Very few people remember it or the 3DO for that matter but it was quite impressive for its time!
> Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids.
The latest grift is posting AI "covers" of real songs to farm SEO hits while evading copyright strikes, which results in fever dreams like this:
I’d rather have human created music, even when it is background music and I’m doing a primary activity that needs focus.
In other contexts, where the stakes are even lower, such as elevator music or on-hold call music AI gen music will probably have less people sneer at it.
So happy that I never stopped curating my digital music collection. Old raspberry pi with USB DAC and external HD, connected to good old hifi amplifier, and controlled via mpd from anyone's phone. It's been working wonders for almost 10 years.
I used to write music in the past, and I mostly do it to tell stories or a songification of a poem. When I lived alone, it was easy because I can record anytime I wanted in full silence. Now that I am with family, I can’t record without a background noise seeping on my vocals.
I found that AI helped a lot, I can still write the story, the poem, the lyrics - and just let AI find a melody that represent the story as close as how I imagined it on my mind.
I mostly design and write the story first, then captures the story as poem or lyrics, then let AI “cover” it for me. I don’t want AI to write for me because the story and lyrics is what I cared about, and I like to put metaphors and hidden messages on it.
For example, this album that tells about the phases of life as seasons is AI generated.
Except the radio they are upfront that you are only a listener.
Spotify says you can make a collection as the all powerful curator, and hear from it in what has been understood to be a random selection. They’re breaking the definition of shuffle.
I’ve had a pretty negative reaction to AI-produced music, too. But I will say that the following track caught my ear when it appeared on my YouTube video feed a few days ago:
“Nirvana Tribute ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Girl Group 1960’s Tribute”
I still prefer radio (SiriusXM cause I don't like commercials) it has the right mix of new, "b-tracks", favorites, genres etc all without having to curate it oneself and end up with things like random AI music spam or the random unrelated track someone sneaked in to game some algorithm or whatever. Also prefer to attend smaller music festivals or live music gigs over large concerts. I just don't want to go wading through the massive amount of random music spending way too much time trying to create playlist when certain radio already does a good job of balancing new with old and far more quality than not.
I've been listening to the radio a lot more recently; there's a few channels, such as my local university's non profit/commercial free radio station that often play some pretty obscure and interesting things, I've discovered a lot of new music that I otherwise never would have listened to.
I feel like a lot of companies / services that were popular and loved once are going to make greedy mistakes with AI, so it would be a business opportunity to launch a "more ethical" alternative.
What I don’t get about Spotify is how bad their interface is. They have an army of engineers and yet over 15 years it has only become harder and less efficient to use. I constantly see regressive tweaks or bugs. What’s the best way to reliably export all my playlists and move on?
I use Spotify to listen to Louis Cole and his contemporaries only at this point. And children's music for my son. Spotify was lovely in 2014-2015 when it made it truly was to discover new musicians. Now it's barf. Once my son is more grown, I'll be done with it.
I'm surprised by how big this news story has been the past week or so, because I thought we all knew about Spotify's fake music already. I remember reading about this program at least 6 years ago.
It sounds like you mean the ghost music, which several people have referenced already in this comment section. That is made by real people while in the linked article they are talking about AI generated music.
I’ve noticed that nowadays, music often uses more generic melodies. Famous influencers, even without a background in music, can create songs for their fans.
Listening to retro music makes more sense to me these days.
Some of it’s pretty good. even a year ago the biggie cover of New York State of mind came out and I was quite impressed
I suppose how you feel about it is irrelevant, time marches forward
I'm not sure if they're AI but most playlists start strong with real artists but quickly devolve into ... generic slop. Going to give Apple Music a try.
Spotify is at the wrong end of the enshittification cycle.
I've experienced none of this on Deezer. They appear to still employ humans to curate playlists featuring actual artists, and as a nice bonus they support lossless audio like Spotify has been half promising for at least the last five years.
Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline.
I feel like the introduction of AI music is shortchanging musicians: musicians have made the AI generation possible, it pushes them aside, and they don't get a cent from it.
>I feel like the introduction of AI music is shortchanging musicians: musicians have made the AI generation possible, it pushes them aside, and they don't get a cent from it.
Much like visual artists, graphic designers, and soon authors.
Except not really. I'm still going to keep consuming art made by humans, even subconsciously, and I'm going to keep enjoying it. AI has no ground-truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already. Perhaps the quantity advantage has turned in favor of robots, but I'll be damned if you can name one AI-generated pop song that everyone knows by heart.
And truth be told - musicians are an excellent example of how a hostile industry can fuck over the working man long before AI enters the equation. Established musicians needed to be managed, and that management typically came from a label that would sign you if you weren't rich enough to go indie. Then, you're effectively contracted talent that has little to no ownership of your own life work. You are expected to provide all of the emotional gravitas while retaining none of the artistic control, and it only got worse in a digital era that further highlighted how valueless physical music had become. Artists had to make their money off tours and merch sales while simultaneously honoring arbitrary record deals demanding X amount of music over Y period of time.
