It’s not just a problem for the outcasts and the unauthorized anymore. The ease and speed of AI production are removing any need for low-level artists producing buffet-style art for mass consumption. This article refers to how Spotify is now directing listeners toward its own fake artists, but Amazon is doing exactly the same thing with ebooks and audiobooks.
In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists. I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.
Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?
In April 2022, I finally felt justified in sharing my concerns with readers. So I published an article here called “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize.” I was careful not to make accusations I couldn’t prove. But I pointed out some puzzling facts.
Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names. Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).
How was that even possible?
I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.
A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers. He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.
- Trumpet Bumblefig
- Bumble Mistywill
- Whomping Clover
- Qeazpoor
- Swiftspark
- Vattio Bud
I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names. The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform.
Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.
Were these AI generated? Was Spotify doing this to avoid paying royalties to human musicians? Spotify issued a statement in the face of these controversies. But I couldn’t find any denial that they were playing games with playlists in order to boost profits.
By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time.
If your brand and your sales are dependent upon a major platform, you need to be prepared for the fact that you are going to lose it sooner or later, because once established, it is always much more profitable for a platform to generate its own content than serve as a middleman paying out the majority of its own revenue to external content creators. And the combination of algorithmic influence with the total indifference of the modern mass consumer means that there is no brand loyalty on a major platform.
As the analyst observed: “This is what happens when distributors take control of a creative industry, and outsource content.“
And it is why it is absolutely vital for a creator-centric community to stick together and relentlessly find ways to work together, because the larger economic forces are now operating in a way to eliminate independent creators. Fortunately, we have a small, but strong and battle-tested community, as well as several loyal creators who understand the importance and the necessity of standing together.
We have a lot of talent in the community. This is why I’m always encouraging people to take on new projects of which they conceive, like Vox DAI, just to give one example, and to support external creator projects like A WORKING MAN – which launches today, by the way – because it gives us all a much better chance than those poor bastards who still think they can rely upon YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon going forward.
And that’s why, although some of my music can be found on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes, all of it is available in the very highest quality on UATV, including the 8th track on the Soulsigma album, THE WORD DESCENDED.
