Continuing with Spotify?

I think the Spotify fallout warrants its own thread

― west elm girls (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, January 29, 2022 2:53 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Neil out, Joni out

obviously this pleases me greatly, but it's going to take a contemporary megastar to change minds.

Grimes' mother:

Feeling enormous pride that the artists who got this #Spotifydeleted train going are Canadian.@Neilyoung & @jonimitchell

There are sure to be more, and bigger. But it’s Canadians who led.

— Sandy Garossino (@Garossino) January 29, 2022

I no longer control it or I would in support of Neil https://t.co/hrD132gi8T

— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) January 29, 2022

nagl Barry

I recently heard a rumor about me and Spotify. I don’t know where it started, but it didn’t start with me or anyone who represents me.

— Barry Manilow (@barrymanilow) January 28, 2022

it's going to take a contemporary megastar to change minds.

Well, Neil was a step forward after 270 doctors and scientists...

Lol. Cardiacs quit a couple of days before Neil but I am not sure that anyone noticed.

Well, Neil was a step forward after 270 doctors and scientists...

― deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Friday, January 28, 2022 9:23 PM

yeah, which should have been the slam dunk from the get-go. and yet here we still are.

(insert generic angry outrage rant that basically sums up to)

man. this whole thing really sticks in my craw.

ugh, past my bedtime and i'm grouchy. sorry for the unnecessary attitude.

Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week.

— scott budman (@scottbudman) January 28, 2022

I know it’s just anecdotal, but I know several people IRL who are canceling their Spotify subscriptions this week (and I have few enough IRL “contacts” that that number feels significant to me).

They paved Paradise, put up a Rogan Pod

No idea who this guy is but seeing lots of similar grim takes. And unlike Lloyd Cole, Bret's not afraid to play the 'wrong side of history' card

These artists have a right to remove content in protest. But make no mistake, their intent is to force Spotify to censor Joe Rogan so that you and I can no longer choose for ourselves whether to listen.

They’re on the wrong side of history. Truth persuades. It doesn’t coerce.

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) January 29, 2022

Joni jumping in gives me hope that more will follow.

Worth noting here, I think, that The Best Show and Kreative Kontrol have left:

pic.twitter.com/79BJTQe0b1

— The Best Show (@bestshow4life) January 27, 2022

I hope you get the connection... pic.twitter.com/XzT3NsCPc5

— Kreative Kontrol (@VishKreative) January 27, 2022

I suspect a lot of the young popular artists who could potentially make an impact here don't care about vaccines or public health and probably an alarming number of them totally agree with Rogan. OTOH artists have their own issues with Spotify and if a significant number of people drop it it may prompt a few more to leave, or they might at least perceive themselves as having new leverage.

If you’re impressed that Spotify lost $4bn this week, just wait until you see how much they lost in the three weeks prior to that. Shares peaked at €312 last year, they’re less than half that now. The model just isn’t as profitable as investors want it to be (see also: Netflix dropping 45% of its share value in a few months).

^^^

the spotify market drop this week may get a tiny further bump downward from the news but is in line with market trends. artists dropping one at a time isn't going to occasion more than a "we're listening" statement from the company; it would take an organized action to make this more than a PR hiccup for them. Five, ten, fifteen big artists individually pulling their catalogs won't make them say "ok, we'll eat the hundred million we gave Rogan." an organized effort of fifty or more artists might -- Future of Music Coalition is as close as we have to that and I'm not sure they want to spearhead something that might be framed as partisan

it would take an organized action to make this more than a PR hiccup for them

see also: literally every other consumer protest

TIL, Neil and Joni are both polio survivors

I do want to ditch Spotify. I'm in the middle of a 3-month trial of Apple Music but I hate their UI and search functions. I'll give Qobuz a shot with their free month. One frustrating thing is having to pay some third party to migrate playlists, and the migration options seem to have frustrating limits. I just discovered the 1500-track Anthology of Dub playlist this past week, and the Spotify ---> Qobuz migration tool has a limit of 1000 tracks per playlist.