> AI has no ground truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already.
Yes it does, your own AI generated pieces are based in your prompt, not purely generated by AI. So they are meaningful to you, but still worthless to others. They can generate their own AI shit. What I mean is that AI content is useful if you had a hand shaping it.
My prompt is meaningless. When I tell AI to proofread my writing or to generate a boilerplate email, pretty much no part of my prompt makes it into the final product. It's a seed of entropy that gets a literary flywheel spinning, but I'm not so pretentious as to assume my 3-word query is somehow unique or even influences the tone of the output. It's not "my" response just because I gave it a question.
Pretty much the past 5 years of model finetuning has been predicated on the idea that AI cannot reliably steer itself in the right direction. Models perform better in almost every way when you seed them with additional, non-unique and human-generated training data.
No, what I said is something else - when you set the prompt, you can find the generated output meaningful for you precisely because you set it up. Other people don't need your generated texts or images because they can prompt their own. It is basically one-time use content, for one person.
The real danger with AI is that it saturates the market/lowers the profitability for real artists/authors/whatever until it's no longer possible to make a career of being one of those things at which point things collapse and suddenly almost no actual humans are writing novels.
Perhaps the quantity advantage has turned in favor of robots, but I'll be damned if you can name one AI-generated pop song that everyone knows by heart.
> Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline.
Or FLACs, if you can get them, which you can on bandcamp. I've got a terabyte of music in my offline playlist. It takes a few months to cycle through everything, then top it up with any new discoveries and latest releases before the next cycle starts.
Lossless local files is the way to go. Full control. Maybe I'm a bit controlling, but if I am paying for music I want the optimal experience and full control.
Related more recently:
Ghost artists on Spotify
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
I noticed this and the ghost artists in my recommendations after playing some ambient.
I'm done with Spotify. I've had the service since it was beta in the Nordics, maybe 2008? It was amazing to be able to stream almost every piece of music there is.
I love music, I'm an amateur musician and I respect artists. This treats music as a fungible commodity. That's not what music is to me, so I choose not to support that.
I also understand the predicament they are in. I had friends who worked at Rdio, and I briefly worked at a startup doing music recommendation until the big 3 quoted us how much royalties they wanted in advance to stream their catalogue one time to learn from.
The record labels are the root cancer on the industry, but the alternative for Spotify might be to become a better label, not become another bad actor.
Fundamentally, there is just way too much supply of music for it to be a well-compensated endeavor for most. I don't think any economic arrangement will make it well paying when there are so many people who are happy with doing it for free for recognition.
Maybe so, but Spotify is especially bad at paying artists a fair share even amongst their peers. If Apple and Amazon can afford to pay artists twice as much per stream, and Tidal can afford to pay three times as much per stream, then the problem with Spotify is... Spotify.
That's not how any of this works, though.
Spotify has the same licensing agreement.
The difference is that Spotify has a free tier (lower revenue from those users), their users listen more, and they may also have more customers in lower-income countries with lower subscription rates.
Which is to say - of you took a specific category of users - say, US-based paying subscribers and kept their listening activity the same - every streaming service would pay out roughly the same amount of royalties per-stream for that group of listeners.
It's quite obvious the CEO being paid reportedly around $300m a year is pocketing money that indie artists generate for the site. Most of these tech sites aren't really interested in delivering value into the communities they serve... Musicians need to wean themselves off of jumping into these types of old "gig economy" schemes, as they really don't provide any return on the huge amounts of time invested in building them up... :/
i frankly do not understand how Apple pays as much as it does - both Spotify and AM pay 70% of revenue to artists, so it might just be that there are far fewer streams on Apple. (plus Apple is a premium only service)
On an AM family plan, if they are really paying out 0.01 per stream... then anyone streaming more than 19 songs/day is a money loser for apple.
It probably helps that Apple isn't carving out $250 million of their subscription revenue just for Joe Rogan.
Spotify has cheaper family and student plans. To my knowledge there’s no way to make AM cheaper. In addition there’s no ad free version of AM that’s being supported by paying subscribers like there is for Spotify - though I haven’t heard the numbers on P&L on these free users.
paying Spotify subscribers don't support the plays from free subscribers. it's two separate pots of money. they explain this in their section for artists
Musicians are already undercompensated. Spotify playing AI music means those musicians aren't compensated at all. Someone who funneled their music into an n-dimensional matrix gets the money, and how much do you want to bet that's Spotify?
Mostly a company called epidemic sound making bank off artists and buying out full rights for pennies
> Fundamentally, there is just way too much supply of music for it to be a well-compensated endeavor for most.
This has been true for at least half a century. Probably many centuries.
I'm scared artists will give up because audiences won't have enough trust to pay enough attention to distinguish them from AI spam. But I wonder how that equation changes when artists can authenticate that something came from them. (This goes for other kinds of art too.)
