Half a Million Spotify Users Are Unknowingly Grooving to an AI-Generated Band
A supposed band called The Velvet Sundown has released two albums of AI slop this month.
Half a million Spotify users are being pushed AI slop by Spotify in order to pad Spotify's profit margin
"Human Music. Huh. I like it."
Honestly, top pop/rock charts have been filled with so much bland, repetitive and uninspired "music" that I wonder just how much of that isn't AI with a coat of paint over it...
Well that makes a few of us with that opinion
On the one hand, you can blame AI for destroying the arts. On the other hand, if the AI product is seen as superior to a certain baseline in the creative arts or music business, what does it tell you about the average quality and creativity in that area?
I don't listen to modern pop/rock music anymore, as it has become a larely monotonous, boring, uninspiring carpet of notes and sounds. Same with "creative" arts: How many people randomly throwing paint at canvasses does the world need?
This ignores that corporate media controls what is put out on the radio and what is allowed to become popular. The generic sameness is not because of the artist but because of the economic forces, the same forces that give us AI ‘music’ garbage
This has absolutely nothing to do with quality. This is about exposure and algorithms.
What does superior mean? If it means superior for the person publishing the song, that likely means it's much cheaper and good enough to not drive away so much traffic you lose profit.
It's essentially the enshittification of culture. Things are being done in the lowest cost way possible and making things worse, but not so much worse that people complain about it.
And that's why I pick which bands I listen to very carefully.
The act of "listening" had changed tons to make this news not too exciting for me..
I'd guess the amount of ppl not paying attention to what they're listening to (algorithms, putting whatever on as background noise like for sleep) is more than audiophiles devouring b-sides of their favorite, modestly popular artists.
Garbage in, garbage out
Has anybody played Cookie Clicker? Articles like these really give me a similar vibe as the news ticker in that game. It starts a bit innocent like "Your cookies are talked about for miles around" but you're already on the slope to "Elder gods from the whole cosmos have awoken to taste your cookies" and the eldritch-like horrors of the Grandmapocalypse. Just a fun parallel.
It's The Velvet Sundown if you want to know.
I wonder if they played with the algorithm to get their own music played more?
Spotify became profitable for a full year for the first time in Q4 2024. I think it's no coincidence. That plus jacking their prices by 25%, and implementing barriers for payout that affect smaller artists (<1k monthly listeners) under the guise of "weeding out AI spam", they know exactly what they're doing.
This band is all over playlists including Spotify's own, and tons of movie soundtrack playlists for some reason (even older movies like Garden State). Lots of these playlists are by Spotify users Lost Records and KULTPOP! which seem to be nobodies who happen to be successful playlist curators. Sus.
Right now The Velvet Sundown has 750k monthly listeners. It's questionable how many of those are real listeners and how many are just bots meant to boost the appearance of their popularity. Spotify has not given a reason to trust that they wouldn't boost an AI band to help their bottom line.
Spotify will kill music for profit. No surprise there.
Very dodgy indeed, it sounds like there's a lot of strings being pulled to promote their slop.
I use Jellyfin :p
Muzak. It's muzak.
