The Ghosts in the Machine

December 19, 2024 10:01 PM

"Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with 'music we benefited from financially,' but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform." Liz Pelly investigates the growing problem with so called ghost artists on Spotify for Harper's.
posted by soundofsuburbia (10 comments total)

This sentence stood out in particular:

It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process.

I feel this is slowly happening to all types of media., not just audio. The slow dumbification of culture.
posted by my-username at 12:06 AM on December 20, 2024 [10 favorites]

If more people deleted their Spotify accounts this could go away. People are too lazy and want music fed to them. This is what they get.
posted by DJZouke at 5:33 AM on December 20, 2024 [5 favorites]

Reminded of “The Original Artists”.
posted by Lemkin at 5:57 AM on December 20, 2024 [1 favorite]

As a gen-x person who has been into music since I was 12, I used to enjoy asking peers how they listened to music "now"--do you use Bandcamp? Do you have a file server, or just physical media? &c.--until about 2020.

I realized pretty much everyone I knew IRL just relied on Spotify or Pandora, and were beginning to view my question as a non sequiteur. The conversations had become very short, even with folks who I knew generally liked to keep current with what is new, weird, cool, whatever axis was salient for them.
posted by german_bight at 7:44 AM on December 20, 2024 [3 favorites]

> People are too lazy and want music fed to them.

Seems harsh. Not everyone wants to 'curate' or 'challenge' or 'work to interpret'. People have lives and just want some tunes for jams or vibes. People sort of expect old-style radio station channels with minimum interruptions, easily doable and used to be lots. Except unchecked capitalism. Since it could be more profitable in some other way it HAD to change. So people will get the "minimum viable product" a barely usable, maximized for profit mess, and damn who it hurts.

p.s. Shout out to SomaFM for being cool listener-supported, commercial-free internet-only radio for 20+ years.
posted by anti social order at 9:30 AM on December 20, 2024 [13 favorites]

People have lives and just want some tunes for jams or vibes

And, as someone who grew up making difficult resource decisions about which audiocassette to buy out of my childhood allowance, it still feels like a minor miracle to just be able to ask my phone to play almost any song I can think of, and it does. My friends and I used to look at the Sharper Image catalog and dream of having a jukebox, and now we all have a near-infinite one in our pockets!
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:40 AM on December 20, 2024 [8 favorites]

I read this article last night, and am deleting my Spotify account tomorrow.
posted by jordantwodelta at 4:24 PM on December 20, 2024

From the article: "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."

I would scarcely believe it, except when I ask one of my gen z students what they're listening to before class the answer is often "I don't know"! The first time I got that answer I was shocked. They had $300 headphones on and didn't even care what they were hearing!

But we listen and we don't judge, so if they're happy I'm not sure that it's bad, exactly. Selfishly I would like the default scenario to be a vibrant scene of passionate artists putting their voice out in the world. But listening in that environment can take work, and not everybody wants to curate their own playlists.

As usual the part that I find myself wanting to judge is the effect of massed wealth and consequent power. Spotify is so big that they can single-handedly manipulate the music production environment, and since the non-curators are more profitable to serve that's the direction of manipulation.

Any business that gets big enough should be nationalized, because any enterprise that is vital to a culture or society should be run for its benefit. The older I get the more sure I am of this. The arts are like education and healthcare, so important that they shouldn't be subject to a profit motive. And yet.
posted by dbx at 7:42 AM on December 21, 2024 [1 favorite]

People are too lazy and want music fed to them. This is what they get.

This is a specific subset of listeners - in fact, I wish they would've spoken to anyone like that in the article about their preferences.
posted by Selena777 at 4:01 PM on December 21, 2024

This is totally unsurprising. Just like how the record companies agreed to smaller royalties in exchange for ownership shares. Royalties they have to share with the artists — dividend payments they do not.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:16 AM on December 22, 2024