Comment by parpfish
2 days ago
Internally, they refer to it as “perfect fit content” (pfc).
It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement.
For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”
That makes all the sense in the world to me. I'd call that an entirely legitimate use for AI generated music.
The barbers I went to recently were playing a channel on the TV which was an endless series of clips panning through ultra-nostalgic French Riviera-style scenery, accompanied by mellow guitar music. Seemed fine at first glance but like all AI stuff it got weirder the closer you looked - boats on land, outdoor dining areas underwater, giant lanterns larger than houses, mangled looking food, that sort of thing.
Someone had clearly just set up a few prompts and let the AI get on with it, creating probably hundreds of channels of this stuff.
Sure, as "content".
But unless these tracks are treated differently in Spotify's payout system, they're extremely profitable, and because payments come from a common pool, they hoover up payments which would otherwise have gone to artists people actually like.