Soylent for Music

Last week, Liz Pelly was a guest on Hard Fork and also Taylor Lorenz’s Power User talking about her new book Mood Machine: The rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. One of the most interesting issues she raises is the advent of ghost artists on the Spotify platform. There’s a helpful extract in Harper’s here but essentially the gist is that Spotify realized that certain high traffic playlists, especially ones people used as what Spotify refers to as "lean back listening" or background noise for work, study, sleep and other activities that require focus, could just as easily be populated:

“with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians–variously called ghost or fake artists–presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself”

In a nutshell, the back and forth Pelly has with Casey and Kevin on Hard Fork is 1) sure, it may not matter much to the user experience that your chill out playlist is full of generic royalty free Muzak?? but 2) it can’t be ignored that this is a pretty terrible precedent for the creative community that were sold the idea that these playlists were a rung on the ladder to making real revenue on the platform.

Anyway, I recommend listening.

Also, this reminded me of Peter Childers and Brian Eno’s generative music app Bloom. Anyone remember this? It was among the first wave of experimental and innovate apps for the iPhone.

"Bloom is a generative music application for iOS.. The software allows for the creation of simple ambient tracks through touch-screen controls and a variety of settings, with created songs looping parts as opposed to a traditional track runtime."

As with everything Brian Eno does, It was cool. I was amazed to find it still around. But listening to Liz Pelly, it won't surprise me if Spotify and other streaming music services start looking to generative solutions to deliver what Spotify refers to as PFC or “Perfect Fit Content” playlists, high density chunks of background ambience generated on the fly to suit your mood.

Thanks, I hate it.