I'm not sure why discourse around this seems to be coming from the perspective that people have no choice but to use Spotify and that Spotify will secretly replace all the good music with bad music and no one will be able to do anything about it, all musicians will be out of work, all will be lost. Spotify is just one music service, and we don't even need to use a music service to enjoy the music we like. If Spotify destroys itself with slop music, what's the sinister plot, the "ugly truth", really?
If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...
And yet it is different, because of the production scale involved. Own brands are actually hard work, especially own brand food, which has to be reverse-engineered at some expense. Own brand food provides price discrimination and usually does not particularly impact the sales of the headline brands.
Netflix’s own content, presumably, pays a large number of creative people’s wages and is of a quality. It is often scratching a creative itch that major studios won’t risk.
Music and music tech, on the other hand, is such that if your audience doesn’t care, it’s quite easy to churn out songs —- one person who particularly hated human culture could write half a dozen fully produced songs in a day.
> If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...
I do wish this particularly nihilistic new form of argument was considered to be toxic itself.
But to answer the point: many outstanding, culturally significant musicians have small fan bases for their personal work. They know they do. That is in the nature of diverse culture. They rely on complex chains of discovery systems —- word of mouth, eclectic radio, old style auteur playlists, live gigs, to find their people, and they often support that by writing songs for major musicians who love their work and who want to do one song they wrote.
It is not their failure at all if the system that is supposed to deliver some of that discovery starts cynically acting against them. While every musician wants a hit and many will dedicate at least some time in their lives to exploring what is necessary to write a hig record, “You should have had more mass market appeal” is not universal creative guidance.
It is not that listeners have no choice in music services. Musicians have no choice but to engage with Spotify. If it is secretly working against all musicians simultaneously at the most basic level —- drowning them out with slop that is deliberately inserted into playlists to water down everyone’s incomes —- then how is it you are more interested in the way musicians are somehow failing, when nothing they do can stop it?
Honestly I am terrified for culture that so many people in the tech world seem to be so aggressively jealous of creativity that they are taking the "anti-anti-slop" stance (to borrow a phrase from politics used for the "yeah well all this criticism validates the choice I am not in any way saying I am making" argument).
Why shouldn’t people be exposed to good music? Maybe they’ll get into it.
Does that slop mentality extend to other things? Food, clothes, consumer goods? Do people deserve rubbish just because it’s not something they’re particularly interested in?
Nobody is forced to listen to slop playlists. I never did, I only listen to albums and playlists that I either curated myself, of that were shared to me by people with similar tastes.
I don't think that people that are fine with slop are the kind of people that niche musicians would appeal to.
If your argument was against the egregious and exploitative way Spotify demonetizes tracks with less than 1k streams, then yes. This is abusive and should be considered illegal. But this mostly benefits large musicians and is detrimental to a long tail of niche ones.
They are harmed because part of the intrinsic deal with Spotify is that you put your music on there so that their discovery systems make it possible for people to hear it who might not otherwise.
If Spotify is deliberately diluting that mechanism it is bad enough. But they are doing it IN SECRET which they would not do if they didn't think artists, industry people, musicians unions etc., would construe that as harm.
If the music they are listening to satisfy their musical tastes for the monent, again, what is the issue?
If generic slop Spotify created to increase their own profits satisfies the listener the same way a song created with labor and love by an actual artist, well, this is saying something. I am not sure either of us will like the message.
2) > If generic slop Spotify created to increase their own profits satisfies the listener the same way a song created with labor and love by an actual artist, well, this is saying something. I am not sure either of us will like the message.
Again: users do not know they are being fed this stuff.
If this was an official, named Spotify product, and users preferred it, then your anti-anti-slop argument might have some weight.
Spotify are doing this in secret because they know it is fraud on likely a contract level but certainly on a cultural level. They'd be rolling it out with press releases if they didn't know it was underhanded.
That is the issue. But then again HN is a place where people really don't mind if companies break laws on an epic scale, destroy worker protections, and deliver worse products like AI chatbots replacing human support, if customers don't really notice.
