this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
83 points (96.6% liked)
Hacker News
339 readers
292 users here now
RSS Feed of HackerNews
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This article is a TLDR of an investigatory book coming out next month already, but the double TLDR:
Spotify has begun targeting "background music genres" like jazz and electronic music for "Perfect Fit Content". It's made by nameless "artists" (mentioned to possibly be AI generated) and they get no royalties (don't have to be paid).
Spotify takes this song, posts it to dozens, if not hundreds of fake artists' pages, and boosts them to the top of the algorithm to get hundreds of millions of listens. More listens than actual popular human artist. This artificially pumps Spotify's stock prices, and then the CEO of spotify dumped their stock, making nearly a billion dollars this year.
Likened to Payola, this hurts actual artists' payout rates on Spotify.