Why do you hate to recommend a class action lawsuit? That is one the few ways the not so powerful can hold the powerful to account. It's far from perfect but it's what we got, unless you prefer a rope and a hanging posse. And it may come to that.
And can't the listeners be a part of this class? They paid for actual music, but got fake music instead. Isn't that fraud, and on a massive and rapidly-expanding scale?
Where are the criminal charges for willful fraud?
BTW did you all see the toothless "settlement" re Live Nation/Ticketmaster that Trump's DOJ's so-called "anti trust" devision just tried to pull behind the judge's back? Check out Matt Stoller's newsletter today for the details. Boy was that judge angry!
The artists have specific damages, the listeners would have to prove they listened to the tracks. Both classes are probably viable but I believe the artists have a much stronger case. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
King Gizzard and Here We Go Magic have both been victim to this fraud as well. The King Gizzard case was interesting because the songs were actual recreations, lyrics and all, with genAI and attributed to King Lizard Wizard.
In my opinion AI is killing the goose that laid the golden egg across the whole internet. Trying to find something food or recipe related it's impossible to find anything that's not some bullshit AI "blog". I've been burned so many times I don't even consider searching online for recipes anymore and I think the entire internet is going to soon become so cluttered with slop that it'll be more trouble to use than it's worth.
Good pt about recipes. In my case, I tend to stick to known recipe sites - NYT, SeriousEats, a few individuals whom I trust. I should probably get back in the habit of using my many, many cookbooks currently gathering dust in the garage.
If you do do that - highly recommend the website Eat Your Books and associated app CookShelf to make your books searchable by ingredient - it’s a game changer.
I listen to my friend's radio station, https://gwyllm.com/radio-earthrites/ which doesn't always play music I like but I know it's programmed by a human.
Because it’s convenient. I’m part of a WhatsApp group of educated, informed individuals that share playlists and music-related news who continue to use Spotify despite knowing it’s modus operandi. Sadly, convenience is killing the goose.
It was amazing for the first six months or so of its existence, being able to hear albums I’d never had the chance to listen to before, all legally (and apparently paying the artists). It was only occasionally interrupted by a rare ad from “Roberta from Spotify”. I recommended it to so many people and was able to share music with people who would never otherwise have been able to hear music like that, being introduced to really lovely music by friend… but then it changed.
This is probably a good time to share that my new album by Dr. Dre and Frank Sinatra will be out this week on Spotify. I just got out of the studio with Frank, and we agreed this one's gonna be a banger!
Yes it is. Awhile back my Grandson was showing several friends some of my recorded stuff from the past. He said they liked it. (I was very busy & creative with all this during the2010's ).
I remember an agent saying I had good material but you can Never have programmed or Electronic drums on a "Jazz/Smooth Jazz track." "Uh-huh ,Sure". And it was the one that I actually got airplay with.
Cut to now & who do you guess ripped off that tune & others of mine ? Including an entire CD for one ? ... SPOTIFY... its where my Grandson found lots of my tunes.
I remember I used to get LAUGHABLE royalty checks back when I did all this. But of course - all incoming $ to me vanished several years ago. As it did for thousands probably more worthy than me as well.
I suspect that Joe Rogan would love to have you on to discuss this, among other topics. If you're game for that I'd really encourage you to reach out to his people.
Well, this is all the encouragement I need to cancel my Spotify account. I listened to the Jazzmeia Horn and Abbey Lincoln tracks because they are jazz vocalists whose music I love. There are not even any vocals on these tracks-it makes no sense. Let’s all cancel our Spotify accounts until they choose to do better!
If you mean the free market, that is false. It allows for greed, but it can be exposed. Would you rather have a socialist government that controls nearly everything? I would not. Read Adam Smith.
Capitalism "can never be a free market, because the concentration of wealth that it inevitably brings will overflow into the political system and mean that the state will continue to skew the market in favour of big capital." -- Steve Owens
How "free" is the market when it gets run by monopolists? No need to read history or Adam Smith; just look out the window.