I don’t have any specialty loyalty to Spotify but I have become pretty dependent on streaming. The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

i'm continuing with spotify

“Speciality loyalty” = morning brain

My spotify and hulu subscriptions are intertwined, so if I ditch spotify for another platform I lose (free) hulu. As soon as it becomes clear where the greatest number of people are migrating to, I'll follow. But for now I'm stuck.

and the Spotify ---> Qobuz migration tool has a limit of 1000 tracks per playlist.

split the 1500 tracks into two playlists of 750, migrate them both, then drag and drop the second playlist into the first playlist, right?

As I said on the other thread, between collaborative playlists, and the family plan, I'm not sure how I could readily disentangle myself from using this platform. If I had a single-user subscription, I may just hop over to Qobuz or Apple (mixed results with the free version of SongShift last night, migrating playlists over to my Qobuz trial, but not insurmountable).

xp - merging playlists: may or may not be possible once they're migrated; last night's brief experience gave me a fixed imported playlist that I could neither add to nor delete from.

oh, weird? i shouldn't talk - i've never heard of Qobuz until this morning - but i just figured any playlist could be edited, if you made it in the first place! kinda weird.

i really hate my opinion on spotify and the alternatives, so much that for once i'll stfu

is it easy to import spotify playlists to another plataform?

Xp - yeah, was odd. 37 of 40 tracks matched by SongShift, figured I could add the ones it couldn’t find manually on Qobuz but no: that imported playlist was read-only. The attempt to do the same with one of the ILX c20 classical playlists was hopeless - barely a 10% match.

If I pay actual money to some service to migrate my Bacharach list (738 tracks) and the Dub list and wind up with a 10% match rate, I will be hot under the collar.

The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

Rogan signed with Spotify in May 2020, and Apple launched podcast subscriptions over a year later. So AFIK they wouldn’t have been in the running when Rogan made his deal (in fact, it was deals like his which got Apple serious about building out exclusive podcasts of their own)… which may not alter your overall rationale

Do people have to be paid subscribers to hear Rogan on Spotify? I figured it was just to get people to the platform. Apple surely would have made a deal with Rogan to keep people using their platform exclusively, but probably didn’t need to as much as Spotify did.

Right, I don’t think that was part of their business plan at the time. Maybe they would’ve signed him in a different scenario, who knows (in which case Young would presumably be pulling his music from Apple)

Idk, I found a Steve Bannon podcast on Apple. Is it still okay to switch to Apple? Maybe I’ll go to YouTube where absolutely no white supremacists or QAnon nuts exist?

It's his reach and influence that makes the difference, the size of his audience.

I mean, Spotify pulled a bunch of archived episodes - with Gavin McInnes and others - so there was pressure from the beginning not to spoil the platform with his show. The issue then becomes whether giving disinformation on Covid is a deal-breaker for an episode of his that Spotify chooses to host.

I dislike Spotify for a few reasons, but yes switching to Apple or Amazon for political reasons (or even the sole reason of disseminating Covid misinformation) does not make a lot of sense. Some people earlier were suggesting that the fact Spotify directly pays Rogan, rather than simply making money off ads a la YouTube, is worse but idk if I find that super convincing.

That said afaict, Qobuz and Tidal don't have the "we murder workers" problem that Apple and Amazon do nor the "paying Joe Rogan $$$" problem, so it's a little disingenuous to frame this as just "Spotify or Apple? what's the diff"

Maybe so. I’ve never heard of Qobuz until about an hour ago. Admittedly I’ve never tried Tidal.

It was initially challenging to get past the "Tidal? lol" reaction, I'll admit

The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

otm. also, to the extent that this list of top 100 podcasts on apple podcast is accurate, the current #10 podcast in the united states (on apple podcast) is the Joe Rogan Experience Review, a podcast where some enormous fucking loser spends 45 minutes dissecting the latest joe rogan podcast

#15 is the ben shapiro show.

ben shapiro is worse than joe rogan (but not as popular). he is a hitler youth

the matt walsh show at #35, what a wonderful person he is

i survey the landscape of american podcasts and i want them all to disintegrate my own brain

let me check google/youtube real quick, see if there is any joe rogan-esque content on there

I moved to Tidal from Spotify about 3 months ago after being on Spotify since it originally launched and for the most part I've been content with it. There are a few things that I miss from Spotify, but nothing that would compel me to go back.

