Over Christmas, I had lunch with my cousin, a talented musician and songwriter who for some years now has made her living from her records and live performances. Our conversation turned, as a conversation between two people working in creative fields inevitably will, to the vicissitudes of making a living in any kind of artistic endeavour. Like most musicians of her generation, my cousin’s music career has roughly coincided with the rise of streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, and so her music has always been available, to anyone who wanted to hear it, for free – or, more accurately, for a monthly subscription fee to those tech companies. The trade-off, in theory, is the potential to reach a wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. But even as her music has become more popular on the platform, she told me, and as the crowds at her shows have grown, the smaller that hill of beans has become.
This has been the case, with Spotify, for almost all musicians. The more dominant the platform has become, and the more damage it has done in the process to the livelihoods of recording artists, the smaller its payments to those artists have shrunk. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that the company’s multibillionaire founder, Daniel Ek, is wealthier than any musician on the planet; last year alone, he made $345 million from his company’s users streaming the work of musicians, which is more than Taylor Swift – the most-streamed artist in the platform’s history – has made in all her time on the platform, but it’s dispiriting nonetheless.
I switched to Apple Music years ago, because it pays artists a slightly more generous pittance, and streams at a higher quality, and therefore seems to represent a marginally less grim version of the same market dynamic. But anyone who still uses Spotify will tell you that the experience has of late been in steep decline. One of the company’s primary innovations, in its early phase, was the “Discovery” function, an algorithmic gimmick that pointed users in the direction of new music based on artists they had already listened to and liked. It always seemed to me a surprisingly effective way of finding new music – far more reliable than I was at seeking it out myself, having only a vague and slippery grasp of what it was I actually liked. But talk to anyone who uses Spotify now, and they will tell you that those days are long gone. All the app wants to point them toward now is artists whose labels have apparently forked out enough cash to game the system in their favour – along with, increasingly, playlists clogged with anonymous made-to-order filler.
[ We are up to our necks in a rising tide of AI-generated slopOpens in new window ]
This latter category is the subject of a fascinating article in the latest issue of Harper’s magazine, by the American writer Liz Pelly. Spotify has in recent years, Pelly claims, been filling its most popular playlists with what the company refers to as “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) – stock filler music attributed to pseudonymous musicians, referred to as “ghost artists”, produced in order to lower even further its royalty payouts. This stuff is, she suggests, commissioned by Spotify, from production companies that pay musicians a flat fee to churn it out, within strictly defined parameters based on what is already popular with listeners.
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If you find music on Spotify increasingly bland, it might be the ghosts
Pelly interviews a professional jazz musician whose pseudonymous side gig involves making this stuff to order. The musician, whom Pelly does not name, describes the process of recording this filler as a kind of feedback loop: the production company sends links to target playlists as reference points, and the composer “charts out” new songs that will work well for those lists. When it comes to recording, there will usually be a representative of the PFC partner company at the session, giving feedback – the gist of which tends always to be to make the music as simple as possible. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” says the jazz musician.
In one sense, there is nothing particularly new about any of this; it’s a digital-era version, in a way, of Muzak, the proprietary brand of background music that has played in hotel lifts and supermarkets and so on for as long as anyone can remember. But what’s insidious here is the extent to which Spotify seems to intend this stuff to replicate and replace the music of artists with whom listeners might previously have formed a connection, and sought out other work by, gone to see play live and so on – simply because it allegedly costs the company less money to stream. It’s a stark example, in this sense, of the remorseless way in which the profit motive tends toward cheapening, degrading and eventually destroying cultural production.
Spotify denied to Harper’s that staffers were encouraged to add PFC to playlists, and that playlist editors were discontented with the programme.
It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users
I am listening, as I write, to a station on Apple Music – on which platform this stuff absolutely still exists, but is (for now at least) pushed less relentlessly than on Spotify – called Lo-Fi. The music it plays is the kind of relentlessly chill and soothing instrumental ephemera popular with people who like to listen to music while they work or study. It’s all tinkling piano and quiet guitar over polite, dusty breakbeats with the occasional wordless croon, and on this station everything sounds like it’s made by the same person, although you never seem to encounter the same “artist” twice. And if you happen to do a Google search for any of the artists to whom these songs are attributed, you will find nothing but links back to their songs on streaming services. No interviews, no listings of live shows, no merch, no Wikipedia pages with lengthy explications of the singer’s problematic political views and links to the Church of Scientology. This, I suspect, is because they exist on, and for, these streaming services alone.
Such a model, argues Pelly, distorts our relationship with music and our understanding of its purpose. “This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds – as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder – is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. 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.”
And the real damage, of course, is only beginning. Although the model may up to now have involved paying a flat fee to the pseudonymous artists who produce this music, that presumably won’t remain the case for long. Because if you’re happy to listen to music made to order by human musicians on an already algorithmic production line, you may not even notice when all of it is produced entirely by generative AI. You’ll only barely be listening anyway, as the model intends.