Johan Röhr is Swedish, as is Spotify, and his success getting onto so many Spotify playlists is largely Spotify generated, not user generated, playlists. Spotify then uses Röhr's pseudonyms as data and marketing citing HUNDREDS of successful indie artists on the service who are, actually, one. Röhr becomes a millionaire, Spotify gets to cut its compensation of other working artists worldwide:
Is this not fraud? Like I wouldn't know the law, Swedish or otherwise, but inventing Potemkin users to funnel pooled revenues back to the company rather than distributing them as royalties seems like a fairly common sense notion of fraud. If anything it should prove that the algorithm is not just cranking decisions based on total uploads and users' attention to them but specifically selecting winners.
Furthermore is Johan Röhr a real person? Does he personally know Daniel Eks?
This is why I forego music streaming entirely. It's bullshit music being forced on entirely ignorant consumers by tech idiots who don't know their ass when it comes to ACTUAL music.
I’m glad I’m old enough to have started in the 80’s, went on a few tours, signed a few contracts, had a stint on a few major labels, made a lot of friends along the way, and then got totally fed up with it all and decided to do it DIY as Peter Gabriel once said. I’m too old for this streaming nonsense. Sorry, this all sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. These billionaires that have destroyed our copyrights should all be in prison for mass theft but then again, I don’t see any billionaire going to prison for anything, including trying to overthrow the US government.
I’m glad I’ve remained a fringe artist and made many friends with fellow fringe artists around the world by keeping to my ethics while they kept to their ethics as well. Art is a hammer, it is not a mirror. It is NOT a vanity project to rip people off with.
Spotify is a plague on any serious musician. This new crop of “artists” that you have revealed for us here all sound like mass produced elevator music that would have been in the New Age section of J&R Music World and Tower Records, but now this nonsense can easily be done with softsynth presets and no ability to play a real instrument. They all need to get a day job and get their nails dirty like we all did in the 80’s and 90’s while we played gigs at night in front of a real audience and got home at 4am to get up at 6am to go to work to pay our rent.
A few thoughts: How do we know that Johan Röhr doesn't have a deal with Spotify to generate streams? Just saying. As for streams themselves, though selling only 10 mil copies of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," as a member of that vintage, I know the records were played over and over to the point that it's quite possible they were played a billion times combined by a much smaller world population that claimed personal ownership and connection to the Beatles song.
I don't believe Spotify is in anything other than the content business, and I tell my musical brethren not to put too much stock in it, for they put no stock in you.
This reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago on Spotify. I wanted a stream of classic soul while cooking, so I looked for one, deliberately bypassed Spotify's self-generated, and found one populated with the great usual suspects: Al Green, Marvin Gaye, The Spinners, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, etc. Great - hit shuffle. After a few dozen gems that I knew I heard one I didn't, and didn't sound of the era to me, production wise. It sounded like someone contemporary trying to sound like the era. Looked up the artist - no info whatsoever.
And then this thought occurred to me - I'm a jazz guitarist by trade. What if I made a Classic Jazz Guitar playlist, filled it with Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, and so on, and then slipped in a couple of my tracks. How many randomly generated hits could I expect to get? The only thing I'd need to do to cover my tracks is make sure the performer's name and playlist maker's name are different.
Or in an anonymous background music world, would anyone look even that closely?
Good points here Ted if somewhat of a bummer. Quantity of content over quality. What streaming has done to music has bastardized the all important connection between artist and the listener. It really is more than shame. It is horrible. I consider good music sacred. This is one of many reasons that I have stayed away from music streaming platforms.
Fascinating. We have all likely listened to music made by anons, but it's hard to see them overtaking human artists. Writing has a different dynamic. Ben Franklin is the most notable member in a long tradition of anon writers, who have always shaped culture: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-stay-anonymous-top-anons-creativity-trust
Ted, you should investigate the world of Spotify "playlist pitching." It's closely related to what you've written here, and it's a fascinating (and rather gross) topic in its own right.
It's the world of websites, such as SubmitHub, in which musicians pitch their music to Spotify playlist owners. The website provides a search engine, so that the musician can find playlists relevant for their own music. Then the musician pays a fee for the playlist owner to listen to their music (which doesn't guarantee a placement, so hence it's legal because it technically doesn't count as payola).
Many of the playlists in that world are "task-driven," such as Music For Studying, Music For Late Night, Music For Coffee Shops, etc. I admit I tried pitching my own music, and I got quite disillusioned. In that kind of setup, there's seemingly no place for creativity or artistic vision — only for submitting music that fits existing, tightly defined boxes.