The increased emphasis on podcasts combined with the Helsing.ai thing are what pushed me to pull the plug. I'm also trying to shift more of my spending/listening to Bandcamp, but I'm too hooked on streaming at this point to abandon it completely.

I mean, Tidal is now majority-owned by a gross tech bro, if you're looking for a "political" reason to avoid that too

gross how?

Dorsey? I'm half joking (though he's not my type of fellow). He hasn't paid Rogan $100m, that's for sure. If I were a heavy Spotify user, and not invested in Amazon or Apple, I'd prob switch to Tidal - the UI is v similar

The arguments that other platforms also feature reprehensible content are valid but imho the Spotify/Rogan issue is different because of the extent to which Spotify has made Rogan the face of their brand. Rogans show is one of the most popular media properties out there and Spotify's play for him was explicitly about identifying themselves w/him in a bid to lure his audience, which imho puts it in another category than just "I can find people saying worse stuff on other platforms too". Ben Shapiro is a monster & is platformed by Apple Podcasts, but at least they are not repeatedly giving him big public bearhugs the way Spotify does w/Rogan, giving him the PR boost that his views are something Spotify considers normal & mainstream.

That’s a good way of putting it.

not that specifically, no.

"go make us more money however you can" otoh...

everything else the company does is in bad faith, why not this?

because spotify is valued at like $100 billion and the amount of revenue generated by a fake king gizzard & the lizard wizard song is a microcosm of a speck of dust by comparison?

i can totally see some drone at spotify convincing whoever this is a good idea. visibility is currency and this is def. visible. and i wouldn't underestimate the appeal of "revenge" even at a big profit-motivated "efficient" company. but maybe you're right, who knows? and more importantly..... who gives a shit

xp these people absolutely think of themselves as the geniuses and the artists as obstacles that they pay begrudgingly if at all. in this worldview, AI generated music is not only seen through the lens of efficiency and profit, it’s the apotheosis of the narcissism and misanthropy at the heart of these tech behemoths

it could also be an "experiment" - can we get away with this. if so then it has potential.

the thing is it's really easy to do, feeding Suno with a list of KGLW song titles and lyrics is pretty trivial, dunno how much was actually on the platform but if I was asked to crank out 50 of these I could probably have it done in a few hours.

anyway if Spotify really was behind this I would think the point wasn't necessarily to make money (they did take them down pretty quickly after all) but rather to see how many people would actually listen to it and how big the backlash would be. though KGLW leaving Spotify was pretty big news as far as these things go I'd imagine most people have no clue about it and their own internal metrics probably show a ton of people still searching for them

they got a $100 billion valuation through greed and callousness, as we all can see, so it’s extremely weird when people act astonished that we are simply expecting the greed and callousness, sorry the disruption to continue

one thing I've noticed about Hulu and Netflix is they do seem hyperaware of what's *not* on the platform. KGLW aren't the biggest name to be off Spotify...that would probably be like, I dunno, Garth Brooks...but I bet they get searched a lot more than Garth does

I would be surprised if Spotify *wasn't* exploring house-made genAI, though I agree that specifically mimicking one band like that would be surprising. It's more likely they'll follow in the footsteps of Meta, who derive a huge portion of their revenue from scams and simply choose to do nothing about it.

Iirc pretty sure there's a lot in the book about fake/faking artists.

Yeah it's a known issue for sure

Wasn't it Spotify that did that whole Velvet Sundown AI band? Or was that abomination on other streamers as well?

Now that I think about it, maybe just mostly fake artists, sometimes tagged with fake genres, a way to fill space without requiring payouts.

