You, my loyal readers know, that yours truly has waxed "poetic" about AI, the open ended tech already changing the world in ways not foreseen by civilization until now. Now, it seems Spotify, in their endless pursuit of money, uses fake artists and AI to create music in order to avoid paying royalty fees to real musicians, something absolutely in concert with how to do predatory capitalism right. Having been an artist all my life, I know, first hand, that one will never make a lot of money in this business unless one is blessed by Fortuna because it's a discipline driven by passion, not money, something I discussed at length, as an adjunct prof teaching at Pratt, with students getting their masters back in the day.
Fortuna governs the circle of the four stages of life,
the Wheel of Fortune, in a manuscript of Carmina Burana[3]
I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
According to a source close to the company, 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.
It gets better.
Perhaps most offensive about this entire alleged scheme, which Spotify seems not to have commented on in the excerpt published by Harper's, is that the company is doing so to avoid paying infinitesimally small royalties to real artists that generally only make a fraction of a cent per stream.
Though Spotify has repeatedly denied that it creates music in-house and said in 2017 that such claims were "categorically untrue, full stop," CEO Daniel Ek tweeted earlier this year that "the cost of creating content" is now "close to zero" — a bizarre statement to make for someone whose company claims to not be in the business of ghost artistry.
With the advent of AI, the cost of creating music becomes essentially zero but it's not just sounds, it's also images and, within a year or so, movies, a topic yours truly began talking about in earnest back in 2008.
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