Hacker News with Generative AI: Music Industry

'A Billion Streams and No Fans': Inside a $10M AI Music Fraud Case (wired.com)
Almost no one hits it big in music. The odds are so bad it’s criminal. But on a late spring evening in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay were having that rare golden moment when everything clicks.
Music Industry, Artificial Intelligence, Fraud, Law Enforcement
12 points by tosh 3 days ago | 1 comments
Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996 (cybercultural.com)
Online music retail was thriving by 1996, thanks to sites like Music Boulevard and CDnow. But music downloads and streaming was more of a challenge — as David Bowie discovered in September 1996.
Music Industry, History, David Bowie
70 points by herbertl 16 days ago | 62 comments
'Streaming as surveillance': How Spotify is poisoning music in the digital age (smh.com.au)
So Spotify knows Amused to Death is my favourite Roger Waters album and Perfect Sense is my favourite track. I bet it hasn’t worked out which line of the song is stuck on high rotation in my head. Yet.
Streaming Services, Music Industry, Privacy, Surveillance, Digital Age
16 points by internet_points 17 days ago | 5 comments
Internet Archive vs. Music Labels: $600M+ Copyright Rift Edges Toward Settlement (torrentfreak.com)
The Internet Archive's 'Great 78 Project' digitizes historical recordings to preserve musical heritage, but in 2023 the initiative led to major record labels filing a copyright lawsuit. The financial stakes soared last month when the labels proposed to update their claim to $693 million in statutory damages. A recent filing suggests that due to significant progress in settlement discussions, it may not come to that.
Copyright Law, Music Industry, Digital Preservation, Lawsuits, Settlements
9 points by hn_acker 44 days ago | 0 comments
Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207M (cnbc.com)
Music Industry, Technology, Acquisitions, History
11 points by alexrustic 59 days ago | 4 comments
Vinyl record sales continue to rise amid music streaming's dominance (engadget.com)
Despite streaming services continuing to dominate the business of recorded music, there’s still very much a place for physical media in that sector.
Music Industry, Vinyl Records, Music Streaming
4 points by ksec 65 days ago | 0 comments
Spotify has paid $4.5 illion to publishers, but songrwriters struggle (variety.com)
Spotify announced earlier this year that it paid out a record $10 billion-plus to the music industry in 2024, bringing its total to nearly $60 billion since its inception in 2006.
Music Industry, Streaming Services, Business, Finance
10 points by anigbrowl 72 days ago | 1 comments
Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says (arstechnica.com)
On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s.
Copyright Law, Music Industry, Internet Archive, History
501 points by coloneltcb 74 days ago | 184 comments
Spotify's biggest sin? Its algos pushed artists to make joyless, toothless music (theguardian.com)
In the hands of some of its most gifted practitioners, songwriting is a kind of emotional alchemy.
Music Industry, Music Streaming, Artificial Intelligence, Criticism
10 points by nickcotter 74 days ago | 3 comments
Brian May: "Nobody will be able to afford to make music" under UK AI copyright (nme.com)
Music Industry, Artificial Intelligence, Copyright, United Kingdom
13 points by CharlesW 85 days ago | 3 comments
Spotify's Beta Used 'Pirate' MP3 Files, Some from Pirate Bay (2017) (torrentfreak.com)
Spotify is often credited as the music service most in tune with the 'pirate' mentality, having converted millions of former file-sharers in recent years. Interestingly, according to writer and researcher Rasmus Fleischer, a decade ago the site actually populated its beta with pirate MP3s, including some that were only available on The Pirate Bay.
Music Streaming, Piracy, Spotify, History, Music Industry
329 points by __natty__ 87 days ago | 253 comments
ISP Will Unmask 100 Alleged BitTorrent Pirates in RIAA Lawsuit (torrentfreak.com)
Altice, parent company of Internet provider Optimum, agreed to disclose the personal details of a hundred alleged music pirates. The request comes from a group of prominent record labels and is part of an ongoing copyright infringement liability lawsuit. Altice, meanwhile, will receive anti-piracy information, including that related to a letter the RIAA previously sent to BitTorrent Inc., the owner of popular torrent client uTorrent.
Copyright Infringement, Lawsuits, Music Industry, Piracy
8 points by speckx 91 days ago | 0 comments
ISP Must Unmask 100 Alleged BitTorrent Pirates in RIAA Lawsuit (torrentfreak.com)
Altice, parent company of Internet provider Optimum, must disclose the personal details of a hundred alleged music pirates. The request comes from a group of prominent record labels and is part of an ongoing copyright infringement liability lawsuit. Altice, meanwhile, will receive anti-piracy information, including that related to a letter the RIAA previously sent to BitTorrent Inc., the owner of popular torrent client uTorrent.
Copyright Infringement, Lawsuits, Music Industry, Torrenting
5 points by isaacfrond 92 days ago | 0 comments
ISP Must Unmask 100 Alleged BitTorrent Pirates in RIAA Lawsuit (torrentfreak.com)
Altice, parent company of Internet provider Optimum, must disclose the personal details of a hundred alleged music pirates. The request comes from a group of prominent record labels and is part of an ongoing copyright infringement liability lawsuit. Altice, meanwhile, will receive anti-piracy information, including that related to a letter the RIAA previously sent to BitTorrent Inc., the owner of popular torrent client uTorrent.