There's a whole fake artist / fake stream ecosystem that genAI could potentially supercharge. Literally just saw a link to this blog post about possibly AI-generated far-right songs being on Spotify's Dutch Viral chart in a newsletter I was reading: https://networknotes.motiveunknown.com/p/spotify-netherlands-viral-chart-is

xp I have read different news stories claiming that Velvet Sundown were and were not AI-generated (the music), but no Spotify is not to blame.

Anyway, imo, the real concern as that post shows is that Spotify simply doesn't care about moderating their platform anymore (also fuck Daniel Ek and his investing in murder). They're not the pioneers in abandoning that formerly crucial-to-success aspect of running a platform company, but expect more and more bullshit to show up there.

Boomy’s output could hardly be called music, though. The app feels more like a novelty generator that mixes vibe-specific fragments. A user is prompted to select from a list of prefab styles (like “Lo-Fi,” “electronic dance,” “relaxing meditation”); selecting “Lo-Fi,” for example, then leads to choices between three sub-styles, “Morning Sun,” “Afternoon Nap,” and “Nights”; from there, a track is generated, which can be posted to streaming services or edited further. The track can be ready to monetize within minutes, with Boomy keeping 20 percent of streaming revenue. The app also owns the track outright, and licenses it back to the “musician” to earn royalties. “Musician” is in heavy scare quotes there; there is no music-making involved. It is a systematic streaming-enabled grift to generate exploitable copyrights.

Spotify didn’t ban Boomy because of its artificially generated tracks, though. It was banned because its tracks were revealed to have been streamed by artificial listeners—meaning that someone had likely bought bot streams from one of many available third-party “stream farms” offering play count boosts as a service. Fake mood music streamed by fake listeners: Is that where the arc of recorded music industry “innovation” eventually leads? “We shouldn’t let any industry’s lack of creativity hold the artists back,” the Boomy CEO would say on stage at the 2023 “Music Ally Next” summit. Indeed, music-tech innovation relies on a never-ending cycle of self-styled outsider businesspeople finding new ways to extract capital and position it as rebellious. Boomy’s brand revolved around hyping the fact that it did not train models on copyrighted material without permission—differentiating itself from AI music companies like Suno and Udio, who were sued by the majors in 2024 for “mass infringement” of copyrights—but this does not necessarily mean it was operating ethically. It also hyped up its potential to enable people to become content creators “even if they lack expensive tools or a formal music-making education,” it wrote in a press release, the latter of which, to be clear, has never been necessary to make art.

As a result of the artificial stream detection, Spotify took down roughly 7 percent of Boomy’s tracks, which the Financial Times reported to be tens of thousands of songs. Spotify, at the time, said that it was working to stamp out “stream manipulation” to “protect royalty payouts for honest, hardworking artists.” But the company made one thing clear: Boomy was not being penalized for releasing generative AI content. It had already been doing so for years: in fact, in its first year, tracks generated with Boomy software had seen so much success on Spotify, the company said they were even getting surfaced on algorithmic “Discover Weekly” playlists. By the end of 2023, Boomy had struck up a partnership with Warner Music Group, ensuring its place in the streaming universe anyway.

The race for cheap content was clearly charging onward, with the digital services, major labels, and VC investors alike all looking for the next frontier of that sweet, sweet commodified attention. Streaming turned to TikTok; crypto turned to AI. The vibes shifted ever on. As the fight for market share between the majors continued, a new factor arrived. How would artists—and the whole system for that matter—be impacted when streaming services were inevitably (always inevitably!) flooded with thousands and thousands of AI-generated tracks? Would “streambait” be supplanted by the generative AI content? Would all of those “fake artists” just be auto-generated one day? Daniel Ek, for one, was into it. On a 2023 conference call, he noted that the boom in AI-generated content could be “great culturally” and allow Spotify to “grow engagement and revenue.”

His company was also figuring out new ways to use the emerging generative AI narratives to ship new playlist products. Similarly to Boomy, Spotify used the language of creative empowerment to describe the beta version of “AI Playlist” in 2024, a chatbot-inspired tool with users supplying prompts to generate new algorithmic mixes; the press release claimed it would allow users to “effortlessly turn (their) most creative ideas into playlists”—by typing prompts—“whether you’re a beginner or an expert playlist creator.” It was a new way to extract data from users, pitched as a democratizing means of expression, rather than what it really seemed to be: the next step in replacing human editors with fully machine-driven processes riddled with musical misinformation.

