<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/13/music-streaming-royalty-hacking-shows-how-desperately-the-system-needs-to-be-overhauled/>
"There’s an interesting story on
Wired about “functional music” – things like
white noise and brown noise – which is widely available on music streaming
platforms. These kind of streams are causing a problem that arises from the
fact that the money earned by streaming platforms is allotted in a rather odd
way. All the revenues are put together, and then divided up according to an
individual artist’s share of the service’s total number of streams. In
practice, this means that the subscription paid by someone who only listens to
interesting but obscure artists nonetheless goes mostly to the big names in pop
music, whose music is listened to millions of times a day.
Because of this revenue division, spam streaming can be highly profitable. Here
are some of the tricks that are used, as described by
Wired:
They might involve uploads with optimized search names like “Relaxing Music
Music Therapy” or “Relaxation, Sound Therapy.” Sometimes, they are songs
just long enough, at 31 seconds, to trigger royalty payments. Other times,
scammers will upload 10,000 versions of the same track, each with a
different artist name. As generative AI becomes more accessible and
sophisticated, spamming platforms is only going to get easier.
It’s clearly unfair that these kinds of songs should receive a share of the
platform’s revenues based purely on the total number of streams, which is easy
to game. But the solution that the French streaming platform Deezer has come up
with has its own problems:
Deezer will demonetize the hum of the washing machine and the drone of
bot-generated muzak. Additionally, every stream of someone whom Deezer dubs
a “professional artist”—those with a minimum of 1,000 streams per month by a
minimum of 500 unique listeners—will count for double.
One issue is that Deezer gets to define who is a “professional artist”, but
music tastes are notoriously personal. Moreover, it’s quite possible that some
people like listening to washing machines or bot-generated muzak – or just
avant-garde music that sounds like these things. There’s no reason they should
be discriminated against."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