So maybe I shouldn't be too surprised by (veiled as much as full-throated) endorsement of secret padding prole-feed.
Does the contract say anywhere that Spotify would never provide their own generated music to users of their platform?
If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
> Again: users do not know they are being fed this stuff.
Users are actively listening to those slop playlists. It does not seem to bother them (otherwise they would stop listening). If they are satisfied with the offering, what exactly is the issue?
> Spotify are doing this in secret because they know it is fraud on likely a contract level but certainly on a cultural level. They'd be rolling it out with press releases if they didn't know it was underhanded.
This is plain bullshit. The claim is that people are listening to those songs when they are added to Spotify generated playlists. It wouldn't matter if the song had, say, a tag indicating that it was published by Spotify themselves. Most likely people are not even looking at the names of songs and artists when the slop playlist they are listening to is playing as background noise.
> That is the issue. But then again HN is a place where people really don't mind if companies break laws on an epic scale, destroy worker protections, and deliver worse products like AI chatbots replacing human support, if customers don't really notice.
If you saw my comment history, you would be surprised.
The problem here is that users are actively listening to slop, but they don't seem to mind it. They are fine with slop. They keep listening to slop. For those users, it really does not matter. There is no abuse taking place.
I am a Spotify user. I think their app is bloated, but it works alright? I can find albums I like, I can create my own playlists, and I can completely ignore whatever Spotify generates I always did. How exactly are they abusive in their relationship with me as a customer?
What you are really angry with is that Spotify found a way to give users that are fine with slop their own cheap slop.
> If the contract between artists and platform provides no such limitations, I fail to see how anyone is being defrauded of anything.
Then why does Spotify refuse to talk about it? It's clearly outside of the spirit of the deal they are striking with artists generally.
Ultimately, they will get away with it because of just the same quasi-justification you're offering: Oh we're not screwing any of them individually, we are screwing them all at once.
Congratulations I guess, your argument is on the winning side!
But certainly Congress, the UK parliament, EU parliament, Swedish parliament etc. should be looking at this through the lens of regulation and competition law. And for once I hope the record labels -- big and small, because so many of them are small -- sue.
I am always in favor of proper regulation. If the EU sees this as abusive and detrimental to competition, they should definitely put restrictions on platforms offering their own content. I wonder if this would extend to, say, supermarkets offering products under their own brands. It is important that regulations don't harm the consumers.
As for record labels suing... Well, they will have this problem which is proving that any fraud took place. Unless the numbers were rigged (and no users actually streamed the slop, and it was actually fraud), I fail to see how they would win anything. What would be the allegation? That users are listening to bad music?
I didn't, particularly. It's just another angle on it.
I do think "defrauded" has both legal and moral dimensions, don't you? This is obviously abject shitty treatment or they wouldn't have been secretive about it.
I'm not convinced this isn't both dimensions, though -- not clear who is being defrauded but both the labels and the musicians unions should do their best to establish whether it could be them.
Spotify have crossed a pretty obvious line here. Weird that you appear to think it's, like, no harm no foul if the customers don't notice. Fast food service logic.
There is already quite extensive legal precedent and practice about supermarket own-brand stuff; fifty years of it, with supermarkets retaining teams of lawyers, operating proper clean-room reverse-engineering processes, etc. It's well-trodden legal territory. Supermarkets work right up to the line. But it's no secret that they do, and brands sometimes push back against own-brand deceptions. Mostly supermarkets threaten each other over their own, own-brand stuff. Caterpillar cakes, vodkas etc.
If Spotify were honest that they were adding "own brand" music into the mix, then this would be a different discussion.
(Amazon are required in the UK and EU to identify which are their own brands, and they mostly comply)
I would bet that it would make zero difference in the amount of plays those tracks got.
Well given that they are inserted into generated playlists and offered up as "similar" playlist suggestions instead of tracks by authentic artists, probably not.
For this to really be resolved they would have to stop putting these tracks in those lists or suggestions panels.
The fact that they evidently list the same track under completely different titles suggests that they are not going to act ethically here.