Music platforms and capitalism

A couple weeks ago I opened Spotify to find that one of my favorite bands, Woods, had released a new album. I know, Spotify is evil. I only have an account because my partner got a family plan and it makes it easy to share popular music with her. But that's more of an excuse than a reason I suppose.

Anyway, the cover art didn't look like something I would expect from a band that primarly uses snakes and skulls in their imagery, so I wave very curious to hear how this album sounded. To my dismay, it was an ambient album completely void of anything that even remotely sounded like the Woods I knew. On further investigation it became clear that someone had uploaded an alumn under the band's name, and being that there aren't safeguards against this sort of thing, there it was.

I'm not sure what type of person would want to steal this particular band's brand. It got me thinking about a YouTuber who was complaining about AI generated music making it's way into Spotify (as well social media platforms) and how it was making a mess of things. It's getting to a point where it's difficult to find genuine content made by real human artists.

I don't know where this album came from or who's behind it, but I hate it. Spotify is flooded with generative content that no one wants, and it doesn't currently have any way to fix it because the underying issues is that apparently anyone can upload songs to an artist's profile.

I saw this same thing happen a while back before AI pushed things into overdrive. Another one-word band, Women, had songs on their profile that weren't made by them—just some other artist with the same name. Seems like Spotify would've figured out how to separate out artists like this.

I signed up to get updates on Subvert.fm because I'm hopeful that the industry can change and be lead and owned by artists. Maybe they'll come up with a better system. Bandcamp has it's own issues with folks stealing name recognition in different ways or upload content they don't own and didn't create.

Really hope the future it different though, because right now it sucks.

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Published 2024-10-25