Actually, there are no socialist governments anywhere in the world (owning all the "means of production"), but there are plenty of authoritarian ones that keep a noose around the necks of their companies, and...their people!
Also, there are plenty of monopolistic companies right here treating their customers as serfs with nowhere to go. Before it was "the phone company," today is tech, the walled gardens, and the mega-billionaires. They would like to be the next royalty, and you will be the serfs shopping at their company stores.
"Rent seeking" is one of the oldest problems recognized in economics.
Call it whatever you will. Read anyone you wish. It is still happening in a MASSIVE way in this ... "Free" Capitalistic / Socialistic / Tomato Tomahto "Free" Rip off Greed Market.
Adam Smith never used the term "capitalism." He maintained that the existence of corporations was incompatible with free markets. Capitalism is dominated by huge corporations. So capitalism is necessarily incompatible with free markets. Markets are the result of laws and regulations, so the idea of a "free market" is a bit of an oxymoron.
“Our merchants frequently complain of the high wages of British labour as the cause of their manufactures being undersold in foreign markets, but they are silent about the high profits of stock. They complain of the extravagant gain of other people, but they say nothing of their own. The high profits of British stock, however, may contribute towards raising the price of British manufactures in many cases as much, and in some perhaps more, than the high wages of British labour.” -- Adam Smith
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” -- Adam Smith
“The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.” -- Adam Smith
“What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.”
“It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.”
The fans of the artists will know and complain- they know for sure what they look like. Spotify is run by assholes who won't pay proper licensing fees for music, film or photos...
At Motive Unknown we have seen this repeatedly now, Ted. We work with an artist, Bicep, who had not one but three counterfeit albums, all released on the same day: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bicep/s/odw3drOb79 And as you'll see, this isn't just Spotify; it's happening on Tidal too.
In their case, they were able to get the songs taken down because they are with a bigger, more powerful distributor that has the means to talk to the DSPs and get the problem addressed. If you are not one of those people, then you fall into the gap of not knowing who to speak to and the problem never getting resolved.
Equally, you have AI agents now working to a level where they can create the music and entirely handle creating an account with a distributor like Ditto and flooding DSPs with their slop. The really perverse thing is that it would appear the CEO of Ditto was the person responsible for the MCP that was allowing this kind of mass upload through their service (based on comments on my own article).
Much of this boils back to our need to update section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Platforms should be responsible for their content. And responsible for fraud that occurs on their platforms. Let me explain...
We all know information is commerce, data is commerce, tech companies like google are not search engines, they sell marketing and ads. Spotify has never been about music or paying artists, they sell campaigns and ads. I've paid for those with my past albums until I realized how much of a scam it was.
We all know the current FCC is incompetent, so the SEC should broaden its scope to cover internet tech and commerce. Fraud, theft and misinformation should be treated the same way writing a fraudulent check is. A felony.
Tech providers will claim their freedom of speech is under attack, I've heard all the BS and excuses tech companies use to steal our private data, it's simple as having zero tolerance for FRAUD.
The EU will probably be the ones who first make changes on issues like this.
This album cover looks like something I might use... but it's some rain sounds without any human instruments, and completely AI generated. I contacted Score a Score and they promised to take it down but it still lurks up there....
A great come-on slogan to lure new artists to the platform:
"You don't have to be famous to be faked on Spotify!"
Maybe you could suggest it to the management? Wait, no...turn it into a parody song....and keep it quiet; you want airplay. Let it fly under the radar and spread like a cancer.
The problem is at the distribution level. You can pay Distrokid, or a bunch of other services, $20 a year or so to distribute your music to every service. Distributors have no incentive to stop this. And there’s no great detection for streaming services. The best solutions imo are some sort of upload limits through distributors and streaming services locking down certain accounts so they can only publish uploads from certain partners
I still think Martin Mills' idea of charging just a dollar per track per annum would go a long way to addressing this. Right now someone can pay Distrokid a fixed fee but can then haemorrhage tracks daily if they wished to. So it doesn't even feel like a complex technical solution is necessarily required; this is an admin shift and would heavily impact the problem in no time IMO.