While the cultural impact of the flagship editorial playlist may have waned, certain elements of Spotify’s lean-back environment were only growing more pervasive as personalization took a stronger hold on the product: music-as-utility, music-as-mood-stabilizer. Click here for happy, click here for sad, click here for chill-out study beats. The long-term effects of how Spotify evangelized lean-back functional music were not just felt on Spotify. Whether through editorial or algorithms, the perfect-playlist paradigm—the idea that a user, through a light-touch interface, could get the perfect soundtrack at any moment—had helped shape new incentives across the music and culture industries. The ripple effects were everywhere. It was in the way that pop artists were rearranging their catalogs into mood playlists, like when Taylor Swift released her 2024 album as five playlists reflecting “five stages of heartbreak.” It was in how labels, artists, and managers alike were thinking up new ways to remix and recast their song assets into streaming-friendly content. And the ripple effects were also felt in the AI start-ups going after the worlds of made-for-you mood music, a whole cottage industry catering to the playlist-trained, functional music listener.

Fake mood music streamed by fake listeners: Is that where the arc of recorded music industry “innovation” eventually leads?

amusingly enough, king gizzard and the lizard wizard records entire concept albums about this sort of thing.

there's tons of people out there attempting to exploit the streaming economy in a number of ways, uploading AI recreations of music removed from the platform is def one of those ways. i 1000% agree that spotify is coming up w/ horrible AI schemes to further minimize the importance of actual artists, i just don't think they are in the business of making 1:1 AI creations of licensed music, the upside vs the downside of that is heavily lopsided towards the latter

music is more than lyrics iirc

i 1000% agree that spotify is coming up w/ horrible AI schemes to further minimize the importance of actual artists, i just don't think they are in the business of making 1:1 AI creations of licensed music, the upside vs the downside of that is heavily lopsided towards the latter

they may not be right now. but would it surprise you even a teeny tiny bit if they had a team do exactly this to get a sense for the downside and whether getting into this business is worth it? because they absolutely would. they would do this in a heartbeat if they thought they could:

Might as well replace the artists with their AI equivalents and just keep all the money.

― omar little, Tuesday, December 9, 2025 11:07 AM

^^ especially with a high-visibility artist who publicly left the platform recently

(who sell out huge arena shows regularly)

related

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jazz/comments/1phxkd5/what_the_heck_with_youtube_music_recently_ive/

Why are you leaving?

- other: "your shitty CEO"

but would it surprise you even a teeny tiny bit if they had a team do exactly this to get a sense for the downside and whether getting into this business is worth it?

if it was revealed that spotify was directing a team of employees to make AI recreations of songs by artists who have left spotify it would lead to a massive backlash and protest campaign, hundreds of thousands of people would likely cancel their subscriptions, many dozens of high profile artists would leave spotify, people high up at the company including possibly the CEO would lose their jobs, so yes i would be surprised if they put all of that at risk in order to make an AI recreation of king gizzard & the lizard wizard

Might as well replace the artists with their AI equivalents and just keep all the money.

― omar little, Tuesday, December 9, 2025 11:07 AM

i don't think this is the incorrect impulse, ever since they started getting into podcasts & e books spotify has been trying to lessen its reliance on music licenses. however you guys are talking about 1:1 recreations of copyrighted music owned by some of the most powerful companies in the world, there is no upside to spotify as a company doing what you guys are describing, it would probably destroy their business. now would spotify try and come up w/ an AI version of a country star who it could use to eat into morgan wallen's streams? sure, they probably are doing that. there are obviously AI companies doing that stuff, which we've already seen matriculate to the platform. but i don't think you guys are really thinking thru the implications of your conspiracy

AI knockoff music doesn't have to be in-house at Spotify, all they have to do is provide an environment where individuals can potentially make money by using AI to generate ripoff music. Spotify profits from the subcriptions and the AI music scammers profit from the streaming of their music.

