You can tell I don’t use AI because my doodles suck, and they will always suck.
With Spotify’s release of lossless audio quality for premium users, the reaction I’ve seen to it has been nearly uniform: cool feature, now pay artists more. Other platforms that pay artists often more than three times what Spotify allegedly does have been able to do so with lossless audio for years. Apple Music and Tidal are among the most popular, featuring the same audio quality and music libraries, despite paying artists far more than Spotify. It’s not a feature people were clamoring for, but fair treatment of the people who make our beloved music certainly is.
Spotify has not been good to artists. It made its CEO a billionaire who could invest in AI-powered weapons of war, but artists get tiny payouts, if they’re popular enough to get any payouts at all. Even large artists like Lily Allen, who has millions of plays, says she makes more money from the few thousand people buying her feet pics on OnlyFans.
Re-read that.
You can make more money selling pictures of your feet than being a popular musician with millions of listeners on Spotify. To that, I have to say, Fuck You, Spotify.
Snoop Dog, with billions of streams, says he made just $45,000 in a year on the platform, stating he doesn’t “fuck with Spotify anymore.”
Spotify all but stopped allowing smaller bands and musicians make any money from their platform, stating that tracks need 1,000 plays over the previous 12 months to be monetized at all. For small bands with followings barely in the thousands, that’s not easy. It seems like no one could make a living from Spotify besides the people who work on the app itself. Making its content? Not a profitable venture. Being an artist and bringing joy to millions should not mean having one or two other jobs.
With artists large and small speaking out about how Spotify fucks them over and is destroying music itself, you’d think the platform would stop bringing harm to one of the few things that makes human life enjoyable. But no, Spotify doesn’t rest there. The platform is full of millions of plays for AI bands, AI bot listeners, and even deepfaked songs attributed to dead artists who had nothing to do with the fake songs that were uploaded, supposedly on their behalf.
AI has a better chance to thrive on Spotify because AI doesn’t need to eat. Listeners already didn’t notice their playlists full of soulless tracks made to pad out their playlists, how will the distracted Spotify subscribers spot soulless AI tracks now?
In This Article:
Fake Artists to Avoid Real Royalties
Let’s say you’re a corporation that has to (usually) pay artists when you use the output of their labor for profit. Your goal would be to pay out as little as you can possibly get away with to maximize profits. If there were some songs that you have to pay less for, you could be incentivized to play those more frequently. This comes into play with Spotify’s payola-like scheme of allowing artists to accept smaller royalties in exchange for algorithmic boosting. It also comes up with Spotify’s alleged “Perfect Fit Content.” We’ve also come to know of PFC as “ghost artists,” as the artists asked to generate this generic content often do not get real credit or revenue from what they’ve been tasked with making.
According to researchers and former Spotify employees, as well as leaked Spotify Slack messages, PFC, is content Spotify pays less for, and inserts into playlists. It’s content that is background music. Music so generic, so bland, that it can be slipped into a playlist to increase a subscriber’s listening time while reducing the amount Spotify pays out for that time you’re listening. The idea is, if you’re addicted to streaming, you’re more willing to pay Spotify more than they have to pay artists. Spotify has historically denied commissioning PFC or forcing it into playlists, but the people making PFC and working for Spotify to insert these tracks into playlists speak of the pressure to put these low-quality tracks into playlists. Employees specifically questioned the ethics of “stealing” plays from real artists to play soulless generic garbage.
“I wonder how much these plays ‘steal’ from actual ’normal’ artists?”
– A Spotify employee in a company Slack message
Perfect Fit Content for Cheap Addictive Streaming
PFC is something Spotify allegedly receives from various producers and then prioritizes. Producers will reach out to an artist, offering to pay them to make generic-sounding music. Much of this falls into chill music categories, like smooth jazz, places where generic sound may pass off as real content. However, from the people who were paid to make it, the creation of this “music” is soulless and draining. It doesn’t pay well either. It can be good for a quick paycheck, but the deals they have with Spotify lead to them paying out only a small amount per stream. Artists desperate for a paycheck may like it, but if their own music got as many plays and promotion as the PFC they made, they’d make more money.
“It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.”
– Liz Pelly, for Harper’s Magazine
The entire idea behind PFC is to turn music into a distraction, a commodity as basic as the paint your landlord uses. You don’t think about it until there’s a problem with it. By pushing this cheap generic content on consumers, they can make music sit in the background, keeping you addicted to streaming Spotify all while not engaging with any meaningful art. It devalues art to the point that you don’t care about it or the people making it. Every time one of these generic songs plays on your Spotify playlist, it’s stealing the position and plays of real musicians who put their heart and soul into what they make. You’re dismantling the very soul of art for the sake of some background music.
Get a damn white noise machine if that’s all music is to you.
