‘Spotify was caught (very publicly) paying production companies to make ambient and cafe jazz tracks under fake artist names so they could pay fewer royalties to real artists.’

Spotify is an anti-music leech. As if their minuscule streaming payouts weren’t bad enough, now this?

‘ Roughly twenty songwriters were operating behind more than five hundred fake artist names. One production company, Firefly Entertainment, was linked to 830 fake artists — at least 495 of which had music sitting on Spotify’s own first-party playlists — while Firefly’s revenue grew tenfold in three years.

The connection between Firefly and Spotify, as Dagens Nyheter and Liz Pelly documented, ran through a lifelong personal friendship between Firefly's founder Fredrik Hult and Nick Holmstén — the man who served as Spotify's global head of music, with ultimate responsibility for playlisting strategy. Two guys from the same small Swedish town. Family vacations together, dinners out, visits to the Spotify office, all lovingly documented on Instagram, including a photo of Hult posing with Firefly producers at Spotify’s 2018 Grammy party.

Dagens Nyheter’s analysis found that Firefly’s tracks land on flagship editorial playlists within one hour of upload—an advantage real artists wait a week or more for, having pitched through standard channels. This speed provides a massive algorithmic head-start — and because Spotify pays from a shared pro-rata pool, every stream these ghost tracks vacuum up is money that would have otherwise gone to legitimate, working musicians.’

https://joelgouveia.substack.com/p/escaping-the-devil-you-kn...

The conclusion doesn't follow the rest of the article:

> It’s astonishingly simple. If you can’t prove you’re a human, you can’t upload your music. This would get rid of 99% of slop and streaming fraud overnight.

No. No it wouldn't. Most AI artists have human identities tied to them.

Like sure, there are probably some bot networks automating all of this stuff. But a lot of the posters want to be seen as musicians without actually learning to make any of the music. They want their name associated with their AI-generated songs, not hidden away behind a label.

Also not a huge fan of the support for gatekeepers either. Feels like society is better when people don't need to get third party approval to distribute their work to the world, and when artists don't need to abide by predatory contracts from labels.

This advice is good though. All platforms should make this a thing:

> Legacy catalog tracks must be reviewed by humans before being taken down.

> Artists must be granted a mandatory notice and appeal window with human customer support.

> Wrongly removed music must be restored with stream counts and royalties left intact.

We need to make it illegal to have AI moderate content without human involvement, in the same way it shouldn't be allowed to act as a police officer or judge.