Hacker News with Generative AI: Music Industry

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 9 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 21 days ago | 272 comments

Spotify's Plot Against Musicians (harpers.org)
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Music Industry, Spotify, Criticism

13 points by gennarro 28 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 29 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 29 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 30 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 39 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 78 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 92 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 96 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 108 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 127 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 132 days ago | 4 comments

The Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10M Was Real (nytimes.com)

Music Industry, Fraud, Money

30 points by cainxinth 135 days ago | 20 comments

Record labels forgot these songs existed. One man rescued them (bbc.com)

Music, History, Archives, Music Industry

10 points by toddmorey 145 days ago | 1 comments

Rescuing songs that record labels forgot existed (bbc.co.uk)

Music Industry, Music, Archives

163 points by walthamstow 146 days ago | 36 comments

How long does music stardom last? A statistical analysis (statsignificant.com)