Paul Johnson on Spotify: From a struggle to a fortune: from the RapCaviar to the Mood Booster and Life Sucks
It was like any other struggling musician, Paul Johnson worked multiple jobs and was hustling. Then his warm acoustic folk-pop tune “Firework” made it on to one of Spotify’s Fresh Finds playlists, designed to surface brand-new artists. Discover weekly, the most desired real estate in hip hop, and the editorial RapCaviar were just some of the featured features on the streaming platforms. Playlist placements are highly coveted, both for how they rack up the streams—more than 7 billion in five years, in the case of RapCaviar—and the way they expose music to new listeners. The latter paid off for Johnson.
His first playlisting shot him from a few thousand streams a day to 20,000, and later, as his music landed more and more spots, to hundreds of thousands. Thanks to this exposure he’s now making around $200,000 a year, mostly in royalties from streaming. That is great for Paul. But, like almost all successes in music, it’s a Horatio Alger story. Spotify wants you to believe the rags to riches transformation is due to hard work and talent when it actually requires a huge amount of luck. Ignoring that luck element illustrates how difficult it is for musicians to support themselves via streaming revenues—and how many hard working, talented people will be unable ever to do so.
The market for recorded music is taking on a new shape with the streaming platforms at the center. Just as the music industry is organized to let labels and publishers scoop up much of the value of music, the streaming platforms, as they become more powerful, are positioning themselves to do the same.
The most dominant, Spotify, tells investors it plans to leverage its listeners into a massive digital ad play that would make it a market leader behind only Google and Facebook. It pushes playlists with names like Mood Booster, Happy Hits, Life Sucks, and Coping with Loss to extract what the company claims is subscribers’ real-time mood and activity data, then flogs it to sell ads. Like the rest of Big Tech,Spotify is better at selling advertisers the idea that it has a mind control ray that will make people buy stuff than it is actually persuading people to buy stuff. The real money will come from Spotify inserting itself as a gatekeeper between musicians and listeners. And those very same playlists that gave Paul Johnson and other artists their breakout success will be central to its ability to do so.
No one listens to the radio anymore. We all have an account on the service. (Thanks Dad!) The radio DJ is a dinosaur, buried and compressed and repurposed to fuel endless algorithmically generated streaming playlists. It’s a blessing in a way. Choose a genre or mood and groove without interruption until the end of time. In the background, an artificial intelligence decides what should come next.
How good is the sound of the DJ? The voice of a shock jock or a human being is not warm or warm ups
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has made some companies shift their focus away from their own software to the bigger picture. They want to be at the forefront. Partly to show off and try to cash in on the current AI gold rush, but also, I think, in an effort to humanize their algorithms. They pushed them into the spotlight to convince people that the Artificial Intelligences can hang with us.
However, it does not sound quite natural enough. The voice is personable, but never warm or warm ups, when it talks about the bands you are listening to. You might be a bit upset when a shock jock says a word to set up an ad break, but at least he has a dipshit human behind him. Cast your mind’s eye behind Spotify’s X voice and you will find only the void—a vast jumble of machine-learning metrics and carefully calculated curation that tells you what it thinks you want to hear. Listening to the AI DJ feels eerily lonely, in that it is a constant reminder of what it is not.