I primarily use Spotify for dark ambient, new age, chillout electronic music and the like. And let me tell you, those genres on Spotify are 100% destroyed by AI-generated content. It's hopeless to let Spotify recommend anything based on the real artists I listen to because after just one or two iterations of "you might like this" you're in the land of 100% AI-generated crap.

yeah all of those genre are getting wrecked by AI, i was compiling a dub techno playlist awhile back on there and just bouncing around and a solid 50% of the artists i came across had zero digital footprint outside of streaming services.

I mean, if Spotify was just full of AI knockoff music I don’t think they’d hang onto many subscribers.

sure, but for me there used to be a lot of utility in Spotify's recommendation engine... it's worthless now, in fact it has negative value because in the genres I frequent it's polluted with garbage.

I think the only people likely to have sway with Spotify over this are major artists. If Swift and Springsteen and McCartney and Fleetwood Mac etc threatened to leave if they don't put in safeguards against AI junk, that might make an impact. Otherwise it's all just bonus for Spotify.

if it was revealed that spotify was directing a team of employees to make AI recreations of songs by artists who have left spotify it would lead to a massive backlash and protest campaign, hundreds of thousands of people would likely cancel their subscriptions, many dozens of high profile artists would leave spotify, people high up at the company including possibly the CEO would lose their jobs

mean, if Spotify was just full of AI knockoff music I don’t think they’d hang onto many subscribers.

maybe it's just living in a post-Trump world but I highly doubt there would be anywhere near the kind of blowback you guys are describing if Spotify made their own AI replikants of popular artists. Call me cynical, but I doubt most people would give a shit, and many wouldn't even notice

if it was revealed that spotify was directing a team of employees to make AI recreations of songs by artists who have left spotify it would lead to a massive backlash and protest campaign, hundreds of thousands of people would likely cancel their subscriptions, many dozens of high profile artists would leave spotify, people high up at the company including possibly the CEO would lose their jobs, so yes i would be surprised if they put all of that at risk in order to make an AI recreation of king gizzard & the lizard wizard

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Thursday, December 11, 2025 4:24 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I don't think any of those things would really happen? I'm sure the discourse would go wild, but it would blow over. I'm also not saying they are specifically targeting KG&WL, though maybe they might move a popular artist for which they no longer have the license up the list. I'm saying they are flooding the zone with this shit. Do I think there is a memo or business plan somewhere in Spotify HQ that discusses using AI to mimic artists generally to reduce their royalties as close to zero as possible? Absolutely.

lol, xp

If there is one takeaway I, er, took away from the Liz Pelly book it's that a shocking number of Spotify listeners are totally passive. I mean, they have sleep playlists! So it becomes a sort of perpetual motion machine. People tune in to Spotify, those people aren't particularly discerning, Spotify sneakily (and overtly) directs those listeners to what Spotify wants them to hear by making the listener *think* it's what they want to hear, often in the middle of a themed playlist that is actually pointing the listener in the direction Spotify wants them to face, to its own benefit/ends. It's like a slight of hand trick. I recall a chapter in her book describing Spotify camps that in essence teach artists to sound like other artists to fit a sub-genre that Spotify itself actually created, then Spotify floods that zone to make the listener feel like they have discovered some new corner of the music world and not just the slop (AI or not, though that is surely the inevitable direction these doofuses are heading in) that Spotify wants them to stream.

I feel like you can hear that happen tbh. If I let it run after the end of an album or playlist, it will start off with sort of obvious RIYL picks and then eventually drift in one way or another and at some point it'll be something I don't like and I'll end it. But probably what it's doing is steering towards particular things.