I mean... if you were paying $12 a year to keep your 12 track album on DSPs, is that too much to ask? I'd argue not, though I'm sure someone out there might take offence at that assumption. But there needs to be some kind of gatekeeping otherwise you wind up where we are now.
There's gobs and gobs of slop 'Celtic' slop on Youtube - AI bagpipes, fiddles, whistles, bodhrans, etc. I haven't seen impersonation, but there are artists that sell (sold) in big numbers that might end up targeted.
I hate to recommend it but a class action lawsuit seems worth pursuing on behalf of these artists seems warranted.
Why do you hate to recommend a class action lawsuit? That is one the few ways the not so powerful can hold the powerful to account. It's far from perfect but it's what we got, unless you prefer a rope and a hanging posse. And it may come to that.
Class action or not, if they don’t get sued they won’t stop.
And can't the listeners be a part of this class? They paid for actual music, but got fake music instead. Isn't that fraud, and on a massive and rapidly-expanding scale?
Where are the criminal charges for willful fraud?
BTW did you all see the toothless "settlement" re Live Nation/Ticketmaster that Trump's DOJ's so-called "anti trust" devision just tried to pull behind the judge's back? Check out Matt Stoller's newsletter today for the details. Boy was that judge angry!
The artists have specific damages, the listeners would have to prove they listened to the tracks. Both classes are probably viable but I believe the artists have a much stronger case. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
https://m.youtube.com/topmusicattorney
King Gizzard and Here We Go Magic have both been victim to this fraud as well. The King Gizzard case was interesting because the songs were actual recreations, lyrics and all, with genAI and attributed to King Lizard Wizard.
In my opinion AI is killing the goose that laid the golden egg across the whole internet. Trying to find something food or recipe related it's impossible to find anything that's not some bullshit AI "blog". I've been burned so many times I don't even consider searching online for recipes anymore and I think the entire internet is going to soon become so cluttered with slop that it'll be more trouble to use than it's worth.
Good pt about recipes. In my case, I tend to stick to known recipe sites - NYT, SeriousEats, a few individuals whom I trust. I should probably get back in the habit of using my many, many cookbooks currently gathering dust in the garage.
If you do do that - highly recommend the website Eat Your Books and associated app CookShelf to make your books searchable by ingredient - it’s a game changer.
I agree - Spotify killed the golden goose. Corporate greed is disgusting.
Why is anyone still using Spotify?
Never had it, never will!
Ditto. I buy music, usually via no DRM downloads, and add it to my own playlists on my phone for when away from home.
When we still had "radio" that mattered we had humans curating the music playlists. A number of DJs were great, and had dedicated listeners.
Then Clear Channel, the precursor of Spotify, came along.
https://radiofidelity.com/the-rise-of-clear-channel-radio/
Founded by a Harvard-educated investment banker, not anybody from "music". He just smelled $$$$$. What a surprise!
And you may recall that "Payola" scandal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
Any lack of schemers and scammers will soon be filled by the "smart" people.
I listen to my friend's radio station, https://gwyllm.com/radio-earthrites/ which doesn't always play music I like but I know it's programmed by a human.
I remember with DJs had pesonalities and followers. You called them to request tunes. Human on human, no app anywhere!
I loved WBAI and WNCN back in the day, and also Karl Haas, in particular, a music lover's music lover, friend, and teacher:
http://www.electricka.com/etaf/etafhomepages/features/feature_list/biographies/karl_haas/karl_haas_home.htm
The world is poorer without him in it. He was the anti-Spotify!
fwiw there are still great local radio stations -- KUTX in Austin is dj'd by actual humans who know actual music
I used it for a while but then quit, never to return.
same
Because it’s convenient. I’m part of a WhatsApp group of educated, informed individuals that share playlists and music-related news who continue to use Spotify despite knowing it’s modus operandi. Sadly, convenience is killing the goose.