Artists create because they have an innate drive to create and express something. They need enough pay to get by so they can keep creating. AI will eat into their pay but their drives will keep driving. Yes they would love to be paid more but the only people driven by money are the corporations. Artists understand life is more than money, and that there is something else to live for besides more money. Unfortunately, that is also why they get taken advantage of by the money folks.
How will you get your music instead, or what alternatives are you considering?
Bandcamp seems to have survived changing ownership and is still a good service. More specialized e-tailers like boomkat and bleep are also good for some genres.
music.youtube.com is fantastic. My playlists are 80% classics from the 60s to 2000, so the source actually probably doesn't matter. I'm not interested in most styles of new music anyway I suppose!
The algorithm still suggests some forgotten classics. On YT music I can find entire albums of somewhat more obscure yet excellent artists that are completely missing from Spotify.
I pay for Youtube with a family sub. Good value for me.
I'm a YTM subscriber too, have been since Google Play All Access beta. While it works for my needs, I fear that AI is coming, if not already, since anyone can upload anything and classify it as Music. I usually stay with well-known artists, but like to listen to ambient stuff, which is a prime target for AI generation.
I've been using soundcloud since forever and pray it never goes, plus with soundcloud paid you get access to a lot of music that isn't just "soundcloud dj music"
Apple Music has algorithmic playlists like Spotify.
Doesn't promote AI songs, has high-res, lossless sound quality and pays artists more.
As an Apple Music customer, I am heartened to hear that they do not promote AI songs and that they pay artists more.
There is no source saying they don’t promote cheaper music just like Spotify does.
Also they pay to the rights-holders exactly the same as Spotify, which is 70% of your subscription. It just happens that Spotify has on average a lower revenue per stream, but for your particular use they both pay the same thing.
Bandcamp, soundcloud, and Presto music's classical-focused streaming service are what replace Spotify for me.
Built a collection of favorites via Lidarr and search for similar acts
My Analog Journal is a great YT channel to zero in on old world music hidden behind the marketing noise of American pop
As for new artists yeah, making art to pay bills is not making art. It’s boring capitalism. IMO it’s why music by humans sucks now. Back in the day there was financial demand to unicorn off one album.
Marketing and advertising, VC are a box. Middle men with no skills but keeping that hand out
> This treats music as a fungible commodity.
This is only going to accelerate. Until the labels die, the universe will find every way to route around them.
Hopefully concert venues are next.
How are musicians are going to perform live before large audiences?
I'm referring to the Ticketmaster / Live Nation monopoly.
If you're not familiar, the company has a corner on the market for concert venues and all associated services (booking, ticket resale, food and liquor vendors, point of sale, etc.) They use this to inflate ticket prices.
How is shoveling AI generated songs going to take down ticket master?
Sorry but music in the genre "generic background track designed to go unnoticed" is in fact fungible and interchangeable.
Double sorry but Brian Eno’s Music for Airports or Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II is not interchangable with AI drivel
In my opinion, Aphex Twin is way overrated. Only a few tracks on SAW2 are listenable. I agree with the sentiment though and on calling out Brian Eno.
It's ok if you don't like it. Good even. It being weird and not of mass appeal is part of the charm.
They are not even interchangeable with each other!
You'd consider those generic?
He wasn't the one calling ambient music generic unnoticed music.
Parent comment said generic, he offered these as counters, so he called them generic.
"I like ambient music"
"Elevator generic background music is trash. Good riddance. "
"No, X and Y in the genre are good bands"
"So you agree it is generic elevator music?"
Hmm, I wouldn't summarize it that way on first read, but I can understand and perhaps agree with the interpretation.
How I read it, the second comment is saying that AI music competes with machine-replicable human music, a subset of human music, but not all.
Frankly, while Brian Eno's Music for Airports was monumental in the history of ambient music, in 2024 people unfamiliar with it aren't going to be able to tell it apart from select AI clips (as much as that will hurt to admit). That's less about it being generic and more about how good AIgen can mimic humans. Just like how humans couldn't tell apart human from AIgen in impressionist art: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... -- we wouldn't use that example to say that human art is just generic slop.
On re-read, I do think the thread started off on the wrong foot by using the word generic. Ambient music is simply some of the easiest music to machine generate being minimalist with heavy use of synthesizers, and much of it was machine generated in the first place in a DAW.
Fair. Your characterization of AI music is a bit ambitious. AI still can't write a breathtaking short story or poem: it can write a mediocre one of standard themes indistinguishable from a student, but that's it. I would argue that AI images is a special case: a photograph is after all not truly "art".
Triple sorry but if these aren't generic, then by definition they weren't what the parent comment was talking about, since it did say generic.
I wasn’t replying to generic, I was nailing “designed to go unnoticed”
As music historians note the profundity of their work with that explicit aim in mind
Then you invented your own thing which they never said, and complained that it's wrong.
I’m quoting them verbatim
You just said you cherry picked a subset of what they said to respond to.
