If you’re a musician struggling to get heard these revelations will make your blood boil!
The latest Rick Beato interview with Ted Gioia is so pertinent to any musician looking to get heard that I have taken the time to manually edit the transcript to make it more readable, and to save you having to watch the whole 1-hour video to get the salient points.
Here’s the gist of what Ted said
A user was listening to Spotify and he kept hearing the same song over and over again. He noticed it was a 41 second song and it had a different name and a different artist every time. All the songs sounded almost identical, so he compiled a playlist of 49 songs. They had different names or different artists and were attributed to different composers. It's obvious to conclude (but can't be proved) this is Spotify's way of using Ai to bump up their profits.
They have ai songs that they attribute to people who don't exist, and this allows them to take royalties that would otherwise go to musicians. If they own the work themselves, created by AI, they're going to be able to maximize their revenues!
It’s hard to prove, but it's hard to think of some other explanation for what's going on.
This is the real threat to musicians behind ai in music, not because ai can do the job better than musicians. It can’t. The real threat is that the platforms don’t have to pay royalties because they can own it.
No one has ever said “my favorite genre of music is ai!”
Ai is being used to save cost in in a deceptive way and that's my fear is that what's happening with AI is it's a cost savings measure being forced duplicitously on the market for the benefit of the companies and hurting the fans and hurting the musicians.
I think uh the story of Johan Röhr from Sweden is very interesting because he has achieved 15 billion streams on Spotify. That's a BIG number. Let me tell you how large it is, that's more than Michael Jackson, more than Elton John, it's more than Abba! Nobody out there, with maybe two or three exceptions in the whole world, can get that kind of streams.
Why is that well Johan Röhr never uses his own name in his music? He has 656 different aliases, sometimes there's a man or a woman. or different National groups. or whatever. He never uses his own name. He uses 656 different names and then shows up on all these playlists he is on 144 Different official Spotify curated playlists reaching 62 million people.
Sometimes he's 40% or more of a single playlist - but no one knows about it because the name changes. They're able to push all this traffic to Johan R. Why is Spotify doing this now?
I got an email from somebody. I can't say if this is true. They said…
Ted you didn't hear this from me but Spotify owns all the rights of those songs and they're using this. Big surprise he Swedish and right down the street from the Spotify headquarters.
Now I can't prove that they are using Johan Röhr to avoid playing paying royalties to real musicians but what other explanation can there be? and let me give you a sort of a hint of the disparity here. I started looking at his music and the music is all just you know banal background music, nothing to get excited about. I found one of his tracks on Spotify that had gotten four or five million plays - then I found the same track on YouTube, it had 100 plays!
What I'm worried about is there are these games that are being played and there's no disclosure - this is not good for the music ecosystem.
They're forcing this music on people and they're only able to do it because the listening experience has become so passive. In the old days you went and bought an album you always knew who you were listening to because you had purchase this record with Hard Cash.
Spotify has deliberately tried to turn the listening experience into something passive. Is that good for the music culture when people don't know the name of the artist?
to visit Ted's website click here