yesitisfake

> 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.

> 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.”