Sounds like they're "fake" in that they're apparently fictional characters who aren't explicitly presented as such. They're just branding-icons, like the mascots who make a brand-name cereal. And then like with cereal, someone else actually makes it.

I guess that this might be concerning for folks who feel like they form spiritual-connections to artists, if they then learn that there wasn't really a singular artist. Though I suspect that most folks probably don't care.

Related:

1. ["Ghost singer", Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_singer ).

2. ["Ghostwriter", Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter ).

> ...someone else actually makes it.

...which sort of applies to a lot of Hot 100 artists as well. A good songwriter writes it, a talented producer makes it sound good, and a well-known personality sings it (with varying accuracy) and has their name put on it as the "artist".

It's a spectrum. At one end you've got The Velvet Underground playing around a single mic hooked directly to a reel-to-reel, and at the other end you've got neural-net generated lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to. If you sort artists by play count on Spotify, the top results will be all over this spectrum (but mostly in the middle, I think).

I remember listening —really listening— to a Debbie Gibson song, in the early nineties.

She was never an artist I cared about. I just assumed she was a “teenybopper queen.”

The song clearly had one -maybe two- musicians in the background, playing a sampler, while she sang. Maybe she played the sampler.

I realized it probably cost almost nothing to record that song.

She didn’t have a regular band, and probably threw one together, when she toured.

I suspect that many artists do the same.

A lot of music these days is produced by one or two people with a computer sitting in a room by themselves. I sometimes listen to the Music Introducing programs on BBC Radio, especially BBC Music Introducing in London [1]. The music is submitted to the BBC by the musicians themselves—hundreds of tracks a week, apparently—and the DJs choose the songs to air on the program. Many of the songs, which are in a variety of genres, are created in the artists’ homes—hence the genre “bedroom pop” [2], which has been around for a while but seems to have taken off since COVID.

I’m an older guy with musical tastes formed in the 1970s, but I find a lot of this new independent music stimulating, enjoyable, and very competently made. When there’s a song I particularly like, I’ve sometimes looked up the artist online, and often he or she has had only a few hundred plays on YouTube and a few dozen followers on Instagram. It must be really tough for young musicians trying to make a career out of music now.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music

There are musicians for hire to play in studio and on the road. Very common practice.

Similarly is the Beach Boys where one brother never left the studio and wrote all of the music while the other guys learned to perform the tunes to take on the road.

Not quite the same, but in that world though

That's a huge number of artists. Take Britney Spears' Grammy winning Toxic for example. The song was written and produced by Bloodshy & Avant, with additional writing from Cathy Dennis and Henrik Jonback[1]. …Baby One More Time, another example of hers contains zero songs written by Spears. Is that the same kind of deception that an unknown artist makes when publishing an original song that makes it way onto a jazz playlist? It's hard to find the utility of such a distinction.

1. https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/britney-spears-tox...

I don't know how true this is but it's been widely reported that the lyric "hit me baby one more time" was due to the song's writer (who is Swedish) believing "hit" was American slang for "call."

It's plausible due to the idiom "hit me up" meaning "call me."

Why couldn't anyone on Spears' team come in and smooth out that idiosyncrasy? If someone writes gibberish for lyrics, do singers just go ahead and sing gibberish?

I don’t know if that story is true, but if it is the lyric still works even if it doesn’t match the songwriter’s intent.

There’s the other slang meaning as in, “I’d hit that”. Of course there is the darker physical hitting interpretation which advocates against domestic violence have a problem with.

Or it could be taken as a blackjack metaphor, for pushing one's luck just a little bit more.

If she had been older and had marketed herself differently, sure.

Benny Blanco produced (often also wrote or co-wrote) 29 number one songs for artists including Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, Miguel, Halsey, and Camila Cabello.

How do you differentiate this sort of artists from 90+% of artists on the top 40? Isn't nearly the entirety of pop music built upon semi-fictional characters?

>They're just branding-icons

Honestly that seems like a lot of music since the 2000s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and an autotune.

Honestly, this seems like a lot of music since the 1950s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and a nice suit.

If you're going back to the fifties it was worse. It was common to have a model on the cover that is white when the artists are not just to sell albums to racists.

Milli Vanilli, Boney M. just to name two. This isn't a modern phenomenon.

It might not have been so easy to pull it off. Or maybe it was. It was the time before people played or sang live on TV. So there was less risk then in the years were live performance in a TV studio became somewhat of the norm.

And for generated music to be profitable it probably "just" needs to have a lot of songs one would not skip when they are part of some automatic play lists or "radio stations" playing stuff similar to x or y.

This way while any one song would only have few streams the overall oeuvre of the creator could be quite profitable. The same as with any auto-generated product targeting the long tail in Amazon (think T-shirts with quotes).

Like the Gorillaz?

Am I missing something?

This describes most of the music industry.

What makes the artists fake is that they are publishing only a couple songs for the specific purpose of providing the streaming platform with royalty free music, and then they disappear. The example pictures in the article show artists that have published 6 minutes and 8 minutes of music. There's also a statistic that 20 people created 500 artists. These artists are shells, facades, illusory, fake. Go looking for them and it's a dead end because apparently all the artist did was publish two songs and dissolve.