It was amazing for the first six months or so of its existence, being able to hear albums I’d never had the chance to listen to before, all legally (and apparently paying the artists). It was only occasionally interrupted by a rare ad from “Roberta from Spotify”. I recommended it to so many people and was able to share music with people who would never otherwise have been able to hear music like that, being introduced to really lovely music by friend… but then it changed.
I'm canceling my Spotify membership as soon as I finish typing this. Disgusted and outraged.
Good for you!
This is probably a good time to share that my new album by Dr. Dre and Frank Sinatra will be out this week on Spotify. I just got out of the studio with Frank, and we agreed this one's gonna be a banger!
Wasn't that Beethoven on the drums behind you?
He was laying down some MAD beats
Spotify is just a rip-off platform, through and through. People need to stop using it. It will never get better.
Yes it is. Awhile back my Grandson was showing several friends some of my recorded stuff from the past. He said they liked it. (I was very busy & creative with all this during the2010's ).
I remember an agent saying I had good material but you can Never have programmed or Electronic drums on a "Jazz/Smooth Jazz track." "Uh-huh ,Sure". And it was the one that I actually got airplay with.
Cut to now & who do you guess ripped off that tune & others of mine ? Including an entire CD for one ? ... SPOTIFY... its where my Grandson found lots of my tunes.
I remember I used to get LAUGHABLE royalty checks back when I did all this. But of course - all incoming $ to me vanished several years ago. As it did for thousands probably more worthy than me as well.
Important work you’re doing Ted, thank you
I suspect that Joe Rogan would love to have you on to discuss this, among other topics. If you're game for that I'd really encourage you to reach out to his people.
Well, this is all the encouragement I need to cancel my Spotify account. I listened to the Jazzmeia Horn and Abbey Lincoln tracks because they are jazz vocalists whose music I love. There are not even any vocals on these tracks-it makes no sense. Let’s all cancel our Spotify accounts until they choose to do better!
Who could have predicted that an economic ideology whose premise is that greed is good would produce shitty results?
If you mean the free market, that is false. It allows for greed, but it can be exposed. Would you rather have a socialist government that controls nearly everything? I would not. Read Adam Smith.
Capitalism "can never be a free market, because the concentration of wealth that it inevitably brings will overflow into the political system and mean that the state will continue to skew the market in favour of big capital." -- Steve Owens
It's more free than under socialism. No econcomic system can address greed, but the free market minimizes the damage. Read Adam Smith.
How "free" is the market when it gets run by monopolists? No need to read history or Adam Smith; just look out the window.
Actually, there are no socialist governments anywhere in the world (owning all the "means of production"), but there are plenty of authoritarian ones that keep a noose around the necks of their companies, and...their people!
Also, there are plenty of monopolistic companies right here treating their customers as serfs with nowhere to go. Before it was "the phone company," today is tech, the walled gardens, and the mega-billionaires. They would like to be the next royalty, and you will be the serfs shopping at their company stores.
"Rent seeking" is one of the oldest problems recognized in economics.
Socialism or barbarism, buddy. Rosa Luxemburg knew.
Call it whatever you will. Read anyone you wish. It is still happening in a MASSIVE way in this ... "Free" Capitalistic / Socialistic / Tomato Tomahto "Free" Rip off Greed Market.
fortunately, there are block buttons, so I will never have to see your evidence-free, negative externalities-blind obnoxious opinions ever again.
Adam Smith never used the term "capitalism." He maintained that the existence of corporations was incompatible with free markets. Capitalism is dominated by huge corporations. So capitalism is necessarily incompatible with free markets. Markets are the result of laws and regulations, so the idea of a "free market" is a bit of an oxymoron.
“Our merchants frequently complain of the high wages of British labour as the cause of their manufactures being undersold in foreign markets, but they are silent about the high profits of stock. They complain of the extravagant gain of other people, but they say nothing of their own. The high profits of British stock, however, may contribute towards raising the price of British manufactures in many cases as much, and in some perhaps more, than the high wages of British labour.” -- Adam Smith
that's not how socialism works bro
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” -- Adam Smith
“The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.” -- Adam Smith
“What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.”