I don't know them but if they're designed to be offensive airport noise fillers then yes, they are.
They're not. Is your search engine broken?
I have absolutely zero interest in listening to any music that is defined by the words "ambient" or "generic" or that is in any way at risk of being outcompeted by AI. I prefer interesting music.
I think your categorical dismissal of a genre that defies categorization (including one of the undisputed most influential eletronic artists ever!) disqualifies you from being able to identify "interesting" music. You sound like a boring person.
yikes
Over the past year I’ve become a big fan of Japanese music. I started with Yoasobi and then Spotify led me to Vocaloid (I knew of Hatsune Miku but I'm not into that). Nowadays I mostly listen to Vocaloid because it’s so expressive and different. This is why I'm excited about ai music - it’s a powerful and accessible tool that can help talented people explore new forms of music. That’s what music is all about for me.
Vocaloids are specialized synthesizers in the traditional sense, the producer has a huge amount of control over the sound. They're not even remotely comparable to typing a prompt into Suno and letting it barf out whatever.
I think this has become slightly more nuanced as of late. For example Synthesizer V now has an AI edition that produces retakes with deep learning.
I wonder how people will feel about this long-term as it blurs the line between generated from scratch and tool-assisted. Clearly the intent is to make it easier for producers to get the results they want. How easy is too easy?
I believe in the near future there will be more discussion about specific parts of songs being derived from AI even if the rest is traditionally composed. Because that is the natural result of creating more efficient tools to solve specific needs that artists have, when "generate my song for me" is not an option they would ever consider (given today's rapidly changing norms, at that point it becomes an issue of integrity over efficiency).
I think it is also interesting how revered Vocaloids have been in certain fandoms stretching back to the late 00's in spite of their artificiality. Whereas a lot of the autogenerated content today is derided for being artificial, "not the real thing." I guess because the vastly wider gap and set of limitations of Vocaloid compared to human singers causes creative workarounds that wouldn't be considered otherwise. But the creator is the one who needs to plan and execute those workarounds, as it confirms to their artistic preference.
Maybe in the future the AI art tools that are seen to be most ethical are the ones that preserve the artistic vision of the user. An aspect that artists are lamenting the loss of. Less outsourcing and more deliberate collaboration.
I understand that and how Vocaloid works. The point I am trying to make is that AI will allow people without technical musical knowledge create music. If that means writing a prompt to create a banger then so be it.
There is no aspect of creation. All of the creative process is offloaded to something else. It's the middle management of art, people pretending they're creators by doing none of the work. Fundamentally what you are doing is no different than sending money to an artist to request them to draw you something. Except instead of a transaction which involves an actual artist doing work somewhere down the line, you are dictating to a model using stolen art to create something for you and then claiming you made it.
I have seen amazing works of art and music from people with zero technical knowledge. It may be rough or weird but the jagged edges is what makes it art.
This right here exemplifies my fundamental issue with GenAI.
Paint a picture without painting a picture!
Write a novel without writing a novel!
Compose a melody without composing a melody!
There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true? They didn't compose the melodic motif, figure out the chord progression, structure the song, or even write the lyrics. The world is getting a bit too kafkaesque for my liking.
Suno to me has only produced the most trivial garbage but music is really hard to produce.
I could see how someone with no background in music could feel a sense of accomplishment with this.
It is like a gen z version of playing the ironman or smoke on the water riff on guitar. It is just not that hard to play the ironman riff either.
As someone who has put thousands of hours into learning music, anything that gets people into music is a positive to me.
It seems like generative AI art and music really triggers tech people who have nothing to do with art and music.
"Kids these days starting off programming a web app with a language model. In my day we had to take adderall and debug assembly code just to print an underscore to a dot matrix printer. That is the right way to start and anything else is WRONG"
It's a bit like taking a photo and it coming out surprisingly good.
You just pointed the thing and pressed a button. Yet you feel accomplishment.
Sure you might have chose a lens, depth and tried to point the things somewhat precisely. Then you sat at your computer to cut enough of the edges and fiddled with some curves so it feels nice for you. But ultimately you didn't make any of it. Machine made it all. You just guided it with the knobs provided for you. Yet you feel accomplishment if you make something good because you also made hundreds of it that were crap.
> There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true?
They "created" something that, until now, would have required skills they didn't have. You don't see how someone could feel a sense of accomplishment for the end result, the thing they poofed into existence and like?
We use tools to make things (even art) easier to create. I don't make my paints from scratch (anymore), or string my paintbrushes (anymore), or now sometimes choose my color palettes or general composition -- tools (like genAI) exist to let artists create art easier, and saying "you didn't put in enough thought/work/etc for it to count as art!" feels dismissive of the creative process and the joy people find in expressing themselves, regardless of how they got there.
In that case yes, things like Suno make it easy to create music in the same sense that ChatGPT makes it easy to write a novel.
Eh, a novel has to hold coherence over many hours, while a song only runs for a few minutes.