The author does criticize the title: "Even the term fake artists doesn’t really do justice to the scope of the situation—because, as we have seen, it’s not the musicians, real or otherwise, who are at the root of the situation, but the dominant players in the industry."

If I were to run with it I'd say the streaming platform is also fake. People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.

> What makes the artists fake is that they are publishing only a couple songs for the specific purpose of providing the streaming platform with royalty free music

The article has 3 examples. Two have easily identified 3rd-party labels, the last is unclear. Neither is a traditional label, but there is also no indication they are owned by Spotify.

> People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.

What bands would people expect in a playlist of background music? In fact, one is from a provider of royalty-free background music - which seems like exactly what you would expect in such a playlist. You could argue that it's not really jazz, which is understandable, but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore.

> but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore.

Metalcore is the top 100 music of metal, I doubt it’s going to change anytime soon. I’d guess what ever is not metalcore, is probably cheesy power metal like Sabaton or Gloryhammer.

I definitely had the wrong impression of how much music was produced by the examples given. It's not just "two songs and dissolve".

If these people create real music, "fake" seems like the wrong adjective. It's very common for musicians to be involved in a bunch of different bands, or even for the same group of people to release music under different band names, for when they want to experiment with stuff that isn't their normal band's "brand". What's being described sounds like SEO optimization to me. A recent Reply All episode interviewed someone who is very successful at Spotify SEO: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv

But what if Spotify pays somebody a salary to create this music, then artificially pushes it up their search-results so people will play it which means they will play less of the music created by independent artists, which means Spotify has to pay fewer royalties to the independent artists.

It would be a bit like if Google-search for some product showed products created by Google on top of the list, but not really even revealing they were products by Google.

I have no information about if this kind of thing is happening but the article suggests there is evidence to suspect it is. Weird artists nobody knows about being on top of the list. How did they get to be top of the list?

> People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.

Streaming services betray their users expectations in many ways. For instance, Spotify has playlists that are called "This is [artist]" for many artists, and you could reasonably believe they were human made, or at least partially human made (unless Spotify served you up one for a very obscure artist, but they rarely do).

But they aren't even looked at by a human. If you have several artists with the same name, it all gets mixed up in the "This is X" playlist. "This is Glenn Jones" contains music both by the guitarist Glenn Jones, the soul singer Glenn Jones, and the Australian country singer Glenn Jones.

My assumption here is that popular songs are covered then assembled into generic playlists which are then used to divert the lion’s share of revenue away from the original artist’s music. Thus providing Spotify or the labels a low-cost way of minimising their royalty payout figures for listeners that aren’t fussed if they hear the original or a cover (eg mindless background music).

They are “fake” artists as they’re hired by Spotify, the label or a 3rd party to produce the cover for a fixed fee, which the rights are then held. To use various names also distracts from what would be highly repetitive production credits.

The author notes that such investigation isn’t possible on services other than Spotify because they do not provide much background information such as play counts. However this information is not necessary, one can simply play the generic playlists made by the music services and check to see if they are the originals or covers.

There is definitely large variation in the streaming industry here. It also wouldn’t surprise me if music services are favouring these playlists as a means to reducing their royalty payout costs.

If that's the case, it's not what's discussed in this article. I don't think there are popular original songs being covered in this list of "background jazz" songs, and if they were, the originals were presumably not the same kind of moody muzak that the playlists are designed around. This is a "scam" in the same sense that the CDs of generic mellow coffeehouse music you could get at Starbucks were "scams".

> I kept waiting for the author to explain how people are taking others' music and re-packaging it as their own to collect royalties, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happening.

Then you missed the point, which was that Spotify diverts listening-minutes to these fake artists to lower the total amount of royalties they have to pay, thus increasing their bottom line.

If the algorithm and business model are predisposed to choosing music that will increase Spotify's profitability, specifically using made-up artists, many of which coincidentally exist in the same country as Spotify, and some 500 of which are actually only controlled by 20 people, I'm not sure why you would bother to think they're "real." It's like saying fake tits are real because you can touch them.

Of course, it's completely up to the Spotify listener to continue using their service, or to use their curated or generated playlists. So for that reason, I don't really care. It just seems interesting to see so many people shilling for Spotify by nitpicking about what they think the word "fake" means.

> “The songwriters and producers of these tracks are either paid a fixed fee per track or a combination of a low advance and reduced royalty rate and it works because these ‘labels’ can guarantee millions of streams through their own network of search engine optimized DSP playlists and YouTube channels.”

> It just seems interesting to see so many people shilling for Spotify by nitpicking about what they think the word "fake" means.

It's moreso that folks just don't like meaningless claims or unclear writing.

The article's titled "The Fake Artists Problem [...]", so it seems entirely reasonable for a reader to want to know is meant by a "fake artist".

Worse, near the end of the article:

> Even the term fake artists doesn’t really do justice to the scope of the situation—because, as we have seen, it’s not the musicians, real or otherwise, who are at the root of the situation, but the dominant players in the industry.