"How can he write music that generates 15 billion streams—I note that the population of the entire Earth is just 8 billion people—and live in total obscurity?"
Via a visibility-blocking curtain made of thick wads of money. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (minimally edited just to correct for awkward Google translation grammar):
"Spotify has long claimed that all artists have a chance to get onto the company's playlists. The audience's interest and the quality of the music must govern. But Dagens Nyheter was told in a previous review that artists and their record companies accept a reduced compensation per song played in exchange for a good chance to end up on the big playlists. According to royalty payments, which Dagens Nyheter has seen, it is about a quarter of the usual compensation. Thanks to the playlists' large audience, the arrangement is profitable."
No kidding. Dagens Nyheter reports that Röhr's company brought in 32.7 million Swedish Kronors (almost exactly $3m US) in 2022. If it's true that Röhr accepted 25% of the usual compensation in exchange for play, he saved Spotify maybe $9m (very approximately, I have no idea about deductions, expenses, etc) compared to what they'd have had to pay real -- named, known -- artists the supposed going rate.
That calculation presupposes that honesty and full compensation are the default metrics, though, when there's no reason to think that the fake identifies are anything but a deliberately constructed money making scam. IF every single wad of "Röhr's" anodyne, cloying treacle had been released under one name it would almost certainly have tossed a spanner in the works early on. Listeners would have seen the constant wallpapering of one particular name and thought "Huh? This guy again? What is this crap? What's the story here?"
At least some subscribers would probably have grokked they'd been scammed by a sort of inverse one-and-a-half Milli Vanilli...in the pike position.
You pointed out the beginning of this many years ago when you wrote about ‘jazz being relegated to background music for cafes’. Never forgot that.
Some of my friends have music follow them for literally 90% of their waking hours (and sleeping too). In the shower, while working, while driving, while cooking, etc.
This... this is why I stopped listening to playlists on Spotify. The idea that I might be listening to ai generated music freaks me out. I hate how music is consumed now. It actually makes me very sad.
Okay, so, here's the other thing about this:
Johan Röhr is Swedish, as is Spotify, and his success getting onto so many Spotify playlists is largely Spotify generated, not user generated, playlists. Spotify then uses Röhr's pseudonyms as data and marketing citing HUNDREDS of successful indie artists on the service who are, actually, one. Röhr becomes a millionaire, Spotify gets to cut its compensation of other working artists worldwide:
Is this not fraud? Like I wouldn't know the law, Swedish or otherwise, but inventing Potemkin users to funnel pooled revenues back to the company rather than distributing them as royalties seems like a fairly common sense notion of fraud. If anything it should prove that the algorithm is not just cranking decisions based on total uploads and users' attention to them but specifically selecting winners.
Furthermore is Johan Röhr a real person? Does he personally know Daniel Eks?
This is why I forego music streaming entirely. It's bullshit music being forced on entirely ignorant consumers by tech idiots who don't know their ass when it comes to ACTUAL music.
Listen to albums, not playlists.
🎶 Spotify killed the humanoid star 📻
I’m glad I’m old enough to have started in the 80’s, went on a few tours, signed a few contracts, had a stint on a few major labels, made a lot of friends along the way, and then got totally fed up with it all and decided to do it DIY as Peter Gabriel once said. I’m too old for this streaming nonsense. Sorry, this all sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. These billionaires that have destroyed our copyrights should all be in prison for mass theft but then again, I don’t see any billionaire going to prison for anything, including trying to overthrow the US government.
I’m glad I’ve remained a fringe artist and made many friends with fellow fringe artists around the world by keeping to my ethics while they kept to their ethics as well. Art is a hammer, it is not a mirror. It is NOT a vanity project to rip people off with.
Spotify is a plague on any serious musician. This new crop of “artists” that you have revealed for us here all sound like mass produced elevator music that would have been in the New Age section of J&R Music World and Tower Records, but now this nonsense can easily be done with softsynth presets and no ability to play a real instrument. They all need to get a day job and get their nails dirty like we all did in the 80’s and 90’s while we played gigs at night in front of a real audience and got home at 4am to get up at 6am to go to work to pay our rent.
- Old Man Screaming At The Clouds
A few thoughts: How do we know that Johan Röhr doesn't have a deal with Spotify to generate streams? Just saying. As for streams themselves, though selling only 10 mil copies of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," as a member of that vintage, I know the records were played over and over to the point that it's quite possible they were played a billion times combined by a much smaller world population that claimed personal ownership and connection to the Beatles song.
I don't believe Spotify is in anything other than the content business, and I tell my musical brethren not to put too much stock in it, for they put no stock in you.