“It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.”
--Adam Smith from The Wealth of Nations
Thank you, correct!
The fans of the artists will know and complain- they know for sure what they look like. Spotify is run by assholes who won't pay proper licensing fees for music, film or photos...
At Motive Unknown we have seen this repeatedly now, Ted. We work with an artist, Bicep, who had not one but three counterfeit albums, all released on the same day: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bicep/s/odw3drOb79 And as you'll see, this isn't just Spotify; it's happening on Tidal too.
In their case, they were able to get the songs taken down because they are with a bigger, more powerful distributor that has the means to talk to the DSPs and get the problem addressed. If you are not one of those people, then you fall into the gap of not knowing who to speak to and the problem never getting resolved.
Equally, you have AI agents now working to a level where they can create the music and entirely handle creating an account with a distributor like Ditto and flooding DSPs with their slop. The really perverse thing is that it would appear the CEO of Ditto was the person responsible for the MCP that was allowing this kind of mass upload through their service (based on comments on my own article).
As I wrote about in my own piece the other day, I think there's a fundamental problem with confirming artists as authentic. It's worth taking a look at the platform Genotone - https://genotone.com/ - which is aiming to solve this problem and looks like it has a relatively elegant solution. (And if you fancied reading my piece, that's here - https://networknotesnewsletter.substack.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-bots?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web)
Much of this boils back to our need to update section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Platforms should be responsible for their content. And responsible for fraud that occurs on their platforms. Let me explain...
We all know information is commerce, data is commerce, tech companies like google are not search engines, they sell marketing and ads. Spotify has never been about music or paying artists, they sell campaigns and ads. I've paid for those with my past albums until I realized how much of a scam it was.
We all know the current FCC is incompetent, so the SEC should broaden its scope to cover internet tech and commerce. Fraud, theft and misinformation should be treated the same way writing a fraudulent check is. A felony.
Tech providers will claim their freedom of speech is under attack, I've heard all the BS and excuses tech companies use to steal our private data, it's simple as having zero tolerance for FRAUD.
The EU will probably be the ones who first make changes on issues like this.
You don't have to be famous to be faked on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0am58B7t8hWDe62l9hsQEP
This album cover looks like something I might use... but it's some rain sounds without any human instruments, and completely AI generated. I contacted Score a Score and they promised to take it down but it still lurks up there....
A great come-on slogan to lure new artists to the platform:
"You don't have to be famous to be faked on Spotify!"
Maybe you could suggest it to the management? Wait, no...turn it into a parody song....and keep it quiet; you want airplay. Let it fly under the radar and spread like a cancer.
"You call it cancer; we call it revenue!"
"One short step away from White Noise!"
"We put the "F' in Spot-i-Fake!"
etc etc
The problem is at the distribution level. You can pay Distrokid, or a bunch of other services, $20 a year or so to distribute your music to every service. Distributors have no incentive to stop this. And there’s no great detection for streaming services. The best solutions imo are some sort of upload limits through distributors and streaming services locking down certain accounts so they can only publish uploads from certain partners
I still think Martin Mills' idea of charging just a dollar per track per annum would go a long way to addressing this. Right now someone can pay Distrokid a fixed fee but can then haemorrhage tracks daily if they wished to. So it doesn't even feel like a complex technical solution is necessarily required; this is an admin shift and would heavily impact the problem in no time IMO.
I go back and forth on this. Does it ultimately make it harder for true indie artists? I think it would work though
I mean... if you were paying $12 a year to keep your 12 track album on DSPs, is that too much to ask? I'd argue not, though I'm sure someone out there might take offence at that assumption. But there needs to be some kind of gatekeeping otherwise you wind up where we are now.
There's gobs and gobs of slop 'Celtic' slop on Youtube - AI bagpipes, fiddles, whistles, bodhrans, etc. I haven't seen impersonation, but there are artists that sell (sold) in big numbers that might end up targeted.