So the author doesn't clearly define what they mean by "fake artists", and then they point out that the term isn't even a good match for what they were trying to say. Which just seems to invite the question: if the author doesn't even like their own wording, why did they use it?

I suspect that part of the problem is that the author's confused about what they're trying to critique. I mean, I get the sense that they're mostly just upset about music-platforms favoring low-cost content. But then they express that concern by instead talking about "fake artists", which seems largely tangential. But then they don't define what they mean by "fake artists", and even critique their own use of the term, making it just.. kind of a mess.

Are shows that Netflix comes up with the concept and produces fake? Is it only real entertainment if the platform buys it from someone else?

Let's imagine these "artists" are all actually created by a team of software engineers at Spotify tweaking a GPT-3-like model for songs. If the songs get listens and users like them, so what?

It's not like you think you're listening to Taylor Swift but instead get a fake. You're clicking a playlist, and that playlist has songs that have been crafted to fit well with the playlist and optimized for discovery. How is this more fake than a record label putting a bunch of young guys together, buying lyrics and songs for them and calling them Backstreet Boys?

> Let's imagine these "artists" are all actually created by a team of software engineers at Spotify tweaking a GPT-3-like model for songs. If the songs get listens and users like them, so what?

I don't think anyone has a problem if users listen to or like machine-generated music. Some people, including some paying customers, would have a problem with this music being presented to them opaquely as if it has gone through the same creative process as human-generated music.

To your other point, re: Backstreet Boys, they're not any more authentic, at least not in my perspective. But the fact that I may find Backstreet Boys completely "soulless" or not a "genuine form of artistic expression" or "lacking in musical talent" is all my problem/opinion, and it's all orthogonal to the point, which is that the promotion of Backstreet Boys, by way of a record label allocating marketing spend to pay a radio station to play their music on repeat, ought to be transparent. There are even "payola" laws about this in the US, complete with a known and abused loophole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola#Third-party_loophole

> ...You're clicking a playlist...

The question becomes, "How did the user find the playlist?" I don't know how organic the process is for getting these playlists in front of a user's face. If Spotify does any kind of algorithmic fuckery to present that playlist more prominently to a user -- while, on the backend, accounting for the fact that the playlist will benefit them financially because the royalties are lower because the artists are "fake" -- then that should be disclosed to the user in some form. I'm not actually suggesting a law or regulation here. But if I were still a Spotify customer, I'd prefer to know if they generated and presented content to me because it benefit them financially rather than because they think I'd enjoy listening to it.

The problem would be that the platform serving the music (and making recommendations of what to listen to) has a strong incentive to promote their own brand, creating a competitive disadvantage for "real" musicians on the same platform.

This is the music equivalent of Amazon Basics. If Spotify really is creating fake artists to avoid paying real artists, it's the same kind of monopolistic vertical integration as Amazon manufacturing their own products to avoid paying third-party sellers.

AmazonBasics products are branded so the consumer knows that they’re Amazon products. Same for Netflix originals.

Spotify associated labels and playlists should have a disclaimer as well.

Think from a musicians perspective though. Real artists making real music lose out. Someone is looking for music in your genre, and Spotify just serves them their own stock music so they don't have to pay you for your music.

That’s the point we all smell here: some very fishy bandwagonning going on here defending Spotify by trying to water down the allegations.

I allege Spotify agents here doing paid work.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sounds like the complaint boils down to ”people on the playlists are not celebrities”.

Which I see as a positive thing.

No, people on the playlists are artists /created by spotify/. It's insidious because you expect these to be curated playlists containing real artists that you might like. But really spotify is redirecting all the royalty money to... themselves.

I think this depends a lot on the mindset of the listener. Am I just looking for some good music to have on in the background while the bulk of my attention is on something else? Or am I looking for a connection to an artist, a set of emotional perspectives on life and meaning encoded in musical form?

If I'm looking for the former, Spotify own-brand muzak is fine. It might even be /better/, for my purpose.

If I'm looking for a connection to an artist whose music can, in some way, become part of my inner emotional life, then I might be upset and disappointed to discover that there is no artist persona that I can relate to.

Both use cases are valid! The OP fails to distinguish between them, and perhaps thinks that the first one either does not exist, or that the potential disruption to the second one is the only thing that matters. However, we can do a bit better than this, and acknowledge that people have different reasons for streaming music.

The important question, which could only be settled by looking at what Spotify listeners actually think and feel, is whether or not there is anyone who yearns for an emotional connection to the person creating the background jazz music, and is upset when they can't find them.

The fraud is the streaming companies like Spotify, Amazon pushing music revenue towards non-existent artists by playing only this fake artists music and thereby pocketing the streaming revenue themselves.

It's basically a case of anti-competitive platform hijacked by the platform owner.

It should have opened with their definition of fake.

But, apparently, it's music that the streaming services are commissioning at cut rates and using their platform to promote, as to reduce their costs?

yes, thank you. this article struck me as just a musician who hates that corporate music is popular on large corporate streaming sites. so what?

What Milli Vanilli did was scandalous enough that they were stripped of their Grammy. This seems directly analogous.

I had to scroll awfully far to find a Milli Vanilli reference, which is what immediately springs to my mind when someone says "fake artist."