It's funny, in a sick way, how people who rebel against "corporate culture" and "over-processed food" still consume garbage like this.
This reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago on Spotify. I wanted a stream of classic soul while cooking, so I looked for one, deliberately bypassed Spotify's self-generated, and found one populated with the great usual suspects: Al Green, Marvin Gaye, The Spinners, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, etc. Great - hit shuffle. After a few dozen gems that I knew I heard one I didn't, and didn't sound of the era to me, production wise. It sounded like someone contemporary trying to sound like the era. Looked up the artist - no info whatsoever.
And then this thought occurred to me - I'm a jazz guitarist by trade. What if I made a Classic Jazz Guitar playlist, filled it with Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, and so on, and then slipped in a couple of my tracks. How many randomly generated hits could I expect to get? The only thing I'd need to do to cover my tracks is make sure the performer's name and playlist maker's name are different.
Or in an anonymous background music world, would anyone look even that closely?
Good points here Ted if somewhat of a bummer. Quantity of content over quality. What streaming has done to music has bastardized the all important connection between artist and the listener. It really is more than shame. It is horrible. I consider good music sacred. This is one of many reasons that I have stayed away from music streaming platforms.
Fascinating. We have all likely listened to music made by anons, but it's hard to see them overtaking human artists. Writing has a different dynamic. Ben Franklin is the most notable member in a long tradition of anon writers, who have always shaped culture: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-stay-anonymous-top-anons-creativity-trust
It’s this exact situation that allows a platform like Bandcamp to shine.
Mindless streams of pointless background music are the audio versions of the endless scroll.
Ted, you should investigate the world of Spotify "playlist pitching." It's closely related to what you've written here, and it's a fascinating (and rather gross) topic in its own right.
It's the world of websites, such as SubmitHub, in which musicians pitch their music to Spotify playlist owners. The website provides a search engine, so that the musician can find playlists relevant for their own music. Then the musician pays a fee for the playlist owner to listen to their music (which doesn't guarantee a placement, so hence it's legal because it technically doesn't count as payola).
Many of the playlists in that world are "task-driven," such as Music For Studying, Music For Late Night, Music For Coffee Shops, etc. I admit I tried pitching my own music, and I got quite disillusioned. In that kind of setup, there's seemingly no place for creativity or artistic vision — only for submitting music that fits existing, tightly defined boxes.
"How can he write music that generates 15 billion streams—I note that the population of the entire Earth is just 8 billion people—and live in total obscurity?"
Via a visibility-blocking curtain made of thick wads of money. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (minimally edited just to correct for awkward Google translation grammar):
"Spotify has long claimed that all artists have a chance to get onto the company's playlists. The audience's interest and the quality of the music must govern. But Dagens Nyheter was told in a previous review that artists and their record companies accept a reduced compensation per song played in exchange for a good chance to end up on the big playlists. According to royalty payments, which Dagens Nyheter has seen, it is about a quarter of the usual compensation. Thanks to the playlists' large audience, the arrangement is profitable."
No kidding. Dagens Nyheter reports that Röhr's company brought in 32.7 million Swedish Kronors (almost exactly $3m US) in 2022. If it's true that Röhr accepted 25% of the usual compensation in exchange for play, he saved Spotify maybe $9m (very approximately, I have no idea about deductions, expenses, etc) compared to what they'd have had to pay real -- named, known -- artists the supposed going rate.
That calculation presupposes that honesty and full compensation are the default metrics, though, when there's no reason to think that the fake identifies are anything but a deliberately constructed money making scam. IF every single wad of "Röhr's" anodyne, cloying treacle had been released under one name it would almost certainly have tossed a spanner in the works early on. Listeners would have seen the constant wallpapering of one particular name and thought "Huh? This guy again? What is this crap? What's the story here?"
At least some subscribers would probably have grokked they'd been scammed by a sort of inverse one-and-a-half Milli Vanilli...in the pike position.
Go to https://www.artistshare.com/ and purchase Data Lords, by the Maria Schneider Orchestra.
https://www.artistshare.com/projects/experience/1/510/1
Not available on any streaming service. Real good music made by real good people.
You pointed out the beginning of this many years ago when you wrote about ‘jazz being relegated to background music for cafes’. Never forgot that.
Some of my friends have music follow them for literally 90% of their waking hours (and sleeping too). In the shower, while working, while driving, while cooking, etc.
This... this is why I stopped listening to playlists on Spotify. The idea that I might be listening to ai generated music freaks me out. I hate how music is consumed now. It actually makes me very sad.