I love Brian Eno, or at least I love his series of solo albums he recorded after leaving Roxy Music right through to his ambient phase in the early 80s.
Eno continues to make music today, but I must confess I have mostly lost tough with his output. The last album I really liked was Another Day of Earth which is 20 years old this year.
This isn’t the only example of a recording albums later work being less exciting than their early stuff. But there is a massive problem.
Everything sounds like Eno. Or if not Eno Johan Johansson. Streaming services are full of tasteful ambient, minimalist music, aimed at listeners who don’t log on to listen to specific artists or albums; they are looking for something to serve as a soundtrack for their lives. They want a quiet playlist for studying, or some for a dinner party, or while they are reading. They don’t often don’t know, or care who the artist or composer is.
Streaming services are full of such playlists, curated for specific circumstances. Since 2013 Spotify has been supplying recommendations for specific moods, activities, and times of day through curated playlists, and artist recommendations.
For years there has been a rumour that Spotify has been filling its most popular curate playlists with generic music attributed to anonymous musicians—sometimes called ghost or fake artists—to reduce its royalty payouts. In particular artist like Brian Eno were being removed from popular playlists such as chill out, ambient or peaceful piano and replaced by ghost artists.
These ghosts artists had profiles with generic, often AI-generated imagery, and little or no artist biographies. They had no websites, and appeared to exist only on Spotify.
At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
A small number of companies supply a large proportion of these tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that provides a library of production music, the that appears in corporate videos.
In 2022, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter used information from the Swedish copyright collection society STIM to calculate that twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,”millions of streams.
I have often argued that there are 2 kinds of consumers of music. Some people are passionate often members of fandoms around specific artists, or committed to seeking out new music. But the majority of music consumers aren’t like that, they just want something to put on while driving or entertaining friends.
For the latter group it doesn’t matter if they are listening to the real Brian Eno, or a fake Brian Eno commissioned by Streaming Services to produced huge amounts of soundalike music. In the future Streamers won’t even need to do that: AI will produce limitless, royalty free music, that sounds identical to music produced by real artists.
Which puts real artists out of business, but protects corporate profits.
If you want a vision of the future imagine limitless fake Brian Eno, endless streaming forever.
And I am just grouchy because Spotify turned down my idea of curating minimalist playlists to soothe small babies:
Prambient