Pursuant to the Above: Velvet Sundown
AI slop's been filling up the web, YouTube, Amazon product listings, so maybe it was only a matter of time before it hit Spotify, too. I've been listening to more and more "modern" (electric guitar, rock music, effects reviews, etc) stuff on YouTube, and came across Rick Beato's video on AI band Velvet Sundown. Normally, I skip Beato's videos, but I watched this one, and, well, oof.
The band is clearly entirely AI generated - pictures, music, description - the kind of lazy horseshit that's been infecting the other channels of our day to day life, and has now come to Spotify. They've got hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners. But as a number of people have observed, there are plenty of AI horseshit bands on Spotify with almost no listeners. So, what gives?
One fun conspiracy theory is that this was put together by Spotify itself, as a way of funnelling funds away from actual artists, and into its own coffers. Who knows. But at this point, it feels like a natural progression of Spotify-the-container, Spotify-the-agnostic-purveyor-of-song-shaped objects. Algorithms and recommendations and autoplay. This sort of thing came for other electronic channels, so it shouldn't be any surprise that Spotify was next. And yet, and yet -
I think part of what's so galling is that Spotify was the "well, we might as well take it" bargain that people accepted when shitty tech companies like, well, Spotify, shifted consumer tastes away from purchasing albums and towards streaming subscriptions that meant that bands other than the very top tier (Taylor Swift, the Stones, etc) stopped making almost anything off their own music. To be blunter: Spotify is for people who don't care about compensating artists, and people who don't think about things hard enough to understand that's what they're doing.
Bands went on Spotify because they figured, why not, it's better than nothing. Well, is it? More and more, it's looking like nothing at all. Alternatives like Bandcamp are a great alternative - Bandcamp's cut is 15%, 10% when sales exceed $5000/year. Getting 85-90% of $10 seems pretty good, until you consider that last year, Spotify had about $24B in revenues. A lot of people pay $11.99 USD/mo to stream, if you believe everyone's Spotify Wrappeds, the same albums over and over and over. And the artists see virtually no compensation for that unless they're stratospherically famous. This doesn't seem fair, because it isn't.
When you buy music via iTunes or Bandcamp or any other platform that lets you purchase actual music, its yours - you can listen to it through WACUP or Sonos (like I do), burn CDs, make mixtapes, and just generally engage with music in a much more thoughtful way than when a song flashes through some algorithmically created playlist. It's someone else's art, it's your copy, you can listen to it as mmuch as you want, and they're fairly paid for that.
And if you intentionally go looking for music to purchase and then download it - building a collection - are you less likely to download AI slop? Not necessarily, but probably. AI-generated music takes hold because certain platforms make it easy (and possibly because the platform is helping promote it). When we adjust our collective behaviours towards treating music as a discrete thing made and consumed by interested people, rather than the disinterested presentation of something ephemeral, we make things better. For the artists making the music, sure, but also for ourselves. If artists aren't compensated, why create art? If nobody creates art, what begins to fill the gaps? Yeah. Yeah.