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“Why pay full-price royalties if users are only half listening”
– Liz Pelly, for Harper’s Magazine
You absolutely should read Liz Pelly’s fantastic article on this for Harpers magazine, an excerpt from her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
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AI Bands for AI Listeners
“The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
– PFC artist, speaking anonymously to Liz Pelly
This kind of generic content may sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the GenAI space. PFC could easily be made by AI. It doesn’t require anything be lively, unique, or even make sense. Instead, it just has to sound like it might be music. Something that can sit in the background. Soulless generic noise that might be music. Passing the Turing test is easy when the tester isn’t paying attention. If you’re paying attention to the art you’re consuming with the same zeal of someone watching paint dry, how would you notice? You’ve been lulled into a false idea of music appreciation by an algorithm designed to make you tune out what you’re hearing, not experience music as art. Spotify has basically primed their users for an AI takeover by making them expect little from their art.
“If a song is created by artificial intelligence and listened to by a bot, was it even heard at all?”
– Amanda Hoover for Wired
A study by France’s Centre National de la Musique found that 1-3% of all music streamed across a number of platforms were likely streamed by bots. That accounts for 1-3 billion streams. In a sense, Spotify encourages both those making fake music with AI as well as smaller artists to pay bot farms to “listen” to their streams. This is because Spotify doesn’t pay artists unless their songs are played 1,000 times over a rolling window of the past 12 months. With many songs only being played because they end up in a playlist, others, ones that don’t reach 1,000 streams every 12 months, are being listened to for free when they’re played. Spotify profits from the labor of those artists without paying them. There’s incentive to use bots to make sure your songs hit those minimum thresholds. Whatever it takes to get paid for your work.
AI music is already flooding Spotify, and Spotify doesn’t have any requirements to label these tracks or remove them. They will remove songs that are suspected of being boosted by bot listeners, but with a distributed network, it can often be exceptionally difficult to prove.
Is Spotify already using AI for PFC? We don’t know yet. Would you be able to tell anyway? Spotify will profit from AI making music for bot listeners, but will you enjoy it? Will anyone still enjoy music in a world like that?
Dead Musician Didn’t Really Make That Track
Screenshot from UMAW, via Instagram
Blaze Foley was shot and killed in 1989. However, according to Spotify, he released a new song, “Together,” on Spotify this summer. How is that possible? Could his estate have decided to remaster and release a song started before his tragic death? No. Instead, it’s an entirely AI-generated song, shoved into Foley’s artist page without anyone’s permission.
Spotify seemingly did nothing to verify its authenticity before letting someone generate AI slop under someone else’s name and upload it to their service. What would Spotify care, after all? They use “Perfect Fit Content” in the form of so-called “ghost artists,” they allow entirely AI-generated “bands” on the platform, featuring them and promoting them to an army of bots and distracted listeners alike. Why would they care? If they can make money, why spend the time not to make money? You could argue ethics, but do you really think ethics or a love of music are at the heart of Spotify?
“It’s kind of surprising that Spotify doesn’t have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly.”
– Craig McDonald, record label owner that manages Foley’s catalog
Someone decided to capitalize on Spotify’s broken system, and it seems as though it worked. Spotify reportedly doesn’t verify uploads with artists before putting them on their pages, and seems to have an easy uploading feature through partners like TikTok’s SoundOn platform. Spotify didn’t do enough to stop the fraudulent content from being uploaded. After receiving complaints, Spotify did remove it, however Foley’s family needed to put in the work to get Spotify to recognize their mistake. It was not something they did on their own.
Why would Spotify go into the effort to make sure more schlock doesn’t end up on their platform? After all, it could be profitable!
Get the Hell off Spotify
What does Spotify have to do to get you to abandon it? There are other streaming services you could choose, there is a resurgence of physical media, including vinyl, CDs, and even cassettes. Through profits, Spotify funds AI-powered war machines, they push real artists out of the spotlight for fake and potentially even AI “music.” They are destroying our connection to music, something essential to humanity, all for the profit of just a few people, making its CEO a billionaire. They’re leaving the people who make real music suffering while profiting in the billions, enough to fund war machines. How could you claim to love music and use such a service?
Getting off Spotify is easy. It’s incredibly easy to switch and you won’t lose access to your favorite artists. In fact, you may be losing access to artists by staying on Spotify at this point! Apple Music, Tidal, Bandcamp, Deezer, all better options than sticking with Spotify. Getting into physical media is easy as well. Just do it already, while we still have music to save.
Sources:
- Lanre Bakare, The Guardian
- Hannah Dailey, Billboard
- Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stones
- Alex Hern, The Guardian
- Amanda Hoover, Wired
- Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media
- Liz Pelly, Harper’s Magazine
- Victor Tangermann, Futurism
- Joe Wilkins, Futurism