On an AM family plan, if they are really paying out 0.01 per stream... then anyone streaming more than 19 songs/day is a money loser for apple.
Spotify has the same licensing agreement.
The difference is that Spotify has a free tier (lower revenue from those users), their users listen more, and they may also have more customers in lower-income countries with lower subscription rates.
Which is to say - of you took a specific category of users - say, US-based paying subscribers and kept their listening activity the same - every streaming service would pay out roughly the same amount of royalties per-stream for that group of listeners.
This has been true for at least half a century. Probably many centuries.
Doesn't promote AI songs, has high-res, lossless sound quality and pays artists more.
Also they pay to the rights-holders exactly the same as Spotify, which is 70% of your subscription. It just happens that Spotify has on average a lower revenue per stream, but for your particular use they both pay the same thing.
The algorithm still suggests some forgotten classics. On YT music I can find entire albums of somewhat more obscure yet excellent artists that are completely missing from Spotify.
I pay for Youtube with a family sub. Good value for me.
This is only going to accelerate. Until the labels die, the universe will find every way to route around them.
Hopefully concert venues are next.
If you're not familiar, the company has a corner on the market for concert venues and all associated services (booking, ticket resale, food and liquor vendors, point of sale, etc.) They use this to inflate ticket prices.
"Elevator generic background music is trash. Good riddance. "
"No, X and Y in the genre are good bands"
"So you agree it is generic elevator music?"
But how I read it, the second comment is saying that AI slop competes with machine-replicable human slop. Of which a lot of ambient music is, but not necessarily all.
Most ambient music boils down to generic muzak that was machine generated in the first place in a DAW.
As music historians note the profundity of their work with that explicit aim in mind
Paint a picture without painting a picture!
Write a novel without writing a novel!
Compose a melody without composing a melody!
There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true? They didn't compose the melodic motif, figure out the chord progression, structure the song, or even write the lyrics. The world is getting a bit too kafkaesque for my liking.
You just pointed the thing and pressed a button. Yet you feel accomplishment.
Sure you might have chose a lens, depth and tried to point the things somewhat precisely. Then you sat at your computer to cut enough of the edges and fiddled with some curves so it feels nice for you. But ultimately you didn't make any of it. Machine made it all. You just guided it with the knobs provided for you. Yet you feel accomplishment if you make something good because you also made hundreds of it that were crap.
They "created" something that, until now, would have required skills they didn't have. You don't see how someone could feel a sense of accomplishment for the end result, the thing they poofed into existence and like?
We use tools to make things (even art) easier to create. I don't make my paints from scratch (anymore), or string my paintbrushes (anymore), or now sometimes choose my color palettes or general composition -- tools (like genAI) exist to let artists create art easier, and saying "you didn't put in enough thought/work/etc for it to count as art!" feels dismissive of the creative process and the joy people find in expressing themselves, regardless of how they got there.
I could see how someone with no background in music could feel a sense of accomplishment with this.
It is like a gen z version of playing the ironman or smoke on the water riff on guitar. It is just not that hard to play the ironman riff either.
As someone who has put thousands of hours into learning music, anything that gets people into music is a positive to me.
It seems like generative AI art and music really triggers tech people who have nothing to do with art and music.
"Kids these days starting off programming a web app with a language model. In my day we had to take adderall and debug assembly code just to print an underscore to a dot matrix printer. That is the right way to start and anything else is WRONG"
It was possible to do a credible job composing algorithmic music in many genres before the current AI frenzy. Before long, you won't be able to tell the difference between human-composed and machine-composed music in any genre.
It will be quite a while before that happens with novels and screenplays. Wouldn't bet against it in the long run, though.
I have seen amazing works of art and music from people with zero technical knowledge. It may be rough or weird but the jagged edges is what makes it art.
I wonder how people will feel about this long-term as it blurs the line between generated from scratch and tool-assisted. Clearly the intent is to make it easier for producers to get the results they want. How easy is too easy?
I believe in the near future there will be more discussion about specific parts of songs being derived from AI even if the rest is traditionally composed. Because that is the natural result of creating more efficient tools to solve specific needs that artists have, when "generate my song for me" is not an option they would ever consider (given today's rapidly changing norms, at that point it becomes an issue of integrity over efficiency).
I think it is also interesting how revered Vocaloids have been in certain fandoms stretching back to the late 00's in spite of their artificiality. Whereas a lot of the autogenerated content today is derided for being artificial, "not the real thing." I guess because the vastly wider gap and set of limitations of Vocaloid compared to human singers causes creative workarounds that wouldn't be considered otherwise. But the creator is the one who needs to plan and execute those workarounds, as it confirms to their artistic preference.
Maybe in the future the AI art tools that are seen to be most ethical are the ones that preserve the artistic vision of the user. An aspect that artists are lamenting the loss of. Less outsourcing and more deliberate collaboration.
I'm done with Spotify. I've had the service since it was beta in the Nordics, maybe 2008? It was amazing to be able to stream almost every piece of music there is.
I love music, I'm an amateur musician and I respect artists. This treats music as a fungible commodity. That's not what music is to me, so I choose not to support that.
I also understand the predicament they are in. I had friends who worked at Rdio, and I briefly worked at a startup doing music recommendation until the big 3 quoted us how much royalties they wanted in advance to stream their catalogue one time to learn from.
The record labels are the root cancer on the industry, but the alternative for Spotify might be to become a better label, not become another bad actor.