By their agreements with rights holders, DSPs aren't allowed to own music copyrights. Except in very limited & specific circumstances.
One way they get around this is with fake artists. Most fake artists are not doing this with Spotify's knowledge, but some are (this is less of an issue at the other DSPs).
It was always funny to me when I was doing A&R at Sony Music Entertainment and I'd see some new instrumental "artist" with millions of streams on their very few tracks - and the IP address of their contact would be a mile from Spotify's office in Sweden.
The DSPs would *love* to follow the Netflix model - produce and own their own content - but that will not fly with the labels & publishers.
So they turn to illicit means to garner some revenue on the margins.
Streaming is a margins business, after all.
#musicindustry#musicbusiness#streaming#fakeartists
All I can say is, shame on them, them being the DSPs behaving unethically. It is bad enough there are not enough listeners around the world to listen to the 100,000 + daily releases, or is it weekly. Doesn't matter - there are not enough listeners. And when fake artists smother the system, it further delutes the opportunities for those who are following the rules. In my world, something passed off as fake is considered fraud. When considering new laws, perhaps updating existing laws or criminal codes, to update the definition of fraud to include fake artist profiles, with hefty fines might be enough to discourage some of DSPs from doing this. I am just ranting on my coffee break 😁
Great commentary on a really interesting phenomenon in the music industry 🔽
I think whatever anyone feels about this, it's a clear breach of the trust / informal handshake agreement musicians have with the DSPs. We obviously know we're in competition with other artists; that's always been a difficult part of the work. But there's no comparison between an indie artist desperately trying to be heard and a platform-owned ghost writer or producer making music to deliberately take up space on their editorial lists, satisfy an algorithmic need or feed into another business objective. There's a clear financial incentive to playlist one and not the other, regardless of quality.
As Drew says, it's an on-the-margins business; Spotify will always say that it can't find more money to pay artists beyond what it pays labels and rights holders already. I think it's an insult to our intelligence as long as these shadow musicians exist and are generating streams in the BILLIONS (with a B). I would call for this to be one of the collective rallying points for us as musicians (alongside low payouts from streaming for songwriters and master rights ownership, the copyright rippoff / stream farming that occurs every day, and what is bound to be a flood-the-zone approach by AI-enabled opportunists) in a push towards streaming equity #streaming#musicbusiness
Entertainment Executive | Music Tech & AI | Streaming & DSPs | Artist & Label Relations | Recorded Music & Publishing
By their agreements with rights holders, DSPs aren't allowed to own music copyrights. Except in very limited & specific circumstances.
One way they get around this is with fake artists. Most fake artists are not doing this with Spotify's knowledge, but some are (this is less of an issue at the other DSPs).
It was always funny to me when I was doing A&R at Sony Music Entertainment and I'd see some new instrumental "artist" with millions of streams on their very few tracks - and the IP address of their contact would be a mile from Spotify's office in Sweden.
The DSPs would *love* to follow the Netflix model - produce and own their own content - but that will not fly with the labels & publishers.
So they turn to illicit means to garner some revenue on the margins.
Streaming is a margins business, after all.
#musicindustry#musicbusiness#streaming#fakeartists
Neurotech inventor and React Native expert. Inventor of Functional Music, Creator of early BCIs, Inventor of the neurotech behind Brain.fm and almost every company using music-based interventions, CEO of Evoked Response,
This is absolutely ridiculous, and incredibly worrying. #AI straight up plagiarizes artists. Period. Example: I clicked on a #FunctionalMusic AI-generated question starred at the bottom of a post the other day and it has a bunch of my content in there verbatim. It didn't even bother to paraphrase.
No doubt music-based AIs have a certain amount of "paraphrasing" involved to keep out of legal trouble, but it is still highly immoral. Not only that, it is NEVER going to be good original music.
Take this example: All news articles in my feed now are generated by AI, with fantastic clickbait titles and graphics, but the article itself is always horrible. I'll click on a Quantum Physics article and it will spend most of the article explaining what Quantum Physics and the Standard Model is. We know what they goddamn are! Get to the story. And it never does. A paragraph at the end will just say something to the extent of "a breakthrough theory is proposing quantum entanglement is tied to gravity". Nothing else is explained. Why? Think about it, the AI is trained with huge data sets, and the article itself is but a tiny node in that set.
Most importantly, AI inherently doesn't know anything about any subject and therefore can't write an accurate article of any interest to anyone, much less an original piece of music.