It was possible to do a credible job composing algorithmic music in many genres before the current AI frenzy. Before long, you won't be able to tell the difference between human-composed and machine-composed music in any genre.
It will be quite a while before that happens with novels and screenplays. Wouldn't bet against it in the long run, though.
You like Creepy Nuts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6FUBWGSOIc
Love them!
Spotify's app is bloated. I've been premium since 2014 but I'm reaching my limit of all the garbage the app has. I wish I could deactivate all podcasts and audiobooks. I don't care about it. I don't mind AI music and ghost artists but I wish looking for some sort of music would bring up playlists from actual people instead of the bubble generated AI from Spotify. I feel instead of exploring and expanding my limits when I search for music I'm just self padding myself.
I'm very happy with YouTube Music. I pay the subscription.
Agreed, and the Apple Music Desktop App suffers from being a legacy franken-iTunes nightmare.
After cancelling Spotify I surprisingly ended up on Tidal, and it's been amazing so far. Feels like how Spotify used to feel before they started shipping the org chart like all big companies eventually do. Plus its cheaper, offers higher quality streams, and gives bigger payouts to artists.
Uninstall iTunes and install the actual Apple Music app, it functions like the one on iOS or macOS
The app is terrible. It is so hard to do what most people want to do. There is so much content in the way. Simple things like adding music to playlists is awkward. It’s incredible that this company has the arrogance to brag about their org structure, when the output is so dysfunctional
It’s interesting that Apple split out music from iTunes, and has somewhat walled apps for music, podcasts, audiobooks while Spotify consolidated
Spotify would probably argue that Apple has control of the OS, so they can surface all of their apps, pre-install them, whereas Spotify has more pressure to leverage their existing install base by bundling everything into one.
I would bet every dollar of my net worth that they are critically wrong on this; its such a beautiful little package that some VP can sell a higher-up to explain away why something they're responsible for isn't performing as expected. I've heard dozens of people complain about how crowded the Spotify app is becoming. I don't know anyone who actively and regularly uses Spotify as a podcast platform; when Joe Rogan was exclusive to Spotify for a bit, I heard a couple people complain about that, which means they were (begrudgingly) using it; but that isn't the situation anymore.
How these complaints convert into behavior changes, subscription cancellations, etc; I don't know.
Apple owns the operating system, so they can keep their full collection of apps front and center without even a download
While I don't disagree about bloat: I like the podcast features, but I hate audiobooks. My wife doesn't listen to podcasts, but loves audiobooks. I understand appealing to a range of users. Some configuration options might be warranted.
What's wrong with specialist services? I love audiobooks, use audible a lot, yet that keeps trying to push it's podcasts on me. I also like podcasts but I have a different app for that, with different features and demands as required by podcasts. I don't often listen to music so have never bothered with Spotify, but music player apps are rarely good for playing audio books or podcasts so why are they all trying to combine them just because they're audio? It's like making a fridge-freezer-oven-microwave-blender device just because they're all kitchen things, so there must be synergy.
Not just AI music, but "ghost artists", which are real people paid bottom dollar to create generic playlist music in a theme, under a different name. https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/music-streaming/spot...
Ghost artists? Aren't they called a studio artist which makes up the majority of paid works produced. Selling art and the copyright happens in every area. Most visual art produced for money doesn't have an artists name attached either.
I went to an upmarket oceanside resort last year. The entire music playlist was 12 minute remixes (possibly AI) of repetitive upbeat ambient.
It was sending the staff crazy to listen to it all day.
At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed; and to get that metric as low as possible. That's why they push podcasts so hard (and why they aren't in a separate app); Premium subscribers barely noticed when they still get ads in podcasts, beautiful double-dipping Spotify! It's why they want to get big into audiobooks; they're going to be a keystone in their justification for an even higher $20+/mo subscription.
Netflix was well on the same course; but instead made what was absolutely not an obvious pivot at the time, to just become a studio like those dozen other guys. In retrospect, it was a genius move because their access to fine-grained data on what their users watch became a differentiating factor to feed back into what the studio greenlights. But, it would have been the right move even if they didn't capitalize on that data, because there genuinely is no business to be built being a middle-man who has to pay for content. Spotify knows this, but they don't have the same escape hatch Netflix had; but they're tearing their app and users apart trying to find one.
>At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed
Where did you get this from? All available answers when searching seem to point out "Time Spent Listening" being the north-star metric for Spotify, not whatever you said. Did you just make this up?
The logical conclusion is to also write AI viewers and listeners. But on YouTube that would be called click fraud.
Seems like the whole online industry is eliminating itself and cheering all the way down.
Also known as the dead Internet theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
When I first heard about it on /x/ about 6 years ago I thought it was a bit of a morbid joke around how if all your human interaction is online you can't definitively state that the universe exists outside your front door. But recently it's started to look like more of a true statement that, at least as far as the internet goes, it will soon be impossible to know if anybody you interact with actually exists.