Do I think there is a memo or business plan somewhere in Spotify HQ that discusses using AI to mimic artists generally to reduce their royalties as close to zero as possible? Absolutely.

well, same. but one of the main points i’m making here is that there is a major difference between 1:1 AI recreation “covers” — which is what the king gizzard story is about — and “general mimicry” of artists. most notably from a legal perspective there is not, like, wiggle room when it comes to making 1:1 copies of copyrighted art. so yes it would be a remarkable step for spotify to engage in that

The music industry historically has tried to push artists that sound a lot or somewhat like very popular artists, and the public doesn’t necessarily go for it (unless the songs are very very good.)

if it was revealed that spotify was directing a team of employees to make AI recreations of songs by artists who have left spotify it would lead to a massive backlash and protest campaign, hundreds of thousands of people would likely cancel their subscriptions, many dozens of high profile artists would leave spotify, people high up at the company including possibly the CEO would lose their jobs

yeah the only thing worse than this would be if they gave $200 million to a neo-nazi, wait

however you guys are talking about 1:1 recreations of copyrighted music

when it comes to making 1:1 copies of copyrighted art

I promise that another part is copyrighted other than lyrics

there's nothing wrong with passive listening, that's what radio is

there is something wrong with the dominating platform for music (and playback revenue) promoting passive listening and directing passive listeners towards music not created by musicians (or created by musicians who signed over royalites and copyrights in exchange for a one time fee)

how about just

there is something wrong with the dominating platform for music (and playback revenue) promoting passive listening and directing passive listeners towards music not created by musicians (or created by musicians who signed over royalites and copyrights in exchange for a one time fee)

I agree that's a lot neater

but must admit as a person who loves music it saddens me that passive listening is predominant

friend of mine used to put on a movie when cleaning the house, just have it running in the background, which at the time seemed preposterous to me

imo it's okay to let someone else choose the music. eg a DJ. or a radio station. Setting aside the issue of AI generated music, Spotify's whole gambit is that an algorithm is good enough to replace these people. for a lot of listeners they're right. They don't want to hear anybody chattering away about a phone-in competition, they just want to hear a lot of music that suits a certain mood, with a few favourites sprinkled in and a few new tunes in there as well and frankly the Spotify algorithm is just tremendously good at doing this. and as glenn is fond of saying, people really do discover new music and new bands this way. I don't know if this is a problem per se. But it does mean that radio DJs need to up their game imo - they have to provide something much more than just playing a bunch of records. expert knowledge, guests, mixes, etc.

In terms of AI generated music it obviously sucks shit but ultimately i see it as an acceleration of existing trends - autotune, samey songwriting, presets, etc. Real live human songwriters and musicians will need to up their games like DJs do, become more human, become less predictable. And I do think that even mainstream listeners will eventually tire of the samey AI shit and gravitate to musicians that have figured out how to surprise

But it does mean that radio DJs need to up their game imo - they have to provide something much more than just playing a bunch of records. expert knowledge

see, I think expert knowledge, which I take for granted that most of this board possesses in some form, is the thing the vast majority of listeners care about least, and I think it's easy to forget this when you frequent places like ilx, and when you are passionate about music beyond its function as wallpaper or background noise. See the common refrain of people on social media who think film / music / literary criticism is obsolete because "now we can just make up our own minds"

xp American TV was designed to be listened to rather than watched up until the mid to late Eighties.

yeah, it was when Miami Vice introduced those colorful blazers

I think the basic conflict is a lot of us are still hoping for listening tools that facilitate good playlists and meaningful music recommendations and recognize that expert knowledge is an essential component of that, while Spotify is looking to shape the experience such that they can reap the most profit from minimal effort and expense. Of course they're gonna encourage passive listening if the current attentional environment (cell phones and social media) engenders it, that achieves their goals which have nothing to do with music. It's not an environment that produces great music though, and again the contrast is we recognize the long-term negative effects of what Spotify is doing, while the company simply doesn't give a shit about that because they're trying to get more subscriptions and pay artists less.

Listeners (especially today) don't respect expertise but that doesn't mean they don't benefit from it, and it especially doesn't mean they won't miss it when it's removed from the process and replaced with shitty AI. Spotify, like most streaming services, either don't care that what they're doing is engendering anomie in the entire population, or it's part of a vertical integration scheme to sell you something else to assuage your nonspecific misery.