Comment by alexjplant
2 days ago
Bandcamp continues to be the best place to organically discover new artists. If I'm ever bored I go to their front page and browse by genre. It feels like the digital version of Sam Goody or whichever 90s record store had the headphone kiosks where you could listen to songs before buying the record.
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
This is not Spotify, it's Spotify fraudsters.
It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down.
Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
> Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform
FWIW, so does BC. Stuff gets eventually deleted, but last year there was a leaked pirated copy of an album for sale for over a week, over a month before release.
1 reply →
> It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
It's being mad that a store sold me a counterfeit rolex, actually. Spotify might claim to just be a "marketplace" like every other platform these days, but they're still the ones hosting that page that passes off slop as legitimate work by another artist. Spotify has a responsibility to govern what is hosted and sold on their platform.
>It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it, and then your bank is like "oh, sorry man, we can't do anything about that, guess they have your card forever now"
FTFY.
Well, Spotify used to be best in class at fighting spam and slop. Glenn McDonald wrote some memorable blog posts about the crap they kept out.
But guess what, they fired Glenn and now the slop runs wild.
I share the disgust at slop music spam sneaking into Spotify's recommendation services last time I used them.
But I absolutely don't agree that Bandcamp does recommendations well. To me, it seems like they don't personalize at all. Maybe you're just lucky enough to share the taste of the (at least human) taste makers at Bandcamp. Spotify's pre-enshittification Discover Weekly was miles better than whatever they do. My experience with old brick and mortar record stores was that at best they stocked a little of the music I enjoyed, but didn't have a clue about it. Most often they didn't stock it at all.
> But I absolutely don't agree that Bandcamp does recommendations well.
I agree with that but I haven't yet seen a system that does recommendations well for me, so I don't see that as a differentiating point.
The main way I discover new music on Bandcamp is by browsing the collections of people who also own albums I love to check what else they bought.
That is better than the front page, but still it takes a lot of effort, and it's just damn hard to measure up to 2015-2016 era Discover Weekly. Probably 80% of the music I listen to I found there or indirectly through there, and I was not at the age they say music taste is supposed to get fixed.