FWIW I'm actually looking forward to this happening, for every social activity that is often claimed to have been better before the internet (ie dating, casual debates about politics, etc) has a potential to return to its pre-internet status quo as people come to the conclusion that none of it is real and gradually drop out. Internet will still exist as a valuable tool for transmitting data but the concept of online communities and social networks will suffer and degrade until there's nothing but spam like usenet did.
While I appreciate the claims about GPT and Google search-bots-first designed web, I couldn’t agree less with the „coordinated international effort“ part.
I much prefer Maggie Appleton‘s Dark Forest writing and talk on the matter:
> The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
> It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.
Links:
- https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
- Talk: https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M
edit: formatting
I dunno, I’ve never seen any of these sort of “things will get better by getting worse” theories pan out. I’d wager that if it becomes difficult to tell real from fake on the internet, people may just become more atomized and paranoid, retreating away from social interaction altogether. So for that reason I hope the Dead Internet Theory doesn’t come to pass.
Technology Ouroboros.
Before articles about this started to show up on the web, I've noticed that my weekly suggestion playlist (which refreshes every monday) sometimes had music with either low quality or encoding artifacts (just like AI music).
But after reading about this phenomenon, I also started to dig deeper into which artists were actually suggested each week. And to my surprise there were quite a bit of artists I've never heard of, and were hard to find further information on.
Hopefully Spotify won't touch weekly release playlist (the one which refreshes every friday) of artists you already listen to and have saved into personal playlists.
This article is trash. Here’s the original reporting expose you want to read: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
Money quote:
> Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
This summary of the book excerpt/Harper's article https://futurism.com/spotify-accused-promoting-ghost-artists provides a short, punchy summary:
> Spotify Employees Say It's Promoting Fake Artists to Reduce Royalty Payments to Real Ones
[...]
> According to a shocking new book, Spotify has been promoting so-called "ghost artists" so it can avoid paying its piddling royalties to real artists.
> In an excerpt from "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" published in Harper's, author Liz Pelly reveals that the streaming platform has a secretive internal program that prioritizes cheap and generic music.
> Dubbed "Perfect Fit Content" or PFC for short, this program not only involved a network of affiliated production firms creating tons of "low-budget stock muzak" for the platform, but also a team of employees who surreptitiously placed tracks from those firms on Spotify's curated playlists.
I think the mods should change this post to link to the Harper's piece, or even the Futurism one.
More broadly, it is interesting how Spotify is following the path blazed by supermarkets, then by video streaming services, in starting to sell (and promote, and prioritise) own-brand content. (Of course the Futurism summary is itself an example of a related problematic practice ...)
Isn't that a different phenomenon? This article is about hit songs that have cheap AI covers, almost identical sounding, presumably to poach royalties from the real musicians.
The "ghost" thing is interesting too, that sounds almost like the industry from before The Beatles, when bands were just people hired by the record companies to record songs written by others, and the companies owned pretty much everything.
There is zero evidence in the article to support the claim of AI artist. It’s far far more likely the “AI Artists” are actually Spotify funded ghost artists. The best evidence for “AI artist” is just as supportive of “Spotify ghost artists” as it is AI.
I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.
The reporting suggests that the "Perfect Fit Content" scheme began in 2017 and had been rolled out on a large scale by 2023, so it's unlikely that it has been reliant on AI music. (It does seem very likely that Spotify is now at least experimenting with replacing or augmenting the ghost musicians with AI.) I don't at all accept that Spotify running a kind of self-payola system with own-brand music is only a big controversy if AI-generated tracks are involved.
I didn't mean it would be a big controversy because it's AI, I meant because they would be replacing major label/artist songs with their own karaoke versions, and then manipulating their own algorithms to promote them. That seems like something the labels would really fight against.
But they don't have to target individual musical acts or individual songs for replication to drain their purses. Time spent listening to Spotify's own-brand lo-fi is time not spent listening to playlists full of expensive third-party musicians, including musicians in whole other genres. And if they did want to make and promote close covers of individual songs then they'd probably call humans: people are already very good at that (many such covers exist already) and (IANAL!) the legal risks are probably smaller and better-understood. After all, copyright defences of unlicensed generative AI seem to rely on the notion that its output is transformative, but presumably it would be hard to make that claim when you ask an AI to produce a near-exact replica of a song you put into its training data.
People who care about music listen to specific artists the know, not some AI-slop auto-generated playlist.
Yes, but... I used to discover great new (to me) artists on Spotify. Now I'm pigeon holed by "the algorithm", to the point where when I start a new playlist based on an artist or song it's 90% songs already in my liked list.
