(Hypebot) — Just in case artists weren’t disheartened enough by how difficult it is to make money on Spotify, new data shows that generic, white noise ‘artists’ are pulling in hundreds of thousands of streams a day from simple ambient sound recordings.
Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
Artists and songwriters spend so much time crafting their songs that it’s a shame when the returns don’t seem to justify the time spent. It’s even worse when a recording of simple noise is making a lot more money without even trying. It turns out that recordings of white noise and ambience to fall asleep have a big following on Spotify, but that also allows some unscrupulous producers to game the system by flouting the rules in order to make some big bucks.
A company called Amritiz reportedly has hundreds of generic fake artist pages with names like White Noise Baby Sleep and Relaxing Music Therapy that have basically the same noise recordings posted over and over. The sad thing is that some of these pages are garnering hundreds of thousands and even millions of streams a day.
Let’s face it, there’s no creativity going on at all here, so these “artists” use SEO as a means of gaining listeners. That’s also where they run afoul of Spotify’s internal SEO rules. A document acquired by OneZero states that “SEO terms such as Christmas Hits, Sleep Music, Music for Concentration, etc., must not be used” as an artist name. In addition, “SEO terms such as Sleep Music, Music for Concentration, Chill, Chillout, etc., must not be used as track titles or track versions.”
But the thing that gives a fake artist away is lack of presence beyond Spotify and that’s what we seem to have here as well. Tell me of an artist that doesn’t have at least some sort of online presence via a website or social media? Even the luddites have something posted by management or a fan.
I’m all for people finding a niche that has a demand that filling it. That’s what the business is all about. That said, if you’re going to post recordings of common ambience and noise, more power to you, but at least play by the rules.