This is a disaster for the music industry, lowering the inherent value of music even further. Instead of just using Muzak stock music, companies will now just generate music sliiiightly different than artists it is plagiarizing.
Fortunately, this is not possible to do with Functional Music. There are 12 variables in music that affect cognition and if even one is out of place the whole effect falls apart. Will that stop #startups from trying it? Probably not, but they will fail, see high churn rates, low conversions, and hopefully eventually call us up.
But this travesty MUST END for all #music. You invent a sentient AI that can make an original song, what's it going to write about? What emotions will it express that humans can relate to? No, it will be forced to create great "Hooks" that appeal to humans, and IMO that is still immoral and a great disservice to humanity AND to a sentience. But that is light years away. Most people do not realize how dumb AI is. It's a trick. A clever card shuffle.
This has to stop. Spotify, you're a dumbass. I've already moved to Amazon Music which has more music anyway.
I'm absolutely disgusted right now.
(P.S. I saw this under my feed reposted by someone I follow, but the repost option was not available there - sorry about that, and thanks for bringing this to my attention)
The music industry is stacked against new artists—most tracks will never even be HEARD.
Why?
✔️ 120,000 new tracks flood streaming platforms daily—many of them generated by AI, drowning out real artists in a sea of noise.
✔️ Nearly 25% of the music catalog on streaming services didn't get a single play last year—meaning millions of tracks are completely ignored.
✔️ Spotify's new payment model means tracks under 1,000 streams per month won’t receive any royalties, further discouraging artistic creativity.
Do you think streaming platforms should do more to promote emerging artists, or is it just survival of the fittest?
Read more in my blog 👉 https://lnkd.in/dBWFh27E
📊45 million tracks on streaming platforms didn’t receive a single play last year.
Your music faces an epic battle just to be heard.
So what do you do as an artist?
🎵You make "stream-friendly" music over a unique artistic expression.
With 120,000 new tracks uploaded daily to streaming platforms how else are you going to be heard?
🤖Plus a significant portion of these tracks are AI-generated.
Thats an even bigger splash in an already overflowing pool.
What's the solution?
Could niche streaming services or refined algorithms be the answer?
💡Let’s start a conversation on how we can balance creativity with discoverability in this new music economy.
👉Here's an article I wrote on this matter: https://lnkd.in/dBWFh27E
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#MusicIndustry#StreamingMusic#Spotify#DigitalMusic#MusicProduction#ArtistsOnLinkedIn#music#business#marketing#streaming#creativity#AI
Spotify is a $80B music streaming leader with 640 million monthly active users.
Daniel Ek, founder and CEO, shared why he doesn’t worry about competition from Google and Apple. He shares 2 of his secret tools that helped him succeed ↓
1. Focus
"We had this discussion before, we're specialized, we don't do anything other than our own service. Apple and Google does this and about 10,000 other things.
I think there's something huge in terms of that focus because it brings clarity. This is all I do every day I don't invest in other companies, I just focus on building this company, and you know we think by that focus in the thousands, if not millions of hours, that we produce in just creating that experience we will win."
2. Speed
"The way you win in this fast-moving world where honestly it's moving faster and faster by the day and there's so much innovation around the world, the only way you can win is by being super focused on solving one problem better than anyone else and by moving faster than everyone else in solving that problem.
It's really simple if you think about it like that and I like to think that it doesn't matter how many smart Mensa people you have in your company, sooner or later you're gonna get defocused if you do 1,000 things and you can't do all thousand things super well."
__
PS: Is Spotify the best app to listen to music? Reply with Yes, or No.
I give business owners high-level marketing leadership that gives them more CLARITY, DIRECTION, and REVENUE just like a CMO, but without the full-time commitment or cost.
In 2015, Jay Z and his powerful musician friends launched a music streaming service.
It was called: Tidal.
What was the goal of Tidal?
Simple, They wanted to create a streaming platform that would pay artists better.
Their goal was to deal with the bad payment structures of giants like Spotify.
But just 3 weeks after the launch, Tidal failed.
The question is Why?
The answer is simple: To launch a successful business, it is important that you understand what your customer wants and build a solid case for why they should choose you...
Tidal didn’t do that,
They did not focus on what their customer wanted.
So TIdal says, we will pay artists better, right?
How does paying the artists better help the life of the average music listener?
It only makes the artist richer and does nothing for average music listeners.
Tidal has no free, ad-supported tier, but does have a more expensive $20 tier for higher-quality sound.
