Jon Cossack
Jon Cossack
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Dirk van Arnhem
About Jon Cossack
"I should listen to some nice relaxing music. Oh, here we go, Jazz for reading. Perfect. I don't plan on reading, obviously, because I never learned how. But some nice piano music should settle me right down. Wait, why do all these songs sound exactly the same? Who are any of these artists? It seems like kind of a weird coincidence that they're all just first name, last name. Their profile photo is the album artwork of one of their EPs. They have no bio and no links to any social media. Most of them didn't start uploading music until this year, and yet they've ended up in these extremely popular playlists created by Spotify themselves? There's something eerily non-human about these playlists, and some people have theorized that Spotify might be using AI to create a bunch of songs that they can package under random pseudonyms and then curate these into playlists that they push out onto all their users. They have AI songs, they attribute them to people that don't exist, and this allows them to take royalties that would go to musicians and keep them for themselves. I mean, just look at the number of likes on all these. They can advertise these wherever they want, all over their app. Now, I wanna stress there's currently no proof that Spotify's doing this. I'm not saying for a fact that they are, but it's not hard to understand hypothetically why they would. Spotify, like Netflix, is one of those companies that came in and disrupted the industry by offering a deal that seemed too good to be true. Because it was. Wait, for a few dollars a month, I can get access to every song ever made? Or every movie ever made? How could that possibly be profitable for them? The secret is that it isn't profitable, and never has been. But as long as you get in early enough to kill all your competition, establish market control, and raise a bunch of money from investors, it doesn't have to be. At least not for a while. But now, it's been a while, and Spotify's getting a little bit more desperate with each passing year. They tried dumping billions of dollars into exclusive podcasts, but ended up just losing a bunch of money and gave up on that. They tried selling a car accessory, but just ended up losing a bunch of money and gave up on that. Then they lost even more money when they had to refund all the people who bought one just because they got mad. Guys, relax! It was only $90 for a thing that doesn't work. And their new plan now is audiobooks, but I'm sure they'll just lose a bunch of money and give up on that because that's what they do. But Spotify's also in a tricky spot because even if you projected infinite growth and they became the only streaming service in the entire world, they'd still have to give up 70% of their revenue to the artists and record labels, whose music is the foundation of their product. And that's where this conspiracy comes in. There's a finite pool of revenue every month that mostly gets redistributed back to artists. Well, what if we had our own artists? What if we were to artificially generate our own music for almost no cost and force-feed it to as many people as possible? Well, all of a sudden, we're not making 30% on those streams. We're making 100%. Again, it's just a theory. But for a company that struggled to turn a profit for their entire existence with a CEO who sees zero ethical concerns with generative AI, it's not outside the realm of possibility. Either way, it's definitely a bleak thought for artists who are already struggling to make a living from streaming revenue. To think the amount of money that each stream is worth could actually decrease. But whether it's because Spotify's filling their platform with AI music or because a bunch of random people are, there's a good chance this is gonna start happening anyway. No human being could ever compete with the volume of output these new tools can generate. Udio can create an entire song in the time it takes me to grab my guitar off the wall. And because of how easy these things are to use, I've already seen a bunch of videos pop up, telling people how to game the system to make a bunch of money from Spotify." -Drew Gooden
Taken from Last.fm
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