Copyright Infringement, Lawsuits, Music Industry, Piracy, ISPs
7 points by gslin 93 days ago | 0 comments
How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop (gamechops.substack.com)
Lofi Hip Hop is an immensely popular style of music that exploded organically online beginning in the mid 2010s. But like all things in music, when too many folks jump on the bandwagon, it starts to slow down.
Music Industry, Music Genres, Lo-Fi Music
191 points by fbnlsr 108 days ago | 227 comments
Spotify Paid $10B to the Music Industry in 2024, $1B More Than Last Year (variety.com)
Spotify paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024 — some $1 billion more than last year, the previous record — making its total around $60 billion since it was founded in 2006. The company made the announcement in a blog post Tuesday morning.
Music Industry, Streaming, Business, Spotify, Finance
37 points by ilamont 108 days ago | 79 comments
Second Circuit Rejects Record Labels' Attempt to Rewrite the DMCA (eff.org)
In a major win for creator communities, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has once again handed video streaming site Vimeo a solid win in its long-running legal battle with Capitol Records and a host of other record labels.
Law, Copyright, DMCA, Music Industry, Online Video
22 points by hn_acker 118 days ago | 3 comments
Music sales hit 20-year high (bbc.com)
Captivated by major new releases from Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Billie Eilish, music fans in the UK spent more on recorded music in 2024 than ever before, new figures show.
Music Industry, UK, Music Sales, Taylor Swift, Coldplay
6 points by dabinat 135 days ago | 0 comments
Spotify Shuts Down ‘Unwrapped’ Artist Royalty Calculator with Legal Threats (digitalmusicnews.com)
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has been busy selling stock this year, becoming a multi-billionaire worth around $7.3 billion according to Forbes. Now, the calculator for showcasing how relatively little Spotify pays to artists — and the absurd contrast to top-level Spotify executive compensation — has been shut down due to the threat of legal action.
Music Industry, Spotify, Legal Issues, Business
219 points by cpach 146 days ago | 272 comments
Spotify's Plot Against Musicians (harpers.org)
404 Not Found. We can not find the page you are looking for.
Music Industry, Spotify, Criticism
13 points by gennarro 153 days ago | 8 comments
The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed (honest-broker.com)
In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.
Music Streaming, Spotify, Music Industry
19 points by frans 155 days ago | 2 comments
The Ghosts in the Machine – Spotify's plot against musicians (harpers.org)
Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform.
Music Industry, Spotify, Business, Conspiracy Theories
48 points by neom 155 days ago | 4 comments
Ghost artists on Spotify (harpers.org)
Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.
Music Industry, Spotify, Fake Artists, Music Streaming, Royalty Payments
586 points by greenie_beans 155 days ago | 383 comments
Save Music, Save the Archive (savethearchive.com)
Over 350 musicians are speaking out to demand that major labels drop a lawsuit aimed to destroy the Internet Archive—and for their industry to take concrete actions to realign their actions with the interests of working artists. Sign their open letter now to show your support.
Music Industry, Copyright, Internet Archive, Activism
355 points by m463 165 days ago | 207 comments
The decline of the working musician (newyorker.com)
Before the gig economy consumed a third of the workforce, it was mostly musicians who worried about gigs.
Music Industry, Gig Economy, Employment
168 points by tintinnabula 203 days ago | 245 comments
Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace (subvert.fm)
Bandcamp's corporate acquisitions threaten independent music. It's time for a new model - one we collectively own and control.
Music Industry, Decentralization, Ownership, Blockchain, Web3
230 points by cloudfudge 217 days ago | 136 comments
Limp Bizkit fraud lawsuit rattles music industry–'These accusations are massive' (theguardian.com)
One of the world’s largest music companies has been accused of depriving “potentially hundreds” of artists and bands of their royalties by the 90s nu-metal band Limp Bizkit.
Music Industry, Lawsuits, Legal Disputes, Nu-Metal, Royalties
9 points by bookofjoe 222 days ago | 0 comments
The $621M Legal Battle by Record Labels Against Internet Archive (rollingstone.com)
In the old chapel of a former Christian Science church in San Francisco, late-afternoon sun pours orange through the windows and several giant servers are hard at work.
Legal Battles, Music Industry, Internet Archive, Copyright
179 points by coloneltcb 234 days ago | 95 comments
Music Industry's 1990s Hard Drives Are Dying (arstechnica.com)
One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.
Data Storage, Music Industry, Technology, History
49 points by m463 253 days ago | 42 comments
Man accused of using bots and AI to earn streaming revenue (bbc.com)
A musician in the US has been accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and thousands of bots to fraudulently stream songs billions of times in order to claim millions of dollars of royalties.
Music Industry, Artificial Intelligence, Fraud, Streaming
9 points by PotatoNinja 257 days ago | 4 comments