The recommendations used to feel like magic, now it's very limited in what it considered similar to something I'm listening to, like it fixates on one attribute of a song, but not the broader context or genre.
yes the add to playlist feature kinda sucks nowadays but i find the 'discover weekly' still relatively strong if not even improving
Personally, Discover Weekly went super downhill for me about a year ago. I used to get about one really good song a week, which I was really impressed by. But now, it's a deluge of songs with obviously fake instruments (the strings are a giveaway) and (presumably) AI-generated album covers. And the weird part is that sometimes a real, big name artist will be co-credited, but I highly doubt they had anything to do with it. (I've specifically noticed this with Audiomachine in particular, for some reason.)
I don't know if this phenomenon is related to the main article, but I've been wanting to rant about it for a while :-P
AI-generated music can be acceptable in certain contexts, such as white noise for coding, running, or working out, where the primary goal is background ambiance rather than active listening.
However, AI-generated fake podcasts are a different story—they're often frustrating and a waste of people's time.
Unfortunately, platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify are increasingly populated with these spammy, AI-created podcasts. For those interested, here's a small subset (4,000+) of such AI-generated fake podcasts available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak....
Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids.
To your point, I actually used to run CPU Bach (a 3DO game that tried to procedurally generate contrapuntal classical music) as a good background music generator while studying as a kid. Very few people remember it or the 3DO for that matter but it was quite impressive for its time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P.U._Bach
https://youtu.be/cW7c43N3pr4?t=123
> Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids.
The latest grift is posting AI "covers" of real songs to farm SEO hits while evading copyright strikes, which results in fever dreams like this:
https://x.com/Karbonicc/status/1864360384884310481
Not to me.
I’d rather have human created music, even when it is background music and I’m doing a primary activity that needs focus.
In other contexts, where the stakes are even lower, such as elevator music or on-hold call music AI gen music will probably have less people sneer at it.
Lower stakes for the management maybe, but any time I'm a captive audience, I feel a strong urge to smash speakers and displays.
What about human created music that's AI assisted?
>AI-generated music can be acceptable
But not at the 10 bucks or whatever they charge now
"This is Earth Radio. And now, Human Music:"
So happy that I never stopped curating my digital music collection. Old raspberry pi with USB DAC and external HD, connected to good old hifi amplifier, and controlled via mpd from anyone's phone. It's been working wonders for almost 10 years.
I had this and it's great. But I love Spotify for showing me similar music or music that I might like. I found so many awesome artists through it.
I used to write music in the past, and I mostly do it to tell stories or a songification of a poem. When I lived alone, it was easy because I can record anytime I wanted in full silence. Now that I am with family, I can’t record without a background noise seeping on my vocals.
I found that AI helped a lot, I can still write the story, the poem, the lyrics - and just let AI find a melody that represent the story as close as how I imagined it on my mind.
I mostly design and write the story first, then captures the story as poem or lyrics, then let AI “cover” it for me. I don’t want AI to write for me because the story and lyrics is what I cared about, and I like to put metaphors and hidden messages on it.
For example, this album that tells about the phases of life as seasons is AI generated.
https://youtu.be/RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r
It’s awful. They absolutely need to introduce a toggle to turn it off.
It’s going to take a lot more backlash than this—they have too much financial incentive to push royalty-free tracks.
Just like their “Shuffle” feature. They have an incentive to play songs in your list that are financially beneficial to them.
It's just like the radio.
Except the radio they are upfront that you are only a listener.
Spotify says you can make a collection as the all powerful curator, and hear from it in what has been understood to be a random selection. They’re breaking the definition of shuffle.
And how do you tell if some music is AI or not?
Sure, there are some obvious cases. But I have been collecting AI songs that I like, and I can't tell the difference from human-made music.
I’ve had a pretty negative reaction to AI-produced music, too. But I will say that the following track caught my ear when it appeared on my YouTube video feed a few days ago:
“Nirvana Tribute ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Girl Group 1960’s Tribute”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs
At first I thought it was a real singer, but then I remembered how convincing the lastest text-to-music services are becoming.
“Stairway to Heaven” in a similar style:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&t=605s
My favorite song of 2024 is AI generated bit about a specific video game. There's no way in hell this song would ever get created without AI.
I still prefer radio (SiriusXM cause I don't like commercials) it has the right mix of new, "b-tracks", favorites, genres etc all without having to curate it oneself and end up with things like random AI music spam or the random unrelated track someone sneaked in to game some algorithm or whatever. Also prefer to attend smaller music festivals or live music gigs over large concerts. I just don't want to go wading through the massive amount of random music spending way too much time trying to create playlist when certain radio already does a good job of balancing new with old and far more quality than not.
I've been listening to the radio a lot more recently; there's a few channels, such as my local university's non profit/commercial free radio station that often play some pretty obscure and interesting things, I've discovered a lot of new music that I otherwise never would have listened to.
I feel like a lot of companies / services that were popular and loved once are going to make greedy mistakes with AI, so it would be a business opportunity to launch a "more ethical" alternative.
What I don’t get about Spotify is how bad their interface is. They have an army of engineers and yet over 15 years it has only become harder and less efficient to use. I constantly see regressive tweaks or bugs. What’s the best way to reliably export all my playlists and move on?
Songshift works, sort of.
I use Spotify to listen to Louis Cole and his contemporaries only at this point. And children's music for my son. Spotify was lovely in 2014-2015 when it made it truly was to discover new musicians. Now it's barf. Once my son is more grown, I'll be done with it.
I'm surprised by how big this news story has been the past week or so, because I thought we all knew about Spotify's fake music already. I remember reading about this program at least 6 years ago.
I haven't used Spotify since.
It sounds like you mean the ghost music, which several people have referenced already in this comment section. That is made by real people while in the linked article they are talking about AI generated music.
I’ve noticed that nowadays, music often uses more generic melodies. Famous influencers, even without a background in music, can create songs for their fans.
Listening to retro music makes more sense to me these days.
Disclaimer: I’m not a musician.
Not having actually random shuffle is more important to me, but I’m only 50/50 on Spotify right now despite being a premium member for a decade.
One wrong move, and one export/import to another service and I’m gone.
Some of it’s pretty good. even a year ago the biggie cover of New York State of mind came out and I was quite impressed I suppose how you feel about it is irrelevant, time marches forward
I'm not sure if they're AI but most playlists start strong with real artists but quickly devolve into ... generic slop. Going to give Apple Music a try.
I like Qobuz, have you tried it ?
Looks ok, will give it shot too. What do you like about it?
the sound quality
Spotify is at the wrong end of the enshittification cycle.
I've experienced none of this on Deezer. They appear to still employ humans to curate playlists featuring actual artists, and as a nice bonus they support lossless audio like Spotify has been half promising for at least the last five years.
I like my music to be created the old fashioned way: using general MIDI on a Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card.
Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline.
I feel like the introduction of AI music is shortchanging musicians: musicians have made the AI generation possible, it pushes them aside, and they don't get a cent from it.
Perhaps legal, but not in the spirit of fairness.
>I feel like the introduction of AI music is shortchanging musicians: musicians have made the AI generation possible, it pushes them aside, and they don't get a cent from it.
Much like visual artists, graphic designers, and soon authors.
don't forget software developers
I only ever required attribution
didn't stop OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon shitting all over even that minimal condition
parasites
Exactly right. Pretty much everyone who has had faith in the system that there is at least some fairness in content creation.
Except not really. I'm still going to keep consuming art made by humans, even subconsciously, and I'm going to keep enjoying it. AI has no ground-truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already. Perhaps the quantity advantage has turned in favor of robots, but I'll be damned if you can name one AI-generated pop song that everyone knows by heart.
And truth be told - musicians are an excellent example of how a hostile industry can fuck over the working man long before AI enters the equation. Established musicians needed to be managed, and that management typically came from a label that would sign you if you weren't rich enough to go indie. Then, you're effectively contracted talent that has little to no ownership of your own life work. You are expected to provide all of the emotional gravitas while retaining none of the artistic control, and it only got worse in a digital era that further highlighted how valueless physical music had become. Artists had to make their money off tours and merch sales while simultaneously honoring arbitrary record deals demanding X amount of music over Y period of time.
> AI has no ground truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already.
Yes it does, your own AI generated pieces are based in your prompt, not purely generated by AI. So they are meaningful to you, but still worthless to others. They can generate their own AI shit. What I mean is that AI content is useful if you had a hand shaping it.
My prompt is meaningless. When I tell AI to proofread my writing or to generate a boilerplate email, pretty much no part of my prompt makes it into the final product. It's a seed of entropy that gets a literary flywheel spinning, but I'm not so pretentious as to assume my 3-word query is somehow unique or even influences the tone of the output. It's not "my" response just because I gave it a question.
Pretty much the past 5 years of model finetuning has been predicated on the idea that AI cannot reliably steer itself in the right direction. Models perform better in almost every way when you seed them with additional, non-unique and human-generated training data.
No, what I said is something else - when you set the prompt, you can find the generated output meaningful for you precisely because you set it up. Other people don't need your generated texts or images because they can prompt their own. It is basically one-time use content, for one person.
The real danger with AI is that it saturates the market/lowers the profitability for real artists/authors/whatever until it's no longer possible to make a career of being one of those things at which point things collapse and suddenly almost no actual humans are writing novels.
Perhaps the quantity advantage has turned in favor of robots, but I'll be damned if you can name one AI-generated pop song that everyone knows by heart.
One year away, two max.
I heard people say that 5 years ago when BERT hit public access.
I agree. In fact I built my own music player to support this on Mac because I wasn't happy with the existing apps:
https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon
> Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline.
Or FLACs, if you can get them, which you can on bandcamp. I've got a terabyte of music in my offline playlist. It takes a few months to cycle through everything, then top it up with any new discoveries and latest releases before the next cycle starts.
Lossless local files is the way to go. Full control. Maybe I'm a bit controlling, but if I am paying for music I want the optimal experience and full control.
Or even better, go to live shows.