So why did Tidal flop?
Tidal did not build their business with the customers in mind.
So the customers ignored them and it failed woefully.
If you want your business to succeed as a Coach, Expert, online business owner, or consultant.
You must always answer the question...
What is in it for my customer or client?
Humans are selfish, if there is NOTHING in it for them, they will ignore you.
If you don’t understand this, your marketing will fail woefully...
Because you read this to the end, I have a gift for you:
Learn how to clarify your brand message with this 12-minute video: https://lnkd.in/dfH7suKt
Music Industry Specialist. | Ex Universal Music, Sony Music | Music Label Management | Catalog Marketing & Rights Management | Streaming & Digital Marketing.
Spotify’s new rules see ‘premium’ artists and ‘premium’ content financially prioritized over so-called low-quality tracks and creator accounts with low engagement.
Amongst those rules are that tracks on Spotify must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate royalties on the platform.
Only 19.16% of artists on Spotify had over one thousand monthly listeners in 2023.
Spotify’s monthly listener count represents each unique individual who has streamed an artist’s music at least once in the last 28 days.
Therefore, even if an individual listener streams a song over and over again within the last 28 days they’re only counted once as a monthly listener.
https://lnkd.in/dYPidBPp
A clear explenation of what is wrong in today’s music streaming economy. Without honest renumeration there are no artists. Without artists & creativity there is no music no matter what sort of ingenious algorithms you are using to service your subscribers. But with all the news about Spotify today, we come to understand that they don’t care about the a.m. problems. They are clearly in the game to make as much money as quickly as possible whatever the cost. Music is a vitally important part of a healthy society. Streaming is not the problem it’s the companies that organise it today that are. There are solutions. It’s time new contenders take the field and build a better and durable platform.
🎶 Meet Spotify’s Most Played Artist You've Never Heard Of: Johan Röhr 🎶
In the vast world of music streaming, some artists become household names, while others, like Johan Röhr, achieve phenomenal success quietly. Röhr, the most-streamed artist you've likely never heard of, has had his 2,700 songs streamed a staggering 15 billion times on Spotify, surpassing even Michael Jackson in play counts.
But who is Johan Röhr? He's the mastermind behind over 650 different artists' names on Spotify, including “Maya Åström”, “Minik Knudsen”, and “Mingmei Hsueh”. His music, primarily instrumental, dominates more than 100 of Spotify’s official playlists, contributing massively to his streaming numbers.
The intriguing part of Röhr’s story isn't just his anonymity but the way his music is managed and monetised. Music historian Ted Gioia sheds light on some potentially unsettling practices, suggesting that Spotify's 50/50 royalty deal with Röhr, coupled with his significant presence on the platform, might be a strategy to optimise royalty distributions. This arrangement raises questions about fairness and transparency in royalty payments, especially considering Spotify's Swedish roots align with Röhr’s.
This situation opens up a broader conversation about the dynamics of music streaming and royalty distribution. Are streaming giants like Spotify using artists like Röhr to navigate and potentially exploit royalty payment structures? What does this mean for other artists within the ecosystem?
🔍 What are your thoughts on this development? Is this a clever business strategy or a questionable practice that could undermine the integrity of royalty payments to other artists?
Let's discuss the implications of such arrangements and how they shape the landscape of music streaming.
#Spotify#MusicIndustry#Royalties#StreamingMusic#JohanRöhr
New #Spotify Research Finds Genres People Love the Most. And That's Not Pop.
A new study published by Spotify has revealed how on-demand music streaming services (like Spotify itself) are changing the way we discover and consume new music. By analysing the listening habits of one million Spotify users and streaming patterns of 282K newly released music, researchers uncovered some trends about genre preferences and the unique way users interact with newly released tracks. Some of them are indeed surprising 👇
#musicbusiness#musicdiscovery#musicgenreshttps://lnkd.in/eZQRPRcM
All I can say is, shame on them, them being the DSPs behaving unethically. It is bad enough there are not enough listeners around the world to listen to the 100,000 + daily releases, or is it weekly. Doesn't matter - there are not enough listeners. And when fake artists smother the system, it further delutes the opportunities for those who are following the rules. In my world, something passed off as fake is considered fraud. When considering new laws, perhaps updating existing laws or criminal codes, to update the definition of fraud to include fake artist profiles, with hefty fines might be enough to discourage some of DSPs from doing this. I am just ranting